Tips on How to Get Better SEO
The goal of any business looking to get noticed online should be to get better SEO, as it is one of the most important ways to increase your visibility on Google and Yahoo. If you want to make a name for yourself in today’s world of digital information, then your ability to get better SEO is essential. We want to give you 7 tips and tricks that we discovered from Jay Goldman’s blog that really gave us the SEO boost that we needed.
Get Better SEO – The 7 Tips
- Landing Pages – We realize that your company’s website probably covers a lot of topics, so it will be impossible to find your homepage at the top of every Google result page that contains a search that matches some topic included on your site. In order to get better SEO, you need to have a page that covers every topic on your site, and then optimize the page based around that topic to the best of your ability using the tips below.
- Titles – Just like our blog, “Get Better SEO,” we have our keywords included in all of our headers and titles. The
<title>tag in your HTML is one of the highest rated ways that Google and other search engines judge a sites content. Your title should come before the company name as well, because this is what people tend to see first when they bookmark your site. Also its a good idea to use WordPress SEO Title Tag Plugin to implement this technique to get better SEO. - Repetition – Not only should you include your search keywords in the titles but also in
<h1>as close to the top of the <body> as possible, this will also help you to get better SEO. - Font Replacement – You will want to make sure that you are using a font that your users have installed on their computer, because currently HTML doesn’t support embedding fonts. According to Jay, their are two popular methods of achieving this: “There are two popular routes: image replacement and sIFR for Flash-based replacement. Image replacement is much more limiting in that it requires you to create an image for each piece of text, while sIFR can be really difficult to get working, requires Flash for display, and can really slow down page rendering. I use a mix of the two on the homepage of this blog, rendering the header using image replacement since it never changes and rendering blog titles in sIFR to get Futura without having to manually create images for each post’s title.
- Doug Bowman of Stopdesign (and now the Visual Design Lead at Google) has a great overview of using background-image to replace text. My preferred method was originally outlined by Mike Rundle and has gone on to be the favourite used widely by web designers (and is even linked to by Doug): Accessible Image Replacement.
- The concept behind sIFR is really elegant: create a very lightweight Flash movie that has the font embedded and then pull in the text it replaces and render it using that font. The accronym stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, named after Shaun Inman who came up with one of the original CSS-based image replacements. sIFR was originally created by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben but hasn’t been updated by them in a long time. There’s a sIFR Lite available from AllCrunchy.com, though it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while either.”
- URL – If you want to get better SEO, your search term should definitely be a part of your URL. Use – for spaces, for example in this case (https://blackboxsocialmedia.comget-better-SEO). If you are working with WordPress, you should look at the Permalinks section of the Settings in their WP-Admin. You need to use human readable URLs, as they are much easier to send to your friends and customers as links and more effective behind the scenes.
- Sitemaps – In the past, Site Maps were used to show people where all of the other pages on your site were. But now they have been revitalized and can really help you get better SEO by submitting a Sitemap XML file to the search engines to help them crawl the site and see how often it is updated. You don’t want to do this manually, why not use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress for this blog). More info at Sitemaps.org.
- Inbound Links – Make sure that you have plenty of legitimate inbound links (no link farms!) on your pages as they count for authoritativeness on the site. You really want other sites to link up to your site as this can really increase your SEO. Make sure you use the right link text, as it will be better for other sites to use: https://blackboxsocialmedia.comget-better-seo, than to use https://blackboxsocialmedia.comseo, because it is more clearly defined and better for SEO.