10 of the most important SEO Tips – Part 2 of 2

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)
This technique is both common sense and good practice. Telling your visitors what the link that they are going to click on allows them to know exactly what they are going to be directed to. Saying “click here” is not enough to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. For example web hosting packages clearly informs visitors where the link will take them and allows search engine robots understand what the main content of the web page is.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly
Your website may look fantastic. Yourself and your web designer may be talented graphic designers who can make Flash and Javascript dazzle your visitors with a show to put RiverDance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and Javascript it’s important to know that search engine spiders can’t read this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide HTML navigation alternatives to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results.

8. Create Fresh Content
When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.
Creating fresh and unique content is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis. This will encourage search engines to regularly visit your website and allow you to create more pages for visitors to find your website within the search engine results.
However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis.

9. Don’t think you can trick Search Engines
As noted before, “ If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it”.
If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases in your pages by making the text colour the same as the background colour, hiding keyword phrases in tiny font, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you again).

10. Offer something unique
If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques that are listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.

I hope you have found this post helpful. Please feel free to add your comments below.