Being visible in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing is essential to having a successful website or online business these days, and we want to help you boost your SERP(Search Engine Rank Position) a little bit with these simple tips.
1. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools
There is nobody that knows SEO as the search engines themself, therefore you should sign up for the free webmaster tool from Google, it is simple to get started and there are a lot of resources and tutorials out there on the internet to maximize the potential from this tool.
The first thing you need to do is to Verify that you actually own the site, you do this by either uploading an HTML file to the root of your website(Recommended), add a Meta tag to your home page, modifying the DNS Record of your domain or by using Google Analytics.
When you have verified your website the first thing you should do is to head over to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and generating an XML Sitemap for your website, if your website is a wordpress blog you can find plugins to do this automatically for you.
You should then upload the generated sitemap.xml file to your website, and entering the path of the sitemap file into Google Webmaster tool, this will cause google to crawl all of the pages that are linked in the sitemap, and causing them to get indexed quicker.
Alternatively you can do this manually by Selecting the option "Fetch As Google" and manually giving the tool each page on your website and submitting them to the index, this is very tedious and not recommended, but the option is there if you chose to do it this way.
2. <Title> tags
The title of your website is important when you want to have a high ranking in Search Engines,
If we for example want to create a website where we sell Toys for kittens and our domain was called KittyToys.com the title tag should say something like this: KittyToys | Kitten Toy Shop and Kitten Toy Reviews for the home page for instance.
and we would put KittyToys | Contact us for the contact page and likewise KittyToys | Kitten Toy Storefor the store part of the website, it all depends on what keywords you want to rank for, In this case I wanted to rank for "Kitten toys" and "Kitten toy store".
Webmasters/Developers often chose to seperate their title tags with a Pipe symbol( | ), it makes the title look structured and clean, you can also use a dash( - ), this helps seperate the website name and the relevant page you are on, it also makes it easier for users to quickly see which website is yours if they have multiple tabs open in ther web browser.
3. Add a Blog to your website
Search engines love fresh content, and there is no better way to deliver fresh content than by blogging, Just like i am doing now ;D
Blogging is also a way for your potential customers to see that you are in fact engaged with the website and are dedicated to it.
The msot important thing about a blog is to provide quility content, this way even if you don't generate sales right away from your blog, you can create a following that will share your blog on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and so on.
If you for instance had the website i previously made up, KittyToys.com, you could write content relevant to cat owners, provide information on how you should raise a cat, how to feed it and so on.
Providing High Quality and Relevant content is they key to improve your rank through blogging.
4. Add Meta Tags To Your Website
If you've read any SEO blogs in the past you might have the impression that Meta tags are useless, I'm going to tell you right now this is a LIE, although it is true that meta tags does not directly influence your SERP, it does have value in todays SEO arsenal, if you have ever done a google search you know that they way it displays information is like this:
Google in fact uses the meta tag "description" for its search result description, so use this oppertunity to write an excelent description for your potential visitors, write something that captures the user and makes them want to click on your link.
The description tag is also often used by Social Networking and social bookmarking websites as the description for the website when users link to your content, this is a good opertunety to capture more visitors to your website.
You can add meta tags manually in the HTML of the website or if you use wordpress you can install a plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast, which will add some aditional fields below your main text area in the "Add new post" section in your wordpress administration panel.
5. Add Social Sharing Buttons To Your Website
Having the ability to comment or share your content is essential if you want your content to spread easily from your users to their friends and networks by the click of a button.
For this you can either use ShareThis or AddThis for your Share-Buttons, you simply generate the widget by choosing the options best suited for your website and placing the code in your website, most of these tools have Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal plugins, so you don't need to dig around in the source code if you use any of these Content Management Systems(CMS)
By implementing the 5 simple techniques I've talked about you could potentionally increase your user interaction and search engine rank by quite a lot, so I hope you found this useful, thanks for reading.
Repost from my Webhosting Business Blog CloudBeast.net