Best SEO Practices

Best SEO or search engine optimization is a very hot topic among webmasters these days. Many of you want to know how to get your website into the first page of the search engines?  or How do you increase your Google page rank?
There are companies dedicated to doing SEO but they charge a hefty price, and unfortunately many of us cannot afford to pay this.
However, there are many simple steps you can follow when building your website to increase your chances of being ranked on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Here is a list of Best SEO Practices to consider:

(1) Title Tag
At the start of a website source code you would normally find meta-tags, the most common are title, description, and keyword tags. Of these the most important is the title tag it plays a large role in the indexing of your websites. It is the first thing that the search engines will look at when determining what the particular page is about, it’s also the first thing that your visitors will see.

(2) Meta-Tags
In terms of Best SEO the two primary tags are – the description and keyword tag, these are not debatable as far as ranking goes, but a good description can lead to more clicks to your website, and relevant keywords can determine the amount of competition you have.

(3) Good use of Heading Tags
This is important when writing your posts, heading tags help users and search engines alike where the key points of your posts are.
Your main title must use the <h1> tag, this tells them what your page is about. Other tags such as <h2> and <h3> also help to break down the content of your page, and give priority to certain sections.

(4) Alt Attributes on images
Placing good on your images such as relevant keywords or text will be added to your source code and will help the search engines with the correct indexing of your page.
In addition if for some reason the image does not load properly the Alt Attribute text will inform the user on what the image is about.

(5) XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps are used by the search engines in order to index through your site.
This list of ALL pages / posts / etc. of your site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what you feel the most important pages of your sites are. All elements that help the search engines properly find and link to all content of your site.

(6) Good content
Having good or relevant content is probably one of the most important factors when it comes to best seo and also determines where you will be placed within the search engine rankings. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc — but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt.
It is important for the content of your page to make sense, you must use natural writing as much as possible, it is important that your article makes sense not only to the reader but also to the search engine.

(7) Link Building
Now this is not probably the most important factor of a successful website. You can have the best site layout with targeted keywords and every page optimized, I put up a good back linking strategy you will get nowhere. You need to drive visitors to your site, and if you are planning to use organic search results you have to be on the first page of the search engines. It is well known that Google ranks websites according to the quality and quantity of links pointing to that site, if you have many links it basically tells Google that your site is important because other people are linking to it. But more important than quantity is the quality of the links you getting, you need to steer clear of link farms and other spammy attempts at link building if you want to attain the best SEO for your website.

If you follow these guidelines you will have a much better chance of getting into the top search results, the Internet has become very competitive with millions of websites being added every week. Gone are the days of slapping together a website, adding a few keywords with some good content and wait as your website climbs up the rankings. It has now become hardwork and dedication if you are serious about the best seo possible for your site.