Quick SEO Tips
Here are some very quick SEO tips that I just came across while looking something up in my Amazon account. To give credit to the author, the tips were posted on the Amazon associate discussion board by Mike Lepore, creator and Webmaster of Crimsonbird.com.
- Remember that no single tactic works for all search engines. Each one has its own way of ranking Web sites. For example, Google notes the “description” meta tag and ignores the “keywords” one, while others take both into account.
- First and foremost, create smart content. Mike provides lengthy, information-packed reviews of books that he’s read, which gives his visitors a reason to come back often. Check out his review of David McCullough’s John Adams to see a great example of good content.
- Try to begin each Web page with phrases relevant to the page’s content. Avoid starting with a lot of navigation elements or advertisements that don’t contain keywords relevant to the page’s major topic.
- Optimize each page separately. Search engines don’t rank Web sites in their entirety, instead ranking each page individually. For example, even if your site mainly focuses on business software, if you have a children’s software page, be sure to include relevant keywords to that topic.
- Use META tags, which appear at the top of your HTML documents. They can either be hand-coded or inserted by most HTML editors. They allow you to precisely describe certain elements of your page.
I know, these are the things that we think we all know… But I was glad for the reminder to optimize each page separately – I keep forgetting that the search engines don’t look at the site as a whole, but at separate pages! So thanks Mike for the reminder and for the great tips!
