SEO 101 - What Every Webmaster Should Know And Follow | Web Hosting Demystified

Search Engine Optimization, something all of us have to do day in and day out to attain and maintain our SERP’s. Reading, learning and updating our SEO knowledge is a never ending task every webmaster must do to stay on top of the game.

This post aims to point out key factors in improving your SERP’s and serve as a guide to optimize your website. I have separated the optimization techniques into two buckets

• Onsite SEO
• Offsite SEO

Today’s post will focus only on the Onsite SEO techniques with a follow up tomorrow about Offsite SEO techniques.

1. Keyword
   • Do your research and have a clear understanding of the keywords that you are targeting right from the start. Your content must be  focused especially in the case of a blog.
   • Do not spam your pages with keywords. Your targeted keyword must not appear more than 3 -4 times on the entire page. Using synonyms and the like are fine.
2. Page Title
   • It is important to have your keywords in your title. This is crucial to a good ranking.
3. Header tags
   • Try to have your keywords in your H tags. Remember do not spam.
   • One and only one unique H1 tag on every page.
   • Maintain a natural flow. H1 followed by H2 and so on.
4. External Links ( Linking Outwards from your website )
   • Use common sense. Do not link to bad neighborhood sites.
   • Set your content and site context by linking out to relevant authority websites.
   • Do periodic housekeeping. Check for broken links and fix them.
5. Internal Links ( Linking to pages within your website )
   • Try to have 3 separate paths to get to any webpage on your site.
   • If you have a WordPress blog, install the following plugins to build your internal linking structure.
     1. Related Post plugin.
     2. Ultimate Tag Warrior (discontinued post WP2.1), WordPress inbuilt tag feature or any other Tag cloud generation plugin.
     3. Manually link to any previous post or page that is relevant.
6. Stop using Google Analytics
   • No point in letting Google track your visitors (visitors equals popularity equals authority) until you have built up decent traffic. Then by all means use Google Analytics.
7. Increase the number of your RSS readers.
   • Beg, bribe or even threaten but get your rss reader count up. Almost every blog uses Feedburner for their feed management and guess who owns Feedburner? That’s right Google!! It’s important to show Google that you have a decent number of subscribers who read and considers your blog worthy enough. This will add points in terms of your site authority.( Now would be a good time to click on the RSS button on the top right corner and subscribe to this feed. )
8. Website load time and network
   • Your website must be optimized and should load quickly. The quicker it loads the more brownie points you get. Ensure your website hosting is of decent quality with proven uptimes. Be fanatical about every page size, optimize and reduce your total page size. If you have the money, go for a dedicated server and IP Address with a good hosting provider.
9. Domain Name, Age and Registration Term
   • Try to get a domain name with your keyword in it. All this talk about branding is great for just that, building a brand. But when you are building a niche website meant purely for monetizing your organic (search engine driven) visitors, a keyword in the domain will help you in getting your page up in the SERP’s.
   • Domain Age is another important factor, the older the better. This helps negate one of the infamous Sandbox parameters.
   • If you are registering a new domain, make sure you register for a minimum of 5 years. Read my previous SEO tips during domain registration.

Follow the above techniques and you will definitely see an improvement in your rankings.

What Next

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