Seventeen SEO Tips

In this article I will share seventeen tips on how to improve your search engine rankings.
Cross-linking: Ensure that important pages within your website are linked to each other using the appropriate ‘anchor text’. Also make sure that if you own multiple websites that these are linked together. This will maximize the page rank of all your pages within each web site.
Take time to learn what sites link to your competitors. Use this information to surpass your competitors SEO efforts and gain better position within the search engines. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit Yahoo! and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors' domain name I.E. link:www.yourcompetitor.com
Include a TITLE tag as the first META tag, directly after the HEAD tag. Use your most important keyword terms in the title tag but please try to avoid stop words such as (a, an, and, but, he, her, his, i, in, it, of, on, or, she, the, etc.) which are common words and characters ignored by some search engines to enhance the speed and relevancy of their search results.
Always Include a META DESCRIPTION tag, directly after the TITLE tag. Include the most important keyword phrase for the web page as close to the beginning of the description as is possible. This is usually the text that shows in the search engine results when you search.
Please include a site map with a links to all your pages. This will help search engines find and index all your pages.
Try to limit the number of links on a web page to a maximum of fifty. If you have more than fifty links limit them to your most important pages. Avoid link only pages.
Use one or more header tags in your main page body and include your most important keyword phrases particularly in the first paragraph to see if it's appropriate to be used as a description of your page. Many search engines utilize the first couple of sentences of the body text instead of the contents of the Meta description tag as the search results description.
Aim to achieve an overall keyword density of 1-3% and no more per page.
Write for humans and not for search engines. Do not repeat keywords or keyword phrases on a web page, as this is often considered ‘spam’ by search engines.
Try to achieve a minimum word count of three hundred and fifty and a maximum of seven hundred words on each page.
If possible, register a domain name using the exact keyword phrase you wish to be found for using hyphens to separate the keywords i.e. www.your-seo-services.co.uk


Name directories within your site after your keyword phrases, using hyphens or underscores to separate the keywords.

Name web pages after your most important keyword phrase. Separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores.


Name your images after your keyword phrases. Again, separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores. Only do this when it is an accurate representation of the keyword.
Try to use the longer or plural version of a keyword whenever possible. Some search engines will return search results that include keywords that extend beyond what you actually searched for.
Use some less common keywords in your main body text. These keywords have less competition in the search engines and your web page has a greater chance of being listed amongst the top results.
Never use font size #1 as the default text size. Many search engines will consider tiny text to be spamming. It's still OK to use some font size one text but not as the default.
Please feel free to check out my SEO Company website for more helpful tips and hints on search engine optimization.