Six Easy but Effective SEO Techniques

Although search engine optimization can be extremely complicated and time consuming, not all aspects of SEO fall into this category. There are plenty of simple SEO techniques which can be implemented by virtually anyone and can help increase the traffic to your web site. Here's a list of six easy SEO ideas:

1) Make sure every image uses the ALT tag
For every image on your web site, you should use the ALT tag to create a short, relevant, keyword description for that image. As long as you don't abuse this tag by stuffing it with lots of keywords, you will be able to maximize the traffic you receive from Google Images and other image related searches.

2) Avoid Frames
Just take our word on this one. Not only do frames give most users a bad experience, but they make life extremely hard for search engine crawlers (which is never good for your web site's rankings). If your web site is currently using frames, it's time to update to a proper CSS style sheet. Not only will this pay off big time in the long-run, but it's actually not as hard to do as you might initially think (you can get an idea from reading Mike's post on converting HTML tables to CSS).

3) Fix Broken Links
If you haven't clicked through all the links in your web site in awhile, it's time to weed out any broken links. Once again, broken links are frustrating for users and bad for search engine crawlers. By taking time to visit the links on your web site, you can quickly identify and fix any that need to be updated or removed.

4) Take Advantage of robots.txt
Even if you want your entire web site to be crawled, it is still a good idea to create a robots.txt file. However, in most cases there will probably be some form of duplicate content on your web site, and you can easily use the robots.txt file to ensure that this does not negatively impact your rankings.

5) View Your Site without Javascript
Not everyone enables Javascript, so it's important to make sure that your web site is still accessible when Javascript is disabled. To view your site without Javascript, you can download the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox and easily toggle Javascript on & off.



6) Give each page a unique title tag and meta description
If you are having problems with Google's supplemental index, this is one of the simplest and effective ways to pull your web site out of it. By giving each page a unique and relevant title tag and meta description, you can show the search engine crawlers that each page of your web site is important and has value.