10 SEO Basics

Use these Monterey SEO basics to rank higher and quicker:

1. Content is king.  Provide quality, relevant content (seeing a trend here?).
2. A master plan.  What is it you want optimized?  Hopefully, you want to be a resource for information, products, subscriptions, etc.  You want to build links with respected sites in your field or geographic location.  You want a healthy conversion rate; visitors to your site turn into buyers, members, or subscribers.
3. Subdomains, or directories.  A section within your site devoted to a theme related to the rest of your site does very well with ranking.  Making use of internal linking is crucial.  These subdomains are the extra indented links that show under a page in Google’s search results, like this:

Hotels – Hotel reviews from people like you – Welcome to hotels.com

www.hotels.com/ – 51k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

  4.  Blogs.  And not just any old blog:  use WordPress!  It is designed to be SEO friendly with many plugins and  tagging     abilities.  Repeating this, but it is worth noting Google does like WordPress blogs.  Think WordPress is old news?  Think again; it’s good enough for Yahoo’s corporate blog, CNN’s Political Ticker, NASA Ames Research Center…you get the picture.  NikaBleu is in some pretty good company.

5.    Be Social.  Twitter, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn are important social "meeting places" and not only helpful to your business but can help you with link building.  Include buttons on your posts so readers can bookmark your pages.

6.   Use keywords smartly.  That means knowing which keywords will get you the most targeted traffic and designing pages around them.  It also means building links within your pages (internal linking, or deep linking).

7.   Don’t forget to feed Google.  Give it a sitemap and privacy policy.  MSN and Yahoo are important too, but I go with Google first.  Read the Webmaster Tools.

8.   Link building.  Again, you want relevant links, and links with your keywords in them.

9.   Article marketing.  Either writing your own articles or outsourcing them pays dividends.  You have an author’s resource box with links back to your site (hopefully containing good keywords!).  Fuel the fire with a hub page or Squidoo lens ALSO linking back to your site and you are creating a web of your own…

10.   Aesthetics.    Your site needs to be user-friendly with all content reachable within 3 clicks, keywords in the first and last 25 words of the page, and a page that loads quickly.  Some flash pages may be beautiful, but a visitor may leave before it even displays.

Try NikaBleu’s Top 10 Keyword Optimizer Report  and learn how your page is doing in over 30 categories!