SEO Tips That Every Website Owner Should Know

Last updated: Search Engine Optimization 3 min read

Do you have a great looking website but nobody can find it? If so, you came to the right place. Take a few moments to read these useful SEO tips.

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These Simple Tips Should Boost Your Traffic and Search Engine Rankings

  • Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content.
  • When your website is done, submit your URL to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Consider also submitting to other search engines, online directories, pr sites, yellow pages, and social bookmarking sites.
  • Submit your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
  • Create a human-friendly HTML sitemap as well for your website visitors for easy page navigation.
  • Make sure you create unique and rich content to avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.
  • Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keyword stuffing.
  • Use text instead of images in your content.
  • Make your page title and meta tags descriptive, short and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.
  • Title tags should be between 40-80 characters (4-8 words).
  • Meta descriptions should be 140-200 characters including spaces (about 20-30 words).
  • Meta keywords shouldn’t be more than 15-20 words.
  • Use H1, H2, H3… headings containing your website’s primary keywords.
  • Have only one H1 heading on each page.
  • Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.
  • If you have a database driven website and the URL contains a “?” character, make sure you use mod_ReWrite to create search engine friendly URLs.
  • You shouldn’t place more than 40-50 links per page at avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.
  • Use Lynx as text browser to check your site: https://lynx.isc.org
  • Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.
  • Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.
  • Create a robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit https://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn more about robots.txt file.
  • Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.
  • Avoid shady tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.
  • Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.
  • Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.
  • Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.
  • Do not use hidden text and links. Show the information to search engines what you show to your website visitors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.
  • Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.
  • Make your site useful, easy to navigate, and informative.
  • Improve your link building. Link to high ranking pr and blogging websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your web pages.
  • Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.
  • Be very careful when purchasing SEO and link building services. Some of these services use illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.
  • Do not buy or sell links.
  • Do not create websites for link building purposes that contain purely affiliate links to your main URL and have no valuable content for the visitors.

These do-it-yourself SEO tips will help you increase the visibility of your website on search engines. If you have questions regarding SEO, or you are too busy to take care of your site optimization, or you want to hire one of the best SEO companies in Raleigh call 919-341-8901 or click here to schedule a free, no obligation consultation to get started.

Tags: Digital MarketingSearch Engine Optimization

Richard Horvath

Owner / President

Richard Horvath is the founder of TheeDigital, a Raleigh based award-winning web design and digital marketing agency. He is proud of his team and the results that they provide to their clients.

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