8 Quick Search Engine Optimization Tips for Your Website

1. Have Unique Description/Keyword Meta Tags for Each Page

Titles may be obvious when it comes to making them unique for each page, but don't forget about the meta description and keyword tags. They can be unique for each page too you know! If you've got a dynamic website with generated content, it's even easer.

For example, if your site has forums, try putting the forum topic title as the title and meta description for that page. That way, users who happen to search for the right phrase online won't see a bland title such as "XX Forums", but will instead see a much more descriptive title and then some, as it will give them a preview of what they're about to see, which is the whole point anyways.

For all you RoR developers out there, here's what I do with every page on my site: <meta name="description" content="<% if @description == nil %>A blog on web development topics. Covering technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Javascript, AJAX, CSS and DHTML.<% else %><%= @description %><% end %>" /> Where the @description variable I specify in the controller. I do the same thing for the meta keywords too except with a @keywords variable.

2. Text, Text, Text!

Try this out: Google for 'search engine optimization' - you'll soon find that the majority of the top 10 ranked pages have an essay's worth or more of text on their front page. This stands to argue that the more words you have on your page, the better - so long as it's all relevant information. Just think about the sheer multitude of keywords and buzzwords that are in 2000 words over a meager 200 words. You'll get more organic search hits simply because you'll have more keywords and phrases than the next site. It's a no brainer.

3. Create a Sitemap Page

Make it basic, just with links. This improves your ranking, plus it helps the search bots get around on your site.

4. For Quick Search Engine Indexing - Add Your Site's Link to Popular Pages

More popular pages get crawled more often by search bots than their less popular peers. If you've got a new website, put a link to it on a popular page so the search bots will find it faster and thus index it quicker. If you don't have a web page that can help you out, post a link in the forums or comment sections of popular websites with similar content as your new site. Also, make sure to submit your sitemap.xml file as soon as your site is online to Google's webmaster tools.

5. Maintain Up-To-Date Sitemap Files

It's important that you maintain your sitemap.xml and ror.xml files. This helps search bots find every page on your site and then some. Also, add this meta tag to your home page: <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> if you want to help the search bots even more. To create your own sitemap.xml and ror.xml files, check out XML-Sitemaps.com - it's easy to use and very fast.

6. Don't Use Horizontal Image Banners

Question: How often do you click on those annoying horizontal banner ads? Yep .... Most people tend to ignore those things without evening thinking about it. A better method is to use text banners instead (banner meaning horizontal and long). Make the links and background color of the text ads fit the scheme of your site if you can. Google Adsense does a good job of allowing you to customize the colors of your ads.

It's also worth noting that I'm not talking about image ads that are shaped vertically or in block form. More often than not, they work great.

7. Target Keyword Phrases, Not Single Words

Targeting single words is too difficult and too competitive, try instead to target longer keyword phrases of two, three or even four words. Make sure that your page fits the targeted keyword phrases and try to keep the targeted phrases to only one or two. And just to clarify, by targeting I mean putting those keyword phrases in the title tag, meta tags, headers, and every now and again in the content.

8. Submit Your Site to Directories for High Rankings in MSN and Yahoo (A Caution on Google)

The big 3: Yahoo!, DMOZ, and Best of the Web - plus Business.com and JoeAnt are some good starting directories to look into. The more directories you submit your site to the better your MSN and Yahoo rankings will be. Try up to 100 directories if you can.

A word of caution however as this may hurt your site's Google ranking because Google values the content of the sites that link to your site a great deal - so if you have your site being linked to from 100 directories, it may not be a good thing - try to keep the number of directories you do submit to, in case you are worried about Google rankings, to 20ish.