subject: Quick Tips for SEO Starters [print this page] One of the main things that you need to keep in mind when optimizing your site for the search engines is: focus on offering unique content. When the search engines look at your site, they are primarily interested in seeing material that the public will benefit from. So if your site is about musical instruments, find keywords that go with this topic and publish original material around these terms and the search engines will be happy. When you take the time to create content that people find helpful, you will not only receive more search engine traffic, but your visitors will want to keep returning to your site.
Avoid using duplicate content, as this is not looked upon favorably by the search engines and can ruin your ranking and possibly get you de-indexed. There are various systems to fill your site with duplicate content, and some claim this is good for SEO, but the reverse is actually true. In general, your content should be unique, related to the main topic of your site and be helpful to visitors.
Another way to rank well in the search engines is to consistently publish fresh content on your site. You will get better results with the search engines if you are consistent about publishing new content on your site. Your website's SEO will function better for you if you remember that the quality of incoming links are much more important than the sheer quantity.
For best results the links that come back to you need to be of relevant content to be of good quality. Having too many irrelevant links coming into your site will do more harm than good to your sites traffic and rankings. Search engines will frown on this because they are looking for related site information. The higher the rankings of the linked sites the more benefit you will see. Your site will benefit from the reputation of the sites you link, giving you a higher ranking and positively impacting your visitors in the long run. Your incoming links are your best asset, don't be hasty, make sure you know who you are linking to and whether or not they will benefit your site.
Many webmasters ignore the fact that linking internal pages together benefits all of the linked pages simultaneously. Doing this effectively is a powerful strategy that will boost your ranking in the eyes of the search engines substantially. Use anchor text with the best keywords to link relevant pages together. Even the big boys like wikipedia, google, yahoo, ebay etc use anchor text to link heavily to other sites with similar information. Since there is no reason why you couldn't take advantage of the same strategy and it's easy to perform, you should try it too. Search engines will dig the fact that you can effectively link your internal sites and your external sites alike.
In conclusion, the essence of search engine optimization is paying attention to many important details so that your site ends up being well optimized for the search engines.
