Over the years, I have been gathering my best search engine optimization tips, and have turned them into articles and blog posts. I love sharing information about search engine optimization, and which will help you optimize your website not only for the search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, but make your website a better experience for your visitors. I’ve been writing SEO tips since 2001, and am constantly updating them–or adding to my SEO tips. That’s one reason why you might consider my monthly SEO services. SEO is always an ongoing task–it changes all the time, so you’ll need someone who knows the industry and keeps up with the SEO best practices, just like I do.
Below are links to all of my search engine optimization tips, articles, and blog posts. As I add more, I’ll keep this list updated on a regular basis. All my search engine optimization tips, all in one place.
Do you Know what your Reputation is Online? Review your Links and Find Out
It is very important that you know what your link reputation is. Many consumers are quite diligent in doing such an investigation before they buy something online. It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is or the price… if they can’t find good information from other consumers about your business they won’t buy it. There is just too much of a risk that it will be a road to disaster.
Content is very important if you want your website to be attractive to users and you want to rank high in the search engines, like Google. However, the volume of content that you have isn’t nearly as important as the overall quality of it. This is where many people make a mistake as they fail to optimize what they put on their web pages, so the miss the ideal opportunity to improve SEO efforts.
Check Your External Links
When was the last time you checked all of the external links on your web site? Who are you linking out to?
Include Keywords in URLs
Your keywords are a great tool to reach potential customers, so make them a priority. However, you should do more than just have those keywords in your tags and your text. They should also be found in your URLs.
How to Remove a Web Page from Google
This search engine optimization tip has to do with removing a page or a specific URL from the Google search engine.
Check the Whois on Your Domain Name
For this search engine optimization tip, let us talk about the Whois and the data that it contains.
Expand On Your Best Website Content
This SEO tip has to do with looking back at your web site statistics and looking at your website’s history to see which content is best. Just like a hot air balloon, you have to put more hot air into it. Acquire more content (the warmest air you can find) and add it to expand your web site’s overall number of pages.
Add a Breadcrumb Trail
For this search engine optimization tip, let’s talk about adding a breadcrumb trail to your site’s navigation. A breadcrumb trail, put simply, is a set of links on your page that lets users get back to where they came from–or go to pages that are ‘higher’ in the architecture of your site. For more information about what exactly breadcrumb trail navigation is, take a look here or here.
Check Your 404 Errors
Check your website server log files for 404 errors. Google Analytics is not enough. In fact, you will not find 404 errors by looking at Google Analytics, or even in Google Webmaster Tools.
Why Image Alt Tags are Important
For this particular search engine optimization tip, let’s review your image Alt Tags and putting keywords in your Alt Tags.
And, for a bonus, here are 5 SEO Quick Tips.
Hartzer Consulting provides monthly SEO services.
You May Also Like My SEO Articles
- 44 SEO Questions to Ask Your Search Engine Optimization Company
- Absolute Versus Relative Linking in Websites
- Balancing Paid and Organic Search Engine Listings
- Do you Know what your Reputation is Online? Review your Links and Find Out
- Domain Name Appraisal Services and Domain Name Values
- Domain Names, Developed Domains, and Expired Domains
- Domain Names, Expired Domains, Moving to a New Domain Name
- How Google Finds and Penalizes Advertorials
- How Search Engine Optimization Adds Value to a Website
- How to Create a Google Page for Your Business
- How to Diversify the Anchor Text of Links to Your Web Site
- How to Evaluate an Expired Domain Name
- How to Find Content for Your Blog
- Google Analytics Bounce Rate: How to Fix Google Analytics to Properly Calculate Bounce Rate
- How to Increase Google Plus Followers
- Domain Name Value: How to Know if You Should Renew Your Domain Name?
- How to Know When You Should Develop a Domain Name
- How to Make a QR Code for Your Web Site
- How to Make Money from Your Social Media Influence
- How To: Make Your Links Do Follow Links in Google Plus
Headings are one of the few on-page signals that still carry weight; the short version is that your heading tags should include your keywords.
There is also such a thing as too much; search engine optimization overkill describes the point at which optimization starts to look like manipulation.
If you are starting from nothing, begin with SEO strategy for beginners before anything on this page.
How to Use These SEO Tips
This page is the index for the search engine optimization tips I have published since 2001. The individual pages are kept because the fundamentals they describe still apply, and where the specifics have changed, each page now carries an update section that says what has changed and what I recommend instead. If you are starting from the beginning, read the pages in this order: title tags, the meta description tag, heading tags, linking to your real home page, anchor text and internal links, and the ten search engine ranking problems. Those six cover the issues that still account for most of what I find in technical SEO audits. The pages on content, link earning and promotion come next, because once the technical basics are correct, content and links are what move rankings.
What Has Changed Since 2001
Search engines in 2001 matched words. They now understand topics, entities and intent, which means that keyword density, meta keywords tags and exact-match repetition, which several of the older tips reference, are no longer useful and can be harmful. Links remain the strongest external signal, but the only links that count are earned ones, and the tactics for manufacturing them have been devalued or penalized. Mobile is now the version of your site that Google indexes. Page speed is measured on real users through Core Web Vitals. And since 2024, AI Overviews answer a share of searches directly, so the question is no longer only whether a page ranks but whether it is clear enough to be cited. The tips that survived all of that are the ones about writing for people, making the site easy to crawl, and measuring what happens.
A Tip That Is Not on the List
The most useful habit I can recommend is not on any of these pages: check Google Search Console once a week. The performance report shows which queries bring impressions and clicks, the page indexing report shows what Google can and cannot see, and the manual actions and security reports show whether anything is wrong. Most of the problems in these tips would be caught early by someone who looked at those three reports regularly.