If you haven’t read the previous post in this series, check out the first 5 steps to on-site SEO optimization to start with on your site. Once you go through the first 5 critical steps, it’s time to look into additional optimization on your site.
Here are eight additional steps that shouldn’t be neglected:
1. Use h1 and h2 tags properly
These tags are not only there to help differentiate layout of your web page. They are also a sign to search engine spiders to give higher importance to the text between these tags. Do not abuse these tags, or you’ll send both your visitors and search engine robots away. Only put really important sections of your site under
2. If your site is clustered with useless code, clean it up
There are many XHTML validators that will help you determine if your code is readable. One of the common mistakes people make is to simply paste the text they wrote in Microsoft Office into their WordPress site. This results in gibberish code that is unreadable by robots.
3. Use proper internal linking
Your website first of all needs to be user-friendly and easy to navigate. Organize your site well and link between its sections, using appropriate keywords as anchor text.
4. Keep Footer links at a minimum
These receive very little or no attention from search engines. Apart from site navigation purpose, they don’t have any other. For SEO purposes do not use this part of the page.
5. Avoid using images as links
Search engines give textual links more advantage. If you forget to add alt tags to your images the links on them have no use at all.
6. Keep URLs easy-to-read
It is important that you give enough attention not only to your domain and content. URL strings, if constructed properly can significantly improve your ranking.
7. Use ‘no archive’ and ‘no follow’ tags
There is no need for search engines to crawl and index every single thing on your website. There is a lot of useless images and duplicate content induced by various CMS. Choose what content to index.
8. Be careful with the use of social bookmarking plugins
Some of them have over 100 pop up links and they can break the external link count of a page. Too many external links devalue all the links on a page. To be safe, you should make those social bookmarking icons ‘no follow’.
Leave a Reply