Where To Start With SEO – Your Top Five Tips

Ben Gomes, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering, said, “our goal is to get you the exact answer you’re searching for faster.” What does that mean for your website? It means that you should have the search engine optimization (SEO) dialed in to make sure that when someone searches for something on the web, Google will find your content first and serve it up fast.

SEO is a big job and if it is part of your low-cost marketing strategy to do it yourself, it is good to start with just a few very important items. For this article, we are going to start with the first five key tips to tuning up your SEO.

1. Use Relevant Content
Though we are going to go through ten tips for SEO, this one is very important. After Google released its Panda updates to fight content farms, it became crucial for website content to be fresh, interesting, well written, and more in-depth. In short, your content needs to be what searchers are looking for in order for Google to rank you higher in search results.

2. Use Proper URLs
This one should be pretty easy to understand. Don’t use dynamically generated URLs; make your URL readable to humans.

Good URL: www.mywidgets.com/light-blue-widgets
Bad URL: www.mywidgets.com/index.php?=8569

Also, make sure that you use hyphens to separate words instead of underscores or making everything all one word and don’t use capital letters.

Good URL: www.mywidgets.com/light-blue-widgets
Bad URL: www.mywidgets.com/light_blue_widgets
Bad URL: www.mywidgets.com/lightbluewidgets
Bad URL: www.mywidgets.com/Light-Blue-Widgets

3. Use The Right Keywords
You have to know what your site is about. Successful fishermen always know the correct bait to use to catch the fish they want; think of keywords like bait. If you are using the wrong keywords, Google will serve it to the wrong fish and nothing will happen. Right keywords + Google + right fish = Success! Use the Google Keyword tool to find out which specific search terms are going to net you the right fishing experience.

4. Use Headings Properly
Heading tags (<H1>, <H2>, etc.) are the part of your website code that tells Google the most important words on the page. Make these headings count; use keywords that match the overall content of your page to further reinforce their interest to stay on the page.

Good Heading: Our Light Blue Widgets Solve All Your Problems
Bad Heading: Let Us Help You Solve Your Problems

5. Use An Appropriate File Structure
Each time you create a new folder level in your website structure, you are telling Google that that information is LESS important than the content in the file above it. Search engines consider web pages in root folders to be the most important content. For this reason, it really isn’t advisable to send content more than two levels deep.

Good File Structure: www.mywidgets.com/light-blue-widgets
BadFile Structure: www.mywidgets.com/widgets/color/light-blue-widgets

Once you take care of these five tips it will be time to move on to the next five. This is the right place to start and getting these principles fully dialed in can take some time. Doing these correctly is key to the best SEO for your website. Tune in next time for the final five tips for great SEO!