I’m no SEO Guru. Let me repeat that. I’m no SEO Guru. I don’t claim to know what makes Google tick or how to make your page rank rival that of Apple.com.

That being said, I do feel like I know a little about the subject. Enough to be dangerous or, at least, helpful.  And so, I offer you my SEO tips. Try them out and see if you can improve your search engine placement.

1. Use Correctly Formatted URLs

Obviously, you can’t use spaces in your URLs, but you shouldn’t use underscores either. Using underscores can cause Google to see words in the URL string as one big word and hamper the ability for people to find your site through a keyword search. Instead, use dashes in your URLs.

Like this:

Not Like this:

If you’re using a CMS (content management system) like WordPress, you can use a custom permalink structure and WordPress will generate a correctly formatted URL automatically.

2. Remove Stop Words from your URLs

However, it’s not just about how your URLs are structured—it’s also about the content they contain. Certain words, known as “stop words”, are words that are likely to be ignored by most search engines, in particular, Google, when a search request is processed. These are usually common words such as I, the, it and what.

If you are using WordPress and have custom permalinks set up, you can download a plugin by Andrei Mikrukov called SEO Slugs that will remove stop words from your URLs.

3. Write concise and focused Meta Descriptions

The meta description is a tag that goes in the head section of your webpage and conveys information about the page that may not be contained within the title.

The tag looks like this:

Most search engines still use meta descriptions to describe the content of your pages. Because of this, it’s important to make sure these descriptions are accurate, easy to read, and representative of the content that’s on the page.

4. Stop Relying on Meta Keywords

I notice people still load their meta keywords tag with keywords thinking it will magically increase their page rank.

The bad news is, most search engines have dropped or only have minimal support for the meta keywords tag—and no one is quite sure if they help your page rank at all!

Rather than loading your meta tags up with keywords, write copy that includes these words organically. And if you must use keywords, use them sparingly and make sure that they appear in your copy or you could be penalized for it.

5. Make Sure your Site uses Heading Tags correctly

Some people hate the heading tag and I’ve never really understood why. Regardless, they are important to the hierarchy of your site and therefore, important to your SEO.

Here are a few quick tips on being SEO friendly with heading tags:

• Only have one H1 heading per page
• Don’t skip heading levels (e.g H1 to H3)
• If possible, have the H1 heading be the first on the page
• Use the main keyword on the page in the H1 heading

The heading tags are also very easily styled with CSS—so use them.

6. Use Alt and Title Attributes on your Images

It’s very important to include alt and title attributes on all of your images. Alt tags describe the content of images to the search engines. When someone does a search for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

Now, from what I know, It’s arguable, whether or not the title attibute helps your page rank, but it’s super simple to do—so what have you got to lose?

Adding the title and the alt attributes is as simple as adding this to the html of your images:

title="your title here" alt="your alt tag"

7. Use a Robots.txt file

If you use WordPress and display your archive pages, tagged posts, or categories, there is a possibility that you will be penalized by Google for having duplicate content on your site.

However, if you use a Robots.txt file on your site, you can tell the search engines, namely Google, not to index the directories you specify.

Robots.txt is simply a text file, that you place on your site root. If you want more information about creating a Robots.txt file please check out http://www.robotstxt.org/

8. Optimize your Page Titles

Optimizing your page titles is another key step in good SEO practices. Here are are a few steps you can take to optimize yours:

• Make sure that your important keywords occur within the first 60 characters of your page title
• Unless your brand or company is really well known, it’s probably best to put the title of the specific page first and the name of your site or company last in your page titles
• Write page titles that evoke emotion, make queries, or promise to solve a problem (that the page makes good on)

9. Create an XML Sitemap for your Site

XML Sitemaps are an easy way to inform search engines about new pages on your site. They also help search engines find and index pages that they might not find otherwise.

Using a site map doesn’t guarantee your pages will be included in the index, nor does it insure a higher page rank. However, it provides infomation that will help the search engines crawl your site and that can’t hurt!

Again, there if you’re using WordPress, the XML Sitemap plugin is available and is capable of automatically generating a site map for your site. However, if you aren’t using wordpress, there’s a site map generator online at  XML-Sitemaps.com that can generate a free xml sitemap for you as well.

10. Use Social Media and build Back Links

While not technically SEO, this is one of the most important steps in increasing your page rank and getting traffic to your site.

Having quality links pointed to your site will increase your “link juice” or the importance of your site to the search engines.

Getting good back links to your site all goes back to how well you market yourself. Some steps you can take to get these links include:

• Sharing a great blog post on Twitter or any of the other, numerous, social networks
• Trading links with other sites
• Posting comments on other sites that “do follow” while adding value to the conversation
• claiming your name on other social networks that allow you post a link to your website
• Writing really great content that people WILL WANT to link to!

It takes some hard work and a little elbow grease, but link building is probably the top way to improve your SEO.

So that’s it…

Before you tell me, I know there are many more advanced and technical SEO techniques out there, but I wanted to focus on the simple things that you can do to improve your site SEO.

Feel free to let me know about any other simple SEO tips that I might not be aware of.  Also, please join in and discuss, argue or comment about any of the tips I’ve posted.