SEO Tricks When Building Your Site
2. Provide a Sitemap:
Directly connected to the logical linking structure, is the sitemap, which is a list of all of the pages contained on the site at a glance. Users find these site maps very useful, but more importantly your sitemap tells the search engines which pages to crawl or index.
Why is this important? Because while you should optimize your home page or index page for your main keyword, site visitors sometimes enter your site via other keywords or phrases.
For example, my site might be optimized for the keyword “Baguio” but those using the search engines might be looking for “Camp John Hay,” which is a popular place of interest in Baguio.”
So if I have a Camp John Hay page, and it is included in my sitemap, and I submit my sitemap to the search engines, and they are able to crawl the site and find that page, there’s a good chance that when someone searches for that phrase, they will enter my site through that page!
There are many free sitemap generators on the web, as well as sitemap submission services available.
3. Keywords
Think carefully about the keywords that you use on your site. Think carefully about the keywords on each page, too. Search engine robots look for specific keywords. They cannot read pictures or movies.
So, if you are designing a photo blog, for example, each picture should be accompanied by a description or an alt text containing your keywords, so the bots can read what your page is all about.
As I mentioned before, the frequency of those words and also the overuse of them, known as keyword density, will help determine the site’s ranking. And when there’s too much supply for a high demand keyword, you may have to use a less popular keyword so you can rank higher for that instead of being invisible in the search engines for the high demand keyword.
For example. ‘Make Money’ is a popular keyword. Everyone is offering a money-making scheme or the other on the internet. But there are about 98,200,000 references to that key phrase.
How about “Make Money on the Web” Ahh, about 23,600,000 references, a little better but too much competition for you.
So you may want to try “Earn Extra Cash” instead with 793,000 references thereto.
Sometimes it is better to use less popular keywords in order to secure a specific search criterion. The key factor is the relevance of the keywords to your business, of course. Do not even attempt to target an unrelated keyword, like a business website featuring a hotel should not target “earn extra cash,” right?
Another tip for keywords would be to target the “long tail.” In other words, your site may have a better chance of ranking if it targets longer key phrases.
For example, there was a recent fire in a school in my hometown, and I wrote about it. My blog post was titled University of Baguio (UB) Fire so that it would appear if folks searched for UB Fire, Baguio Fire, University of Baguio Fire. See what I mean?
Ok another example, targetting “dog food” may be hard so go for the long tail — healthy dog food, “healthy dog food options.” “organic dog food recipes” instead.
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