Top 8 SEO Techniques To Improve Your Website Rank on Google

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, as the name suggests, the optimization of your website so that it will appear high on a search engine search (eg: Google, Yahoo). SEO should be, at the very least, as important to you as the design of your website. Afterall, what is the point of having a beautiful website design if nobody can find it unless they already know where it is? SEO is a crucial factor in determining the success of your website as an extension of your business. The better it is optimized, the higher it will appear on a search and the more new customers & clients you will attract.

There are many companies out there who specialise in SEO and will charge you a pretty penny to take care of it for you. If you are on a budget however, the following SEO techniques can be implemented to make your website as competitive as possible.

1. SEO: Determine Your Keywords

Keywords are words that describe your company, product, organisation or website topic. For example, a website for a shoe company may have keywords such as high-heels, sneakers, wedding shoes, and ofcourse the word shoes itself.

Why is this important? Well, these keywords relate directly to the words a user will type into a search engine like Google to search for what they are looking for. So if Sally searches for wedding shoes on Google, our shoe company will most definiatly want to appear as high as possible in the results. This is partially achieved by selecting appropriate keywords for your website and applying them in the points that follow.

2. SEO: Meta Tags

Meta Tags are hidden elements of code in your website that provide information about your website topic to search engines.

There are 2 types, namely meta keywords and meta descriptions. As you may have guessed, the meta keywords contains a list of the keywords decided upon in the first point of this article. Meta Description on the other hand is a brief description (1 or 2 sentences) of what the website is about. It is worth your while to include the 2 or 3 most important keywords in this description as well. Search engines will also use this description as a part of their search results, so make it as appealing as possible to prospective visitors or clients.

3. SEO: Relevant Content

Content refers to the information on your website. It is important to have good web content to begin with and also to include your keywords in your content as search engines like Google will actually read it to determine what your website is about. More importantly your content and keywords must be of the same topic. In other words your keywords must be relevant to your content.

For example, lets take our shoe company described earlier and assume they used irrelevant keywords such as "farming" and "weather patterns". These keywords are obviously not relevant to their shoe business and the content on their website. Such a choice will hurt them in the search rankings.

As unlikely as that example sounds, it illustrates the point that you cannot ignore your content and how it relates to your keywords.

4. SEO: Title

The title of your website appears at the top of the internet browser and serves as a description of the specific page being viewed. It is also used by search engines in their search results, in fact it is likely the first thing about your website that a visitor will read when searching on a search engine. So it is important that it be brief, descriptive and also include 1 or more of your most important keywords.

5. SEO: Headings

Headings are similar to the title, in that they are brief and descriptive and very important in search engine optimization. Headings serve 2 purposes, 1 for users and 1 for search engines.

Headings enable the content to be laid out in a logical and organised manner. They allow for sections to be arranged in priority, which allows for ease of reading and navigation for a visitor.

At the same time, they are able to communicate the natural order and structure of your content to search engines. From this perspective it is also important to include keywords in your headings.

6. SEO: Correct Use of Images

Good quality images are great on a website as they can improve the look and feel of the website design. Striking images can provide that visual impact neccessary to attract and hold a visitor's attention.

There is a potential drawback, however, as any content that is included as an image, will not be read by the search engines. Thankfully, there is an easy SEO way to solve this problem. It is the use of something called "alt tags". These tags are pieces of code that provide descriptions of content contained within an image.

By using these "alt tags" you can have rich images and still confer any important content to the search engines. On that note, it is also adviseable to include relevant keywords in your "alt tag" content.

7. SEO: Valid Code

The simple fact is that not all website code is valid. What do I mean by valid? Well, valid code is code that adheres to all rules set out for website code.

It is very possible for a website to display properly to a visitor yet have invalid code. So why is this a problem if the visitor is seeing the website, you may ask. The problem is that a search engine might not be able to read the invalid code. If it cannot read the code, then the webpage may as well not exist from a search engine's perspective.

If you are taking your SEO seriously, then valid code must be acchieved.

8. SEO: XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is a document that has information about all the pages on your website. More importantly it includes the links to each and every page. This is important for search engines as it is a single place where they can see what pages you have. Otherwise it is possible that some of your pages will be excluded from searches merely because the search engine did not see it exists.

back to top