Search engine ranking and your web sites traffic are directly influenced by four main areas:

Content, Links, Popularity and Reputation

Content: The more unique, well-versed content a site has, the better it will rank. Content primarily consists of the text on your site, but also includes images, videos and anything else the users come to the site for.

Links: Mainly concerning inbound links, but also includes outbound links and internal links. The more, quality, inbound links a site has, the better it will rank.

Popularity: The more people that know about your site the better it will rank and the more traffic you will receive. Popularity is often measured by the number of inbound links to a site.

Reputation: Popularity alone is worthless without a good reputation. If a site is known by many to be of poor quality or of little to no use to the users it will not rank well.

10 SEO Tips Relevant to All Websites

1. Content is king, period. Make sure you have good, well-written and unique content focused on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

2. One keyword phrase per page. Don’t try to optimize a page for several keywords.

3. Use a unique, keyword-focused Title tag on ever page. Do not stuff the title with unneeded keywords.

4. Match page content to Title text.

5. Natural language content ranks better with search engines. Don’t stuff your text with keywords. This method does not work and can hurt your rankings.

6. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links and image ALT attributes.

7. Quality inbound links are better than many poor links (which can actually hurt you). “Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.”

8. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one part of several attributes that go into the ranking algorithm. A site with a low PageRank can outrank one with a high PageRank.

9. Search engines like fresh content (ie – Deal of the Day, blog, etc.), be sure to add new, useful content to your pages regularly.

10. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO (Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, etc). Building good customer relations through social marketing will help build your sites reputation.

Other SEO Tips to consider

1. Use SEO Friendly URLs. (ie – yourdomain.com/spacelys-sprockets.htm)

2. Every website should have a sitemap, but not rely on it. A search engine should be able to find every page on its own.

3. Eliminate those nasty 404s. No one likes getting to a page that isn’t there.

4. Avoid duplicate content and/or duplicate URLs pointing to the same content.