Here are seven search engine optimization tips to make sure that your site is as valuable to Google’s PageRank as it is to your visitors:
1. Don’t keyword stuff. If you use keywords in a blatant, excessive manner on your site could cause a search engine to ignore or devalue that keyword. It might actually identify the page as spam. In that vein, only conjugate the same root word excessively (example: “word”, “words”, “wording”, “worded” – which is known as “stemming”) if the text reads naturally.
2. Don’t use potential keywords that aren’t likely to be used in a search, and especially if they don’t contribute to your content.
3. Do use your site identification, or domain name, as a keyword for SEO ranking and placement purposes. Make sure that this string appears as content, so that it would be misconstrued as spam.
4. Avoid duplicate content or you could be dinged for it. The major search engines analyze pages looking for long-string repeats, so be sure to go into ALT attributes of your image tags and mix up your keywords so that they’re not identical in sequence to words or phrases used elsewhere. And whatever you do, don’t duplicate content on or from other pages or sites, or you could have a serious problem on your hands.
5. Do place keywords in titles, or meta tags.
6. Our recommend is to have at least 250 words of content on each of your sites pages and twice that for more research-oriented content. Your very best keywords should be peppered in a natural way in the body section of your content. And attention should be taken to make sure the keywords appear as the most prominent phrases of your pages.
7. Link your pages together, using the keywords that are appropriate for the content of the landing page in the anchor text of the sending page. And use contextual links (links found within written content, or paragraphs) whenever possible, especially if the pages are related. If the topics aren’t related, use image links so that search engines don’t see the text and get confused.