Important SEO tips for your website

To optimize your whole site for search engines, you’ll need to follow these basic tips:

1. Make the website about one particular thing/niche.

It can be about any stuff, too, but choose one primary topic that is most vital to your message.

This step is important, so you may want to do a little keyword research before choosing a topic.

2. Mention keywords where they subject most.

Include your “one thing” in the site title, domain name, description, tagline, keywords, blog categories, page titles, and page content.

If you’re on WordPress, you can change a lot of this in the General Settings or through a plugin like All in One SEO Pack or Yoast (which I use).

3. Link to interior pages on your site.

A lot of content management systems routinely do this, but if yours doesn’t, you’ll want to be deliberate about linking to your most important pages straight from your homepage and cross-linking them with each other.

4. Use a permalink structure that comprises keywords.

Some sites have “ugly” permalink structures that use numbers to recognize pages.

Don’t do this. It’s bad for SEO and just doesn’t appear good.

Use a URL structure that comprises text, and make sure you include keywords in your URLs.

So instead of having a page’s URL be this:

https://yoursite.com/?p=12

It should look more like this:

https://yoursite.com/coolpage/

5. Remove anything that slows down your website.

Page load times are significant, so get rid of any non-essentials that bog down your website.

These may include music players, large images, flash graphics, and pointless plugins.

6. Use keywords in your images.

Include words that reflect your site topic in the image title, description, and “alt” attributes.

Also, re-title the file name if it doesn’t reveal your main keywords (e.g. writing-tips.jpg instead of d1234.jpg).

7. Link to other websites with similar content.

You can do this by including a blogroll, link list, or resources page on your website.

Of course, do it frugally, as each outbound link is a “vote” for another site. Though, if you do it well and people click your links, this tells search engines you are a trusted authority on your specific topic.

8. Update your website regularly.

Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than those with static content. That’s why blogs and directories (like Wikipedia) do so well on search engines. They are continually being updated with new content.

None of the above matters if you create content that sounds like a robot composed it.

Write great stuff, follow the steps above, have patience, and you’ll see results.