Top Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic in the World Wide Web. After all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. I have identified and made a list of top 15 SEO practices that I tend to forget quite often. These simple SEO techniques if practiced properly can make a significant difference as to how my pages are ranked in the Search Engine Queries.

1. Use rel=”nofollow” tag on low value links to not pass the page rank juice. For example ‘Read the rest of the entry’, ‘About’, ‘Contact’ etc.
2. Use proper anchor text for interlinks. Don’t use ‘here’ or ‘there’.
3. Optimize the images, always create alt tags and write description in the alt tag.
4. Use search engine friendly permalinks. Make sure the URLs do not have ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters.
5. Use hyphens (-) between words to improve readability.
6. Do not use underscores (_), use hyphens (-) instead.
7. Do not use session id in URLs.
8. Use sticky posts.
9. Use tag clouds.
10. Have a category description paragraph.
11. Let the visitors subscribe to category specific RSS feed. (Use category specific RSS plugin for WordPress)
12. Use internal linking when possible and appropriate.
13. Use sub-directories rather than sub-domains when possible. Sub-domains do not share link love from the main domain as it is treated as a different domain.
14. Research the target audience and aim the site content appropriately.
15. Keep the content up to date. Visitors don’t like outdated content. Updating the content frequently also attracts the Search engines spiders to index the web pages frequently.
16. Going forward I will try to use this list to optimize my web pages for search engines.