The search engine optimization industry has been one of the most
dynamic ones. It always keeps web masters and website owners on their
toes as they strive to get their websites on the top of search engine
results.
Search engines like Google frequently change their
algorithms of which, some of which they announce and some of which are
left for us to guess. Either ways, we have to keep up out optimization
efforts in order to preserve the rankings and make it score higher.
However, in spite of the changes and updates, there are several
practices that remain consistent throughout i.e. they are as relevant
in today's time as they were in the past.
Here are some timeless SEO tips and tweaks that would help you improve your website ranking in search results.
Title Tags
Search
engines place increased importance on the title tags of web pages. In
fact, the title tags are one of the most important SEO elements of a
web page. Good title tags are defined by their effective summarization
of the web page in relevant words. All the pages of your website should
have a unique and keyword rich title tags. These tags not only inform
the search engines about the page contents but also appear in the
search results and tell users about the contents.
Anchor Text
The
visible text of the link is called the Anchor Text. One of the most
important SEO ranking factor is the number of inbound links and the
text that is used to connect the link hold increased importance. This
is because the text that is used for the links also get indexed by the
search engine crawlers and affects your rankings. For example if you
sell T-shirts online and there is an external link that says 'Find
Customized T-shirts Here' it would be a whole deal better to link the
words 'customized T-shirts' than 'here'. This is the same case with
your internal linking as well. Therefore, try and use descriptive
'keyword-rich' text for your links while linking to your own web pages.
Quantity of Inbound Links
With
links, what is more important than the number of links is the number of
unique domains they are coming from. If you have 100 inbound links
coming from 50 different domains, it is actually better than having
1000 links coming from 5 domains. It is all about how dispersed and
extended your link architecture is rather than how dense it is.
Social Media
Social
media is a very powerful media to establish your presence and extend
your business on the web. Social media websites like Facebook and
Twitter offer enormous opportunities to plagiarize your content and
increase your linking on the web. They can act as efficient traffic
generating sources if used correctly.
Just as there are these
basic SEO tweaks, there are also certain practices that have become
outdated and don't work anymore. Here are some of them.
H1 Tags
They
were a rage in the past because they informed the search engine
crawlers about the increased importance of the particular text just
because of the increased size. What happened was a little bit of CSS
was used to specify H1 tags just anywhere and everywhere. However, at
present H1 tags don't have all that importance.
Keyword Density
This
was an important SEO consideration sometime back until people started
stuffing keywords in the text to get a high density. As of now, there
is no important placed on them. Rather, what is important is having
good and highly valuable content.