The Magic Formula for Search Engine Optimization

Posted on May 14th, 2012. Written by Suhail.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about presenting your site to the search engines, as well as the audience, in the best possible light. Keep in mind all the search-engine-imposed regulations when crafting your site, because you just don’t want to annoy them. You also want the users to like what they see on your site. A very indispensable tenet of SEO is to always consider the users when you are changing, editing or doing what-ever-else with your site.

The magic formula all these on-the-top-of-the-search-results sites apply is what I like to call T.C.K.L., pronounce it tickle or tackle as it strikes your fancy. The T is for tags, C for content, K for keywords and L for links. They are all important to SEO techniques, not necessarily in that order, but hey I had to make an acronym out of it and calling it cult didn’t seem very user-friendly!

Link Love

Picture the internet as a serviceantic spider web across the globe – I hope you aren’t scared of spiders or the analogy might get a bit creepy – and the web crawlers all over the place are the spiders, of course. These are friendly spiders, people – they only bite when you spam-up your site! Anyways, these spiders love it when websites are connected together so they don’t have to work to get from one place to the others. The more links leading them to a site, the more they love the site. So you want to have a lot of backlinks to your page if you want it to be popular and have a good visibility among relevant search results. But the quality of the links is also an issue. Many people get into things like “link farming” for cheap marketing, which is just not healthy for the site. The search engines these days have the uncanny ability to tell a spam-free site from a spam-infested one. And by association, your site is going to be labeled as spammy and untrustworthy – not good for your site if you hadn’t realized, yet! You want your site promoted by respectable sites, preferably with a good anchor text. So “No candy from strangers!” for you guys. Make good link buddies, spread a little link love and stay away from suspicious activity.

Keyword Crazy

Keywords are the foundation of your SEO strategy. Really? As if we didn’t know that! Of course you know it. But what you might not realize is that optimizing your site for the wrong keywords may just be the reason your SEO goes downhill. Selecting the suitable keywords is the very first step to successful SEO. There are fortunately a lot of tools that tell you various keywords that would fit your site. A few tips wouldn’t hurt though, I suppose. Remember, with the internet as densely-populated as it is now, optimizing for one-worded keywords is like fighting a losing battle. You want to look for double- or triple-worded relevant keywords. And hear me out, loud and clear – keyword density isn’t all that it’s made out to be. You need to make sure that your keywords appear in the headings and title tags and the URL – in the rest of the content, use as it comes naturally. Do NOT, and I repeat, Do NOT stuff your page with keywords that search engines disregard your site altogether.

Creative Content

You cannot decorate a dirty room, can you? Well, similarly, you do not want to do SEO on a crappy website that users despise. SEO is meant to make the audience and the engines happy. So you need to make sure that your website content is original and crafty, and doesn’t make the audience want to gouge their eyeballs. Make sure that the site is easy to navigate, because you do not want users to be confused out-of-their-wits, keep it user-friendly and tone down the geek! Also, make certain that your site runs smoothly on all major web browsers because it puts the users off if it doesn’t.

Tag Tale

People are really gung-ho about their tags. There used to be a time when meta tags were really involved in the rankings but that was before people started sneaking in keywords in every nook and cranny, hence making the engines change the way they tackle the relevancy ranking. Meta tags are still a good practice to personalize – it makes you a goody-two-shoes from the viewpoint of the engine. The keywords are most effective in title tags and in meta tags.

So this is what I call TCKL, which combined together is a powerful SEO formula to boost ranking and make the engine and your site visitors happy as a clam!

Suhail

Professional content writer having experience in writing all types of contents like articles, blogs, ebooks, squidoo lenses, hubpages, reviews, web content, news, press releases, link wheel creation and much more.Check out my Gigs here: http://www.seoclerks.com/user/Suhail

1 Responses »

1. 

   deannatroupe

   December 11, 2011 • 3:18 pm

   It is interesting to see how seemingly small things can affect your site’s SEO performance. I will go back and check my sites to make sure I am not doing these things myself.