SEO tips and tools
Search engines are always improving their algorithm to better index small websites with quality unique content. If you have the seo basics right from the start your website can benefit from organic (free) traffic. There is however a lot of confusion regarding the basic techniques around search engine optimization which could lead to your website being penalized by the search engines. Here’s a list of basic seo tips and tricks to get you started on the right track. We will be adding to the list on regular bases so be sure to bookmark this page.
- Dynamic titles – Make sure your pages title tags contain related keywords to your content. Also put yourself in your potential visitor’s shoes – write a title which the visitor will find interesting and possibly click on e.g. seoblog.co.za/seo_tips.php – If you are using Wordpress set the permalink in options to date and name.
- Deep linking – This is a quick way to tell search engines you have targeted content on your website related to the keyword you are linking. Link to pages within your website using a related keyword to describe the content instead of linking ‘click here’. This could also contribute to your page views and user session times as the visitor will be discovering more content as he reads.
- Building links – Link building is the key to search engine optimization, especially if you have third party sites linking keywords in their content to your homepage and sub pages. Established websites linking back to your website’s content raises your website’s ‘trust’ level on the internet.
- Get indexed – If your website is new and haven’t been indexed by search engines getting a back link from a quality site will help alert Google and co to crawl your pages.
- Think quality links – The impact of a bunch of low quality websites linking to your website will have less effect than one quality established website back link.
- Setup your XML sitemap – Setup a sitemap using any sitemap generator or any of these plugins if you are on the Wordpress platform. Sitemaps will guide the search engine spiders crawling your pages to all the quality content. If you have loads of content setup different sitemaps to categorize your content for the spiders to crawl.
- Track your goals – Start off by setuping up SEO campaign goals and then track your progress with Google Analytics. We will go into great detail with this application very soon but for now sign up, add the tracking tags and let Google collect some data so you have stats to work with.
- SEO Books – Get your hands on these quality search marketing resources – the Quirk eMarketing text book or SitePoints’s SEM Kit.
Legend has it that 
Comments
Thnx for the resource guys, who better to get advice from!
Thanks.
This information was very useful.
awesome initiative. awesome blog charl watch moralfibre itll be my seo testing ground. although im a little old skool. and still rely mostly on wom. i find if people meet our writers and hear how passionate they are they remember to search for us on google
Thanks guys.
Interesting post. Thanks for sharing.
One in my opinion which you might have missed – especially with blogs – is having only one navigational structure. This eliminates possible duplicate content issues/penalties.
So either Archives, Tags, or Categories.
If you prefer having more than one navigational structure, block the other ones with a robots.txt like this:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /blog/page/
Disallow: /blog/pages/
Disallow: /blog/feed/
Disallow: /blog/feed
Disallow: /blog/*/feed/
Disallow: /blog/archives/
Disallow: /blog/category/
That one just blocks the Googlebot. But as you can see, your RSS feed *can* also cause dupe content issues.
Thanks for the great list.
Trackbacks