5 Advanced Tips for SEO and Your Website

When creating content for your website and taking Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into consideration, there are some additional advanced techniques to consider to help get your page positioned well in search results. Good content, keyword rich file names and directory paths, inbound anchor links to your site, keyword rich page titles and meta descriptions are important, but these other tips will help as well.

Page Redirects / Site Moves

Use a 301 Redirect via the .htaccess file. A 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for web page redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you need to change file names or move pages around, a "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently"."

Use a Rel="nofollow"

To better control the 'votes' or 'page rank' you give to other web sites that your web site is linking to, if you add a rel="nofollow" to a the hyperlink, it will prevent any link benefit to that site keeping the value of your link juice on your web site. A web page with this tag indicates that the destination of that hyperlink should not be credited any additional ranking by user agents (search engine bots) which perform link analysis upon web pages (search engines). For example, on your web page you link to a neat article found on some person's blog. Rather than boost the ranking of that blog, you can add the tag to your link which allows you to not 'endorse' the site, just link to it.

Legitimate Link Building

Link building can include, blog posts, directory submissions, link exchanges, or other advanced link building efforts such as link baiting. Search engines are cracking down on 'Paid Links' so if you are doing, or planned on doing that, forget it. Save your money because doing so will put your web site at risk (if caught) and be dropped from the index. The best method currently is to do a link exchange with other similar and relevant content as to what your web site is about.

Link Baiting

Link baiting doesn't have to be as negative as it sounds (though people will abuse it most likely). Simply said, link baiting is basically attracting anyone who can link to your site to your web site...and have their web sites present your link to as a web site to visit. The trick is, to have a web page that creates this type of social buzz where everyone wants to link to it.

Local Listing

You should optimize your web site to attract local traffic by showing your address and local phone number prominently at the top of the web page. Use Yahoo Maps or Google Maps to display the location of your store (if you have one). You should also submit your web site to the free local listings services on Google (which now display 10 locations) and Yahoo. You will also need to make sure your web site is listed in local directories such as City Search and ask customers to leave reviews of your business on these web sites.

These 5 advanced techniques, in addition to the 5 Beginner and 5 Intermediate techniques, when done correctly should help with your organic ranking. Also be aware of the 5 SEO Abuses that can get your site penalized or even banned from the search engines.

Jason Perry

Two great SEO tools which can help track the success of your web site are WebPosition 4 and Hits Link. Both which you can try for free.