Tips to Optimize your Site for Search Engines

So you started a blog/site, but what's next? How do you get visitors?
Well, keep on adding great content to your blog and you will surely
have more visitors. How? Google and other search engines drive most of
the traffic to your blog/site. Hence it is vital to make your site have
better page rank so that it can benefit more from the search engines.
This is where Search Engine Optimization comes handy. Here are some tips
to optimize your site for search engines.



Site URL and Title

It is bettter to keep the site URL short and avoid long domain names.
Also, a descriptive URL giving the idea of the page contents is better
search engine optimized. For example,
http://funsurf.tk/p/how-to-make-a-site.html is better recognized by
search engines than http:/funsurf.tk/page.php?id=3

Make sure your title is contains your most important keywords and the
length is between 10-60 characters. Also every page should have a unique
title. Don't just give a single title to all your pages.
Meta Content

Try to include unique Meta descriptions to all your
pages in about 70-160 characters. Here also, give importance to
keywords and include your most important keywords in the Meta
Description. Also Meta Keywords are good to include. Include the most
used keywords and avoid excessive repetation. Avoid excessive use of
tags as it might affect your SEO negatively.
Headings and Content

Try to use H2 headings for titles. Use H1 only for the most important title. For greater SEO, use only one H1 title per page.

Images say thousand words. But Google is not able to read the images. So
include correct Alternative texts in images. Also don't use excessive
images as it will slow down your page load time and this is certainly
not good for SEO.

Add more relevant text to your pages and increase your keyword density
to have better SEO. Also don't copy/paste from other blogs as it can
have a negative impact.
Frames, Flash and Ajax

Avoid using Frames and Flash content.
Search engines don't understand them and cannot read their content. Full
Flash sites are always a bad idea as they both increase page load times
and decrease page ranks. Ajax also comes to the same category. Don't
include this unless necessary.
XML Sitemap

A sitemap lists URLs that are available for crawling
and can include additional information like last update, frequency of
changes, and importance. This allows search engines to crawl the site
more intelligently. It is always a good idea to submityour XML sitemap
to Google™ Webmasters Tools and to Yahoo Site Explorer.
Backlinks

Backlinks to your site matters a lot. The more number
of backlinks, the more is the traffic to your site and the better is the
page rank. Instead of participating in link exchange services, it is
recommended to make your online presence in social networking sites and
try to comment in the blogs you visit.
Conclusion

Whatever you do to increase SEO, content is the king.
Remember that no one will visit your site again if he didn't find
anything related to his search in your site. I've found many great sites
from google search and now regularly visit them. I too have found
countless sites that I don't visit. I've also noticed misuse of SEO in
some sites and never prefer to click a link leading to those sites as
I'm pretty sure that the site doesn't contain any relevant content.

A blog always have greater page rank than sites due to its everchanging
contents. So update your blog frequently. Do you have more tips? Please
share with us.