Cog SEO Blog

Posted By Melanie Prough on April 11, 2009

There is nothing more satisfying than a little something with a big yield. I love these things! Its like polishing the chrome on and old car….Instant gratification. So lets give ourselves a little SEO love today with some easy, sweet little somethings that pack a big SEO punch.

1. Optimize your title tag for maximum page relevancy, this is a big ticket item in overall page mechanics. Important words first. Avoid excessive punctuation and stop words.
2. Build a eye catching description tag that will entice search engine users to visit. Be a savvy salesman, market your web site. PS: This is not a keyword list.
3. Build a Google sitemap to increase your crawl efficiency, save some bandwidth, and depth of the crawl.
4. Use targeted anchor text when you post in forums, Blogs, and other applications. If you are specifically trying to hit a certain phrase, use it in several different variations.
5. Track your keywords, and look to see what queries people are finding you with in Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics. Keyword optimization is never done, it evolves.
6. Freshen your content once a month. This is going to help engine like Google who are really trying to move to a fresher index rank your site better. Add the last mod command to return the proper server response to the search engines.
7. Don’t ignore your inner pages…The more lines in the pond the more fish you can catch!
8. Businesses should provide clear location and contact information. GEO indexing is a hot vertical search option you don’t want to be left out of. Try a CSS address tag for an added measure of importance for the location information.
9. Use Google Analytics and its information provided to target a wider audience and improve your reach. Watch your incoming traffic and optimize for different areas one at a time.
10. Write an article related to the content of your site, and submit it to a site that allows you a link back to your own.
11. Make a video and upload it to a video sharing platform like YouTube. This is another highly trafficked vertical search platform. Don’t forget to link back to your site.
12. Narrow your Social Bookmarking / Web 2.0 scope. I see too many Blogs with 5000 buttons on their posts. This has several problems; firstly its slows the page down no matter how slow they are or how you load them, secondly it dilutes the strength of the bookmarks. For example would you rather have (5) Diggs or (1) Dig, (1) Del.icio.us mark, (1) Furl, and (2) Reddit. I think you will find most of these sites rank by popularity. Yes, you gain a link, so bookmark them each yourself if you like, but I have serious doubts if they really count that many times coming in to the same Domain. When it come to offering the selection to your visitors you want a concentrated vote of popularity.
13. Reference reliable resources in your pages. Be very careful who you link to.
14. Add customer reviews to your page. Businesses can see a huge benefit from this. Really want to do this up nice, try audio or video.
15. Start a newsletter for your site. Users still like newsletters. Make sure you are following the spam rules.
16. Tell-A-Friend form – This, believe it or not can bring you big referral traffic. Its a gem!
17. Ping, ping, ping if you have a Blog. A ping will let the engines know you have a new post. I use: Google Blog; King Ping; and Technorati.
18. Tables be gone! If you have old pages like I do, set aside an hour a week and get rid of them.
19. Build links – If you are going to be successful you have got to allocate some time to building links. There are many methods. Link baiting is easy, but can take time. The best way to speed this up is by building your authority and reputation. Directory submissions really build more traffic than links. Don’t run around forums and Blogs doing link drops! That will only make you look like a cheezeball. If you have something to contribute the maybe after a few posts, it will be OK.

I like to do things that bring me fast results, just like most people. The one thing I didn’t mention up there is frames…If you have a page in old frames you really need to replace it. In the meantime a quick fix is to block the non-parent frame’s URLs in your robots.txt to prevent indexing.

Have a cool quick tip? Comment…

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

Categories: SEO General
Tags: Address Tag, Anchor Text, Google Sitemap, Google Webmaster Tools, Incoming Traffic, Keyword List, Keyword Optimization, Relevancy, Search Engine Users, Search Engines, Search Option, Server Response, Title Tag, Vertical Search