Webmasters are hiring the SEO companies by paying thousands of dollars to optimize their sites for search engines and to get traffic from giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN. This is not possible for all webmasters. If you keep track of following basic SEO tips you can save these dollars and can achieve almost same final effect.

Although it is difficult to optimize for all the search engines at the same time due to the crawling and ranking algorithm difference in these search engine spiders. Concentrate on following basic things and you are almost 80% done for search engine traffic.

1) Keywords in URL:
Try to add keywords in your post URL’s those will bring search engine traffic for your site. Keep the URL length short upto 4 words in domain name and upto 8 words in post slug. Keep in mind to include keywords that you are added in URL to post content naturally otherwise only keywords in URL won’t work.

2) Keywords in <title> tag:
<title> tag is most important aspect of SEO. The post title is shown in search engine result pages. So give importance to have good <title> tag around 8 words length containing your core keywords included.

3) Keywords in anchor text of Inbound links:
If you are submitting site to different web directories give different anchor text for each submission. Also for manual reciprocal link exchange try to have different anchor text and deeper post links instead of index page. Try to get backlinks from relevant sites.

4) Keyword in your post:
Include the keywords naturally in post content. Use main keywords in <H1>, <H2> tags. Keywords should be relevant to page.

5) Keywords in images <alt> tag:
Fill the <alt> tag of your images with proper keywords. Search engines use this <alt> tag instead of the image description.

6) Inbound links:
Links from relevant sites means these sites are voting for you and you will get importance for ranking. Stay away from bad neighbors. At least do not link from you to bad sites. Let bad neighbors link to you as you don’t have control on that so ignore it. As I mentioned above strictly try to have different anchor text for inbound links. Stay away from link spamming. Try to get some .edu and .gov links.

7) Outbound links:
Do not link to more than 100 links from same page. It will be considered as link farm (word you might be hearing from beginning ;-)). Many outgoing links will not give you any benefit. Keep outgoing links limited and possibly link to relevant sites only.

8 ) Meta tags:
Use <Description> and <kewords> Metatags. Metatags generally do not have that much importance now-days but Yahoo and MSN still consider Meta tags. Include post description in <description> meta tag. Some times this description will come as search result description on search result pages. Use <keywords> meta tag to include keywords, around 15-20 keywords will be sufficient. Do not use keywords that are not in your post content. Use All in One SEO pack plugin to add different Description and keywords meta tags.

9) Avoid Duplicate content:
Wordpress blogs have drawback of duplicate contents. Content is said to duplicate when same content is accessible from two different urls. Concentrate on unique content. Fresh content is also important for fast ranking as crawlers love fresh content. Use robots Noindex meta tag and robots.txt file for avoiding duplicate contents. Use post excerpt on index, archives and category pages. You can use evermore wordpres plugin for wordpress blogs for showing post excerpts.

10) Site Navigation :
Navigation should be simple. Avoid using javascripts and flash movies on home page. Interlink all your pages. Use related post plugin for this. Keep most of the pages accessible from home page. Do not use frames in site design. It will be difficult for crawlers to crawl your site. Do not use images to linking.

Submit sitemap to all major search engines. Use sitemap generator wordpress pluging for easy creating and submitting sitemap.xml file.

Use robots.txt file to ban pages that you don’t want to be indexed. More detail on creating robots.txt file can be found here or here. Also do not ban most part of your site this will reduce crawler visits to your site.

Always keep these simple tips in mind whenever launching a new blog or optimizing old blog for search engine traffic.

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