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When talking about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques, many web developers and website owners would simply equate this to having mountains of external backlinks and talk about anchor-text linking. However, the other side of Search Engine Optimisation relies largely on the actual content of your website and how well your website is structured and internally linked together. I call this internal SEO or On-page Search Engine Optimisation. Here is a checklist of on-page SEO points that you should keep in mind:

• Unique Content: Remember that “Content is King”. Search engines places greater importance on webpages that have unique and relevant content. Remember to also check your spelling and grammar.
• Duplicate Content: On the flipside, having duplicate content on your website is a big no-no since search engines put greater importance on unique, relevant content.
• Use the nofollow tag: All links on your website that goes to any external domain should have the rel=”nofollow” tag. By including this tag, you will stop the “link juice” from going to the external website, while your own website will be valued higher by search engines such as Google.
• Proper use of Headings: Every webpage should have one H1 tag. Some webmasters make the mistake of using two H1 tags on one page. Headings of secondary importance should be in a H2 or higher tag heading. Use the strong(bold) tag and list tags(ul and ol) when necessary. By correctly structuring your page with heading tags you will make it easier for search engines to properly index your page and show relevant excerpts of your webpage on its results pages
• Use a Robots.txt file: Robots.txt files can help you control parts of your website that you do not want indexed. These may include administrative or private areas of your website
• Use a sitemap.xml file: By having a sitemap.xml file you can tell search engines how often to visit your website for new content. By doing this you will let search engines know how often to index your website. Check out Google Webmaster for more information.
• Dead links: Always check your website for dead links. W3C link checker is a good tool. You should also check other parts of your code for any errors.
• Loading Times: Websites with large images and other multimedia can take a long time to load. Search engines are known to penalize websites with unacceptably slow loading times.
• Use of Flash: If your website is built in Flash, this can be major disadvantage in your ability to rank well in search engines. Search Engines currently have great difficulty indexing Flash pages, so you should limit your usage. If you must use Flash, then you should also incorporate standard HTML content as well.
• Use SEO Friendly URLs: By having readable SEO friendly URLs, search engines can give greater weight to certain keywords and its matching content when ranking your webpages. If you are running WordPress for you website, then I recommend you read my post on WordPress Permalinks.
• Descriptive image file names: This is a technique many people do not know about. By having keyword-driven, descriptive image filenames, you will rank well in Search Engine image results (Especially Google). The naming format I use is to separate each word with a “-” (dash). For example, “this-is-a-picture.jpg”
• Meta Description Tag: The Meta Description tag, unlike the Meta Keyword tag (which is useless) is still relevant. Your Meta description tag will show up as the excerpt in search results pages. This is pretty good for having on your homepage, as you can put in a catchy welcome message. However, I find it is irrelevant and even counterproductive in content-heavy webpages, largely because Google usually does a darn good job of extracting an excerpt from you webpage for your keyword.

  
  Above: Google did a darn good job in extracting an excerpt for my homepage in its results pages for my name: Tam Nguyen. I had not included a Meta Description tag, but if I did that’s exactly what I would of put in.

• Meta Title Tag: The Meta title tag probably holds the greatest weight in determining how well your webpage will rank for a certain keyword (from an on-page SEO perspective). So you would want to make sure it is relevant to the content and has keywords you want to rank for.
• And finally… keywords: Make sure you have the relevant keywords you want to rank for in you content, title tags and headings. But remember not to go overboard and stuff every sentence with them. If you need help finding the right keywords to target, then I suggest you use the Google Keyword Tool

If you keep these points in mind when building your website, then chances are you will rank well for your keywords in search engines such as Google. If you need any clarification on any of these points or would like to add your own on-page Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) methods, please feel free to leave a comment.

If you do not know about WordPress’ inbuilt capability to ping certain websites, then I suggest you read through this post and set up you Pinglist as soon as possible. Pinging other websites from WordPress simple tells certain websites that you have updated or new content which will allow fast indexing of your webpages in search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

WordPress by default only has a handful of websites that it ‘pings’ to. However you can dramatically decrease the time it takes to index your webpages by adding more and relevant websites to this pinglist. This will also help your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts since your webpages will appear in search engines for certain keywords quicker.

To set up your WordPress pinglist simply login to your admin area and then go to the ‘writing’ link under the ‘Settings’ tab. Once there, go to the Update Services heading (down the bottom) as shown in the pic below.

Below is a pinglist that you can use to replace the current default list. Simply copy and paste this list to replace the current one. If you manage to find more sites to add to this pinglist, simply add them to the ‘Update Services’ box.

http://zing.zingfast.com
http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.weblogues.com
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.popdex.com
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
http://www.lasermemory.com
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2
http://www.catapings.com/ping.php
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
http://www.blogroots.com
http://www.blogpeople.net
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.a2b.cc
http://weblogues.com/RPC/
http://weblogues.com/ping/
http://wasalive.com/ping/
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.twingly.com
http://rpc.technorati.jp/rpc/ping
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rcs.datashed.net
http://r.hatena.ne.jp/rpc
http://popdex.com/addsite.php
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://pingoat.com/
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://ping.wordblog.de/
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.snap.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.namaan.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.kutsulog.net/
http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/RPC2/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.fc2.com/
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2
http://ping.blogoon.net/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://packetmonster.net/xmlrpc.php
http://newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://newsblog.jungleboots.org/ping.php
http://mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
http://mod-pubsub.org
http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://imblogs.net/ping/
http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://hamo-search.com/ping.php
http://fgiasson.com/pings/ping.php
http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2
http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://catapings.com/ping.php
http://bulkfeeds.net
http://blogupdate.org/ping/
http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://blogsnow.com/ping
http://blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2
http://blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://blogpeople.net/ping
http://blogoon.net/ping/
http://blogoole.com/ping/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogdb.jp
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blog.goo.ne.jp
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping/
http://bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://bitacoles.net/notificacio.php
http://bblog.comping.php
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

Using this pinglist, I have had my blog posts indexed in as quickly as 2 minutes. At maximum, my pages are indexed within 24 hours. How did I know that? Well I currently have the SEO toolbar installed in Firefox which has a button that will show the cached version of a webpage. You can also do this in Google by going to the search bar and typing in this:

cache:http://www.yourwebsite.com/

At the top of the cached page it will show the last time the page was indexed by Google.

There are many ways to drive visitors to your website; however one of the most effective is to use articles. Popular search engines such as Google are always on the lookout for new and creative material for their users. These users, which include you and I, demand a wide variety of information at our fingertips. The reason being, we view the internet as a huge source of information. When we begin writing articles we can use that mindset to begin to write fresh and unique content, which is exactly what the users and the search engines want.

When you are starting to write your article from the very beginning, or even if you are a rewriting an article, there may be a few steps you want to to keep in mind. Once you have determined the topic you are going to write about, you probably will want to do some research online, which can involve using a research tool such as the Google Keyword Tool.

You may want to look at articles that others have written on your topic on such sites such as EzineArticles, or try to garner the opinions others have on your topic, on Discussion Forums. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, as this will only help you learn more about your topic. If for any reason you don’t have a broad knowledge or understanding of the topic at hand, take time to fully research your topic before you begin on your writing endeavor.

During your researching stage, it is always important to keep in mind the keywords that you are trying to direct to your website. Remember to be specific and targeted with your keywords. For example, if you are a Perth tax accountant, you would want to target keywords such as “Perth Tax Accountants” or the name of your business, rather than just “Tax Accountants”.

When you begin your article, you must remember to write it in a structured manner- one which has a beginning, middle and an end. It is a good idea to break up your article into paragraphs of about 4 or 5 sentences each and no more than 700 words for the whole article. If you are writing the article to be be sent to Online Article sites such as EzineArticles.com or GoArticles, remember to include a link back to your site in the resource box.

Writing articles for you website is a great way to boost the amount of visitors to your website. Not only do articles bring traffic directly from the people that read the articles, but they also provide you with a boost in your Search Engine Rankings for specific keywords relating to your site.

This is because for every article that links back to your site, you are getting more backlinks, which help search engine such as Google determine the importance of your website. Writing articles is just one of the great techniques that you can use to help get a new site kick-started or give an old one that extra boost it needs.

Many website owners will know that it is a difficult task to drive high quality traffic to a site. Whether your website’s purpose is to sell products and services, to sell affiliate products or simply a promotion site, there are certain techniques that will help market and bring more traffic to your website.

Social Media Marketing
Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are all the rage these days, so it is important to build an effective web presence in these sites and others, which will increase your website following. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon can also provide a great boost in your website traffic if you submit your site’s link to them. These social media sites are extremely effective in increasing the popularity of your website as well as provide a boost in search engine rankings.

Building Backlinks
Submit your site to high PR website directories in order to gain quality backlinks back to your site. Most directories will place your site link in the right categories which will help bring relevant and targeted users to your site. Doing simple things such as posting on relevant discussion boards with your site’s URL in the signature area will also boost traffic to your site and also raise your search engine rankings, which will bring you more targeted traffic.

Affiliate Programs
If you sell products online such as an ebook, you can always start up a promotion program to allow others to help sell your products for them, while they earn a commission. It is entirely up to you how you decide to pay your affiliates, whether it be percentage per sale or pay per lead. You may also want to promote your affiliate program on an online marketplace such as Clickbank.

Article Marketing
Writing or hiring people to write articles for your site is one of the most effective ways to build both search engine rankings and also bring about targeted traffic to your website. If you consider yourself a talented article writing or web copyrighter you can easily write articles that are relevant to your niche.

The articles do not need to be long, just make sure you don’t go plagirising other people’s work, after all search engines only like unique content. If you would rather others write for you, their are plenty of keen freelance writers and companies dedicated to providing you with fresh and unique content, such as Constant Content.

List Building and Email Marketing
One of the most effective ways to improve your product conversion rates is to build a list of visitors who come to your website. By providing users who come to your website with an option to opt-in to a mailing list, you are building a list of potential customers that you can then launch an email marketing campaign or simply to notify of for future products.

This way users will continually come back to your website rather than simply leave your website forever. Remember that it is a good idea to offer your users a discount as an incentive to come back to your website again and again.

Maintaining proper in-site SEO Practices
Sometimes website owners are so caught up in building backlinks and advertising about their website they forget the other side of Search Engine Optimization. Make sure your website has an effective search engine-friendly linking strategy so the search robots can easily navigate and index your website.

Keep in mind keyword-relevant title tags, meta descriptions, nofollow tags, SEO Friendly links, as well as having well researched and unique web content on your site. If you do this properly and also have an effective external backlinking strategy, you can expect a lot of targeted visitors from major search engines such as Google. It is also important to remember to design your site in a way that is not only easy for search bots to navigate, but also easy for human users.

Advertising
Paying for advertising space is a proven method for generating a great boost to your web traffic. Programs such as Google Adwords or Facebook Ads give advertisers a great opportunity to bring about targeted traffic to their website.

You may also wish to purchase a permanant advertising space on related websites that you think will provide potential boost in traffic. If you own a website that is only very new, advertising is a great lifeline to help improve and grow your website traffic.

For a majority of websites, most of their web traffic comes from search engines, therefore it is very important to know the right manner in which you can maximize your search engine rankings. Many website owners either neglect or simply are not really familiar with the best SEO practices. Here are six mistakes web developers should avoid when designing and programming their website.

Poor Web design
A website’s graphical design and navigation will affect its ability to retain website visitors and aid them in navigating your website. Search engines take into account a website’s bounce rate when determining its search engine rankings. A website’s design does not merely refer to the graphical element but also its hierachy structure. Search engines like to have URLs that are readable and filled with relevant keywords.

Steer clear from having php queries in URLs- they make it hard for search engine robots to crawl and they don’t do you any favours for the search terms you are trying to rank for. If you want to restrict search bots from accessing any areas of your site- such as error or restricted pages or tell search bots when to index your site remember to include a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml file.

Overusing Graphics and Animations
Search engine robots navigate through your website’s source code and cannot read the content on graphics or animations. It is a good idea to avoid using an image in situations where a HTML text could be used instead. If you must have an image as a text, in a logo for example, remember to include that text in the ALT and TITLE (for Firefox) tags.

Websites that are primarily built on Flash cannot currently be read by search engine robots, therefore if you decide to incorporate flash into your website you need to make sure you accompany it with some HTML text. Another downside of having a graphics-heavy website is that search engines take into account the loading times of your web pages, which means your website may be penalized for loading too slowly.

Little or no Backlinks
Many websites rely primarily on search engines as their main source of traffic. If you website has little or no backlinks, your website will perform poorly in the search engine rankings. Search engines such as Google rely on mathematical algorithms that determine a site’s pagerank. If your website has many backlinks coming from other websites with a high pagerank, you can expect your website to perform fairly well depending on your competition.

Inproper use of Keywords
Before you input any content into your website, you must first do your research into your niche. Be specfic about what keywords that will suit your website. If your website is about your company or brand, remember to include those keywords that make up the brand or campany name.

You also need to be careful about what keywords you try to target, as some may already have a lot of competition. Try to target keywords that are well searched but have less competition. There are many online research tools to help you with this, one of which is Google’s Keyword Tool.

Insufficient use of HTML and Meta tags
Many website owners underestimate the role that HTML and meta tag play in search engine rankings. The HTML Title tag and Meta Description tag are the two most important on-page optimization techniques to help improve your search engine results page for particular keywords, while also helping visitors know what your site is about from a list of search engine results.

Use keywords in these tags that differentiate different pages from one another. Be selective in the keywords you try to target as this will determine which visitors enter your site.

Lack of New or Unique Content
Search engines like new and unique content. It is not a good idea to include duplicate content in your website as you may be penalized by the search engines. When writing content for you site, keep in mind not only the keywords that are relevant to your website, but also your website’s readers or customers.

Your approach should be that you are writing for your visitors, but also keeping in mind the search engines and keywords. It is always best to write you own content, however, if you choose to hire a writer, be very clear about the style, content and length that you require for your website.

If you have a WordPress blog and don’t know about using permalinks, then I will show you how easy it is to make your URL structure more SEO friendly in just a few short steps.

Firstly login to your administrative backend and look for the Settings header on the left sidebar. Underneath that should be a link to the ‘permalinks’ page. On the page you should see that under ‘Common Settings’, that the ‘default’ option is chosen. The example URL should have some php query at the end of it eg. ?php=123

If that is what your current link structure looks like on your WordPress blog, then I suggest you change it. By using the ‘Custom Structure’ option, you can change your URL structure to something far more SEO friendly. What I suggest you do is change it to /%postname% as shown below:

This will change your URLs to a structure like this:
http://domain.com/post-title for an individual post.

The reasoning behind this is that Search Engines such as Google DO place emphasis on URLs when deciding to rank a particular page for its keywords. So therefore, if you have a URL that includes the post title, then there is a good chance your post title contains keywords that you want to rank for. In turn, the Search Engines take this into account and you will likely rank higher for particular keywords than if you had an unreadable ‘php query’ URL structure.

This is certainly not to say that you should spam your Post titles with keywords, just remember to make them relevant to the content that you are writing about. If you want to take this even further and want to customize your permalink structure even more, then I suggest you check out this page, on the Official WordPress site.

So you’ve just completed a massive overhaul of your website, maybe to a new domain, or maybe you’ve just revamped your site’s site structure and need old pages to redirect to updated locations. So how do you do it?

If you run you website on the Apache web server and cPanel as you server control panel, then the solution is simple. Recently, I needed to move my old portfolio website to this new domain without losing my search engine rankings I needed to find a way to do it.

Of course you could go and rewrite your old website’s .htaccess file, which would involving copying and pasting codes that you don’t really understand, but if you want to know the easiest way to permanently redirecting pages, then I suggest doing it through cPanel.

Firstly Log in to cPanel and then go to ‘Redirect’ which is under the Domains heading:

Once you are there find the domain or page you want to redirect. Then type in the new domain or page location you want to redirect to in the ‘redirects to’ box. Check to see that the redirection type is ‘Permanent 301′ NOT ‘Temporary 302′.

Leave the rest of the tick boxes alone and click ‘Add’. You should then get a confirmation page saying the redirection was successfully. On the odd occasion you might get an error message saying a .htaccess file could not be created, but if you try again you should be successful.

There are few things you may need to keep in mind when permanently redirecting pages on root directories.

For example if you want to redirect your homepage at:

http://new-domain.com/

then you would also need to redirect

http://new-domain.com/index.php

This is just in the case somebody goes directly to the index.php file, in which they will go to un-redirected old page. The 301 redirection does not distinguish between the two versions so you would have to redirect both manually.

The same would go for a lower subdirectory like:

http://new-domain.com/pages/news/

Which in this case being the index.html, index.php or whatever the root filename is.

It is important to distinguish that a 301 redirect is not the same as a 302 redirect. A 302 redirect tells search engines and the browser that the page has moved ‘temporarily.’ Your new page will be indexed separately from the old page and you will not get the search engine rankings and traffic that you did for your old page.

What you want to tell Search engines and browsers is that this new page has moved to a new location. Search engines and browsers will ignore the old page and not index it, instead going directly to the new page. In this way you will keep your search engine rankings, considering the content is not significantly different from the old page, but rather just cosmetic changes.