SEO Tips for Newbies

So you are just starting out with your own new web site or blog eh? Have no idea where to start, I’ll try and give you a few helpful tips to get you pointed in the right direction. The tips I give will be simple, and will help you more than some of the hoopla you see spreading around the internet about this subject.

I took a web site for a small non-profit organization, and had it ranking #1 in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask in less than two months, and it really wasn’t that hard to do. These few simple tips will go a long way to helping out your site.

1. Content

Content is king. I can not stress this enough. The more content you have on your pages, the better. If you have a blog or a web site, the more pages you create with text, keywords, and unique content, the better of you will be. This is very important. Try to stay away from coping and pasting others peoples work, and instead concentrate on creating unique content on your blog or web site. In doing this, google, Yahoo, and the other search engines will place your site accordingly.  The more content you can create, the more you build up your web site. This is the single most important part of building a web presense.

2. Meta Tags

Nowadays, most web masters will state that meta tags are not important in the search rankings anymore. In some ways, they are correct. however, having good keywords and matching meta tags does help the search engines better categorize your site, and help it rank for relevent terms. Yahoo search for example does infact still use the Meta keywords, and Meta description Meta tags.  So for that alone it would be wise to use the meta tags to help the spiders that use them evaluate your site. Bing does use Meta Tags to help properly categorize your site in to the correct category, but it doesn’t base rankings on them that I know of. The Robots Meta tags are useful in helping to index and archive your site.

more on Meta Tags

3. Use a Robots.txt file

A robots.txt file allows you to give the crawlers (Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, Teoma, and msnbot) directives and instructions to properly index your site. You can use this file to instruct robots not to index certain parts of your site, and optimize the craw of your web site. Furthermore, you can use a robots.txt file to tell the web robot where your site map is(more on sitemaps below) which will make the crawler aware of the pages on your site. create a robots.txt file and put it in the root of your web site directory.

more on robots.txt file here

4. Create a Sitemap

Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing, and Ask all support the sitemap protocol. A site map si an xml file that tells the search engine crawlers about the locations of the pages on your site, when they were last updated, and how often to check them.  You can sign up for Google Web Master Tools, Bing Webmaster Center, and Yahoo Site Explorer and submit your sitemaps to them. This will allow the crawlers to read your sitemap and crawl your site accordingly. It is highly recommended by Google to create a sitemap.xml file and submit it to them so they can better crawl your site.

more about sitemaps

5. Participate in other blogs and forums related to your site

This can help you some what, participate in sites and discussion forums related to your niche, and include a link to your site in your signature. This will not necessarily help you in search engines, but it will get word about your site out there that it may be passed along by word of mouth. This is a small thing one can do to help get their site noticed by the community you are targeting for your site. This may or may not help your search engine rankings, but it will get your site out there to people with common interests. Remember people are more important that search spiders.

Conclusion

This should be enough to get you started in the right direction. I just recently started this site, after i decided not to renew my old domain name with another host. I had a pretty decent site built up in two years of time and was getting a decent amount of traffic. The above is exactly how I started out, remember, don’t get discouraged because Rome was not built in a day. I am a firm believer that a person can get a decent web site and traffic going without paying some company big money.

Stay tuned, I will be writing a future blog post to give even more tips concerning link submiting, directories, and other tips to help you get started in the right direction. so until then, continue to work hard, create good content, and you will persevere!