SEO Singapore – SEO Tips

8 things you should be doing to make your site rank in Google

If you have ever started a business for the first time you will know that there are so many things that you can do and the list can be overwhelming. If it is your first time creating a business then it is highly likely you will do lots of things that you do not need to do or you do things in the wrong sequence. I know this all too well having created seven businesses from nothing over the last 14 years.

Getting your site ranked on the first page of Google is like starting a new business – there is so much you can do yet there a several things that you simply must do. If you do these things then you will soar ahead of your non-SEO optimised competitors.

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8 key SEO Tips

SEO tip 1

Get yourself set up with a XML sitemap

A XML site map is basically a list of all the pages on your site. It should tell you also when the page was last updated. XML means eXtensible Markup Language.

Watch this quick video to see how to set up a sitemap using XML.

Make sure you name the sitemap sitemap.xml the name is not that important but the suffix is. And then FTP it to your server and store it in the root of your web site. Eg http://www.seo-magic-webs.com/sitemap.xml

You should add a robots.txt file to your site as well. This is a text file that is located again in the root of your website and it tells robots where to find your sitemap file. See this example on our site http://www.seo-magic-webs.com/robots.txt

Watch this You Tube video now to show you how to set up a XML sitemap so you can rank on Google

SEO tip 2

Set up a Google Webmaster tools account

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Google webmaster tools are very important for your site SEO ranking. Without using the Webmaster tools you are working blind sometimes about the issues Google see with your site. When you create an account and anchor your site to the account Google will give you a lot of information that will benefit you.

You will need a Google account so if you have a Gmail a/c you can use this or set up a new account.

Watch this You Tube video now to show you how to set up a Webmaster tools account in Google so you can rank on Google

You should also set up Yahoo Site Explorer as well. This is similar to Google Webmaster tools. You should lodge your sitemap with them so Yahoo wakes up to learning about your site as well as Google. You will need a Yahoo account to set this up so create an account first.

SEO tip 3

Add a Word Press Blog

Adding a blog allows your site to receive regular content which will mean your site will rank better on Google and Yahoo. Notice we say Word Press blog. Word Press is the best SEO blog you can get. You must have the blog located on your site. If it is off your site (ie on WordPress.com) then it has no SEO value to your site.

Make sure that you load your blog as a sub folder and not as a sub web. This is good www.seo-magic-webs.com/blog this is not blog.seo-magic-webs.com. Sub webs are often seen as separate sites by Google and other search engines. Use a sub-folder to ensure the blog : site connection is strong.

Pick up the free blog software from www.wordpress.org.

SEO tip 4

Fix major W3C HTML errors on your site

Modern HTML coding has changed so fast most web developers have not kept pace. Because of this most websites have coding errors. Having a few coding errors is not a big deal. There are very few W3C compliant sites around.

W3C is the organisation that sets the HTML coding standards for web pages.

To test your pages and rank high on Google use this link http://validator.w3.org

SEO tip 5

Fix Canonical errors on your site

Web developers do not usually know about this issue. It is a major stumbling block to stop you ranking on Google. We usually find that sites that do not rank once they have their canonical issues fixed they rank very well.

Watch this You Tube video to learn more on how to get on Google fast.

When we optimise your site using our SEO.SIMPLE. service we fix all these when you choose the site optimisation package.

SEO tip 6

Make sure you run on a fast server

Server response time now is very important to Google. It announced that it added it as part of its search algorithm early 2010.

At first thought you may wonder why server response time is part of your SEO ranking but if you think like Google then it is obvious. Server speed is part of the user experience. Why should Google serve up a site as being one of the top sites for the selected keyword when it takes a minute to load a page.

As well as ensuring your server is fast then it is also important to ensure your site is always up. If you want to lose your ranking fast then have Google visit your site when it is down and if it experiences this a few time then it will drop your ranking very fast. We have this issue with a client who is not ranking very well. Their server runs like a dog but our client has not had the chance to relocate the site yet to a better server.

If you want to learn what Google thinks of your server speed then watch the video above on the Webmaster tools and you will see a bit about server response times.

SEO tip 7

Add Google Analytics to your site for better SEO monitoring

Google analytics will not help you increase your SEO directly but indirectly. If you are not measuring your SEO results then how can you improve them. Plug Google Analytics into every page of your site so that you have full reporting available using the latest state-of-art tool. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics to add your site. You will need a Google account to set up Analytics. You can you use Gmail account.

Watch this You Tube video to learn how to set up Google Analytics.

SEO tip 8

Fully optimise your website

Having a fully SEO optimised site will allow you site to rise to the top so much better. There are three components to ranking high, site content, back links and SEO optimisation of your site.

Site optimisation includes some of the tips above especially sitemaps. There are also HTML sitemaps and we recommend adding them as well. The tool we shared about above that generates XML sitemaps will also generate HTML sitemaps. XML is a must, HTML is added extra.

When you SEO optimise a site you must ensure the following at a minimum:

• Each and every page has a DIFFERENT page title. We are talking about the HTML page title <title>this is the title</title> and not the content title.
• Each page uses a different META description tag that is 154 characters or less. If more it will be truncated by Google and may not be used. If they are not unique Google tends not to use them.
• Make sure your page titles only use keywords that you want to rank for as much as possible
• Use H1 and H2 tags on your page and have keywords in your titles. If your style sheet does not use H1 and H2 get your designer to change
• Make sure each image has a description in the ALT text (an HTML properly for the image tag)
• Make sure you have a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml file
• Fix all canonical issues

There is a lot your can do in addition to what is listed above. If you do what is listed above you will stand out from 95% of all other websites.

And remember at the end of the day – adding more and more content to your site is the way to go. That is why our SEO.SIMPLE. service is perfect because it does all this for you for a modest investment amount.

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