Quick SEO Checklist for Your Website – Beginners Guide

You can optimize your site for search engines if you are keen about boosting its rankings. You can enhance the visibility of your website within a short span of time by using the technique called SEO. SEO is a broad topic and knowing its techniques and tactics can be of great help in getting the results you deserve.

Using unethical or black hat methods can lead to disastrous consequences for your website such as its ban by a particular search engine. If you want your SEO campaign to be a success, you should assign importance to certain factors such as those mentioned below. These points can be of different priority for different people and you should be clear regarding what will work for you to derive the best results.

Following are few important SEO checklists

Give importance to header and Meta tags

Giving importance to header and meta tags can enable Google to give a better ranking for your website. It is a good idea to include as many keywords as possible in the meta tags of web pages since these are still weighed highly by a number of search engines. It is also considered to be very beneficial to include keywords in header tags as this can enable search engines to easily understand what the website is all about and the way to list it correctly.

Use tags

You can enjoy plenty of advantages by linking your web pages to the relevant websites. You can use a specific type of tag based on its location. You can use no follow tags if you are placing your link in sites that do not belong to your niche area. You should also take care to avoid placing links in spam sites as these can affect your website’s ranking negatively.

On the other hand, you will be able to enjoy a lot of advantages by placing do-follow tags when linking with relevant websites.

Upload your site map

Submitting site maps is also of great importance as this can lead to proper indexing of a website. You can generate a sitemap of your site by using a popular content management system. There are also several sites online that can help you to create site maps for free. You can also inform the search engines when you upload a site map for your website.

SEO and content go hand in hand and by putting up the right content you can enjoy better search engine rankings and attract a lot of traffic to your site. You should avoid keyword stuffing and limit the use of keywords. Placing too many keywords in the content can affect your site by making people lose interest.

SEO Tactics – Dos and Don’ts

The process of search engine optimization involves the use of black hat or white hat techniques. Some sites get good rankings in spite of incorporating the black hat or unethical SEO techniques. On the other hand there are other sites that may not be able to enjoy good rankings in spite of implementing white hat techniques. This post throws light on the good and bad techniques of SEO and the best ways to improve the rankings of your website. Both beginners and advanced users can take note of the following techniques and use the best ones based on their priorities and goals.

SEO Tactics:

Inferior White-hat Techniques:

• Meta Keywords

• Spam reporting competitors

• Search engine submission

• DMOZ/Yahoo! Directory Submission.

• Press release optimization.

• Wikipedia links

Superior White-hat Techniques

• Keyword research

• XML sitemap creation

• On page optimization

• Vertical Search targeting/inclusion

• Embedded badges and widgets

• Internal link architecture

• Page rank sculpting

• Rewriting Dynamic URLs

• Page Rank sculpting

• Link bait

Inferior Back-hat Techniques

• Reciprocal link trading

• Automated software

• Automated blog SPAM.

• Keyword stuffing

Superior Black-hat Techniques

• Paid directory link building

• Dofollow blog comments

• Injected links

• IP cloaking

• Parasite hosting

Search engine optimization (SEO) can prove to be fruitless and an expensive exercise if you don’t have a clear idea about what you need to do and what to avoid. When it comes to SEO, you cannot afford to be impatient. It can easily take up to 6 months for your website to start appearing in the search results.

Since every SEO project is unique, you should test a lot of things even though you may have handled a lot of SEO jobs earlier. You should test each and every aspect and should not try to expedite this process. New content or optimized content can get reflected only after a few weeks or months. That’s why it is better to start this task sooner by handing over the responsibility to a reputable SEO company.

Author Bio:

I’m Ramya, a freelance web designer/writer based in India.  I have worked in a number of SEO projects and have a good insight into creating a web design with SEO techniques incorporated in it.  Apart from web designing and SEO I also contribute high-quality articles to top class websites and blogs. Besides business I am part-time wildlife photographer and generally an extrovert, I also like travelling to different destinations.

 Website:  http://www.seotraining.me.uk/seo-training-courses-overview/