5 Intermediate Tips for SEO and Your Website

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

Anchor Text

Keywords placed in the anchor text of links on a web page are given a higher priority by most search engines. Anchor text links should be used whenever possible for boosting organic results of that web page.

Other web sites that link to your web site with your keywords in the anchor text on their web pages... is also very effective strategy for boosting a web page's organic ranking.

Images / ALT tags

While there is no direct evidence that search engines are continuing to use this, or planning to do it again, it is however recommended to put 2-6 descriptive keywords on the image. There are a few reasons to use the ALT tag on images, even though originally its use was abused by individual that would 'stuff' 1x1 pixel images with dozens or hundreds of keywords. In any event, it is good ADA and Section 508 Compliance to put descriptions on your images.

1. Content becomes visible when a mouse passes over the image.

2. Content appears whenever the image fails to load.

3. The latest HTML specs require that images have an Alt tag (ADA and Section 508 Compliance)

Robots.txt File

Create a robots.txt file to prevent access to certain folders on your web site by some or all of the search engine spiders (or bots). There is no valid reason that I can think of as to why your cgi-bin folder needs to be indexed. There are many web sites available to educate people on the creation of a valid robots.txt file,

Sitemap.xml

Another very useful method to make search engines aware of your web site and content is to create a sitemap.xml file and submit it to the major search engines. Google Sitemaps is once place to submit your sitemap, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft Live. All now accept and use the same format. The tags in a sitemap XML file all have a purpose and you can change the frequency and priority to your needs.

Directory Structure

Another method to improve search engine optimization for a web site is the directory structure, or 'file pathing'. Simply stated, create a keyword rich directory path that contains your web page.

For example, instead of:

http://www.somewebsite.com/insurance/auto.html

A better directory structure and file naming convention (see above) would be:

http://www.somewebsite.com/insurance/auto_insurance/free_quote.html

Formatting your directory structure in this manner gets your keyword appearing multiple times.

These intermediate SEO techniques will help you achieve better positioning for your web pages in the organic search results. For the next SEO steps make sure you followed the basic 5 Beginner techniques as well as the 5 Advanced techniques which you can implement. Lastly, stay away from 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.