Seven great tips for better SEO

Below you'll find a few search engine optimisation tips and tricks that will help you improve your natural search results without any investment in advertising.

1. Produce unique content

Keep producing fresh articles for your Web site to ensure your site keeps flying high on Google search results. Producing fresh content creates unique material that Google values and indexes and uses keywords relevant to your business that may appear in the Search Engine Results Pages. Use a standard blogging or content management system to make it as easy as possible to publish the articles.

2. Use title tags on every page

Search engines place great deal of value on the title tags of Web pages. For that reason, you need to ensure that you use a unique title tag for each page, target one SEO keyword per page, avoid non-alphabetic characters, and stick to the 60-character limit.

3. Use headers

You need to guide Google in terms of what's important on your page. Headers are an excellent way to indicate importance. You can use H1 and H2 headers by using the following standard HTML notation: [<]chevronH1chevron[>] [<]chevron/H1chevron[>] or [<]chevronH2chevron[>] [<]chevron/H2chevron[>].

4. Get some link love

Google uses links as a way to determine the importance of a website. It considers the following factors:

• The PageRank of the website that links to your website;
  
• The number of links to your website;
  
• The authority of the website linking to your website.

You can get more links by creating content people will want to link to, asking your clients or suppliers to link to your website and offering your articles for free syndication.

5. Use a co.za domain if your market is in South Africa

If you want people from South Africa to find your website, you should host it locally and use a co.za domain.

6. Don't use Flash

Flash is invisible to Google. If you use it, you will have a great-looking website, but no visitors. Instead, use normal HTML, CSS, .NET or PHP. You've probably read somewhere that Google can index flash text; to a degree it is true, but take note that you are putting yourself at a great disadvantage if you use this technology for navigation and important information.

7. Monitor your traffic and ranking

You can't manage what you don't measure. Keep your eye on your traffic levels and your rankings in Google. Doing so will help you manage your SEO and increase your traffic.

In closing...There are three things that really matter to Google and other search engines: the relevancy of your content, the number of links to your Web site, and the freshness of your content. Focus on them in your SEO efforts and you'll reap the rewards of better search results.