The Obligatory SEO Article

I would’t consider myself an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination but there are certain basics, that if implemented, should see your site crawl up the search engine listings a notch or two.

I’ve had moderate success with my artist website for the term ‘sell art’ (number 5 from a list of 187,000,000 results) so I’ll use this as an example where necessary.

Firstly I’ll start with the standard SEO rant that the majority of page content must be relevant to the purpose of the users visit. Don’t keyword bombard the page with generic and irrelevant words or phrases that are not part of the user experience. SEO is about tweaking a page to provide a more concise, structured version of your content that a search engine can consume as well as a user.

Begin by ensuring that the key parts of the page correspond with each other. By this I mean that the ‘title’ tag, meta tags, all the ‘h’ tags and the primary content match up.

For example, the homepage of Alltradeart has:

a title tag contain:

‘Art - AllTradeArt - online portfolio - upload art - selling art - sell art online - art gallery - artist portfolio’

a meta keyword tag containing:

‘Art, AllTradeArt, portfolio, online portfolio, selling art online, gallery, All Trade Art, art for sale, upload art, upload artwork, artist directory,sell art, buy art, artist profile’

a h1 of:

‘Welcome to AllTradeArt - Create Your Own Online Art Portfolio’

a h2 tag containing:

‘Sell Art, Browse Art or Create a FREE Online Portfolio’

and a chuck of text, again contain key phrases, ‘sell art’, ‘upload art’ etc.

Shown like this it appears as though I’m forcing the user to consume content that I’ve deliberately developed for search engines, in reality these components are spread over a complete page and therefore form part of a complete user experience that they’ll hopefully find useful.

Next is the difficult bit – gaining inbound links. Ideally an inbound link will come from a site that has found your site useful and therefore has a description of your sites services alongside a link. The link would be description rather than just a url, for example ‘a website for artists’ rather than ‘www.alltradeart.co.uk’. If possible a linking site would have a higher Google page rank than your own. A general rule of thumb is that if you gain a prominent link from a site with a Page Rank of five your site will gain a Page Rank of four pretty quickly.

Granted the above methods have been stated over and over again in every other SEO blog in one form or another but these are the methods that I’ve managed to get working successfully. These methods should be used as a quick guide and form part of any build process.

Note: I know meta tags are virtually irrelevant in modern SEO but for the little effort it takes to get them working why not add them? The odd Search Engine still use them and every bit of traffic helps.