Top 5 SEO Tips

Here’s some real SEO Tips you can actually use to increase your sites search engine rankings in Google.

No wishy washy, get backlinks (with no pointers how to achieve this) or obvious tips like build good content (what the heck is good content!).

SEO Tips You Can Trust

These are all SEO facts NOT SEO myths.

SEO Tip 1 Anchor Text of Nofollow Links

The anchor text of nofollow links count towards the Google ranking of the page the nofollow link is ON (this was an unexpected result when I tested this). However, as expected it does NOT count towards the page you are linking to and does not use PR/link benefit.

SEO Tip Usage – You can link to relevant external sites and add the nofollow to the link and gain on page SEO benefit from the anchor text used without wasting link benefit/PR to the site your linking to.

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – I’ve not seen a page/site that uses nofollow excessively receive a penalty, but even so it’s something to take into account. It’s not a clean white SEO tip, it’s a little grey.

SEO Tip 2 Title Attribute and Alt Attribute Text

The title attribute (that’s title=”keywords here” normally associated with text links) does NOT count towards a pages rankings, the alt attribute text (that’s (alt=”keywords here” normally associated with images/image links) does count.

SEO Tip Usage – Makes no difference what you put in the title attribute, but try to be keyword rich in your alt attributes, meaning if a page is about SEO Tips try to use SEO Tips as alt text.

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – Like any on page SEO technique, don’t go over the top with stuffing your alt attribute text with long keyword lists. Be descriptive about your images whilst covering your pages SERPs and you’ll be fine.

SEO Tip 3 Google Sandbox

The Google sandbox is not avoided by using an aged PR0 domain name. The sandbox is the effect caused by a lack of aged links and so adding links and maintaining them until aged (minimum 9 months old) is the way out of the “sandbox” (how long you are in the sandbox depends how good and how old your links are).

SEO Tip Usage – Basically it’s add enough links and wait for them to count fully. Higher the PR a link is an longer it’s been live the better, if the anchor text is relevant as well, that’s icing on the cake.

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – With link building growth is slow at first, don’t be tempted to cut corners (link spamming for example) because it’s moving to slow for you. I tested adding 25,000 links to a new site almost over night, the home page hit PR7 first PR update, but it NEVER received any decent Google rankings (was penalized for sure). Be patient, remember the links you add today will not mature until 9+ long months from now (give them a year to be sure).

SEO Tip 4 Anchor Text

Anchor text of a spiderable link is not only important to the page you are linking to, but also to the page you are linking FROM.

SEO Tip Usage – From an SEO perspective anchor text is considered more important than standard body text so use relevant (that means relevant to the SERPs you want for a page) anchor text a LOT.

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – If you own multiple domains be careful with how you interlink them, it’s very easy (talking from personal experience here) to link way too many times from one site to another. Try to avoid site wide links, not completely (one is OK to a domain), but don’t make the mistake of adding multiple links to the same domain in a site wide fashion.

SEO Tip 5 Title Element and Meta Tags

The contents of the title element (that’s the title a lot of webmasters call a title tag, it’s not a tag/attribute, it’s an element) is damn important, more important than any other on page factor so don’t waste it’s SEO value. Conversely the meta tags DO NOT count towards a pages rankings in Google, though the description meta tag can be used for the SERPs description so add something to increase CTR from a Google search.

SEO Tip Usage – Spend a lot of time on your pages title, (ideally targeting one main SERP per page) and a small amount of time on your meta description (think sales copy, sell your page) and forget about your meta keywords (I copy the title elements contents and forget about it).

SEO Tip Blackhat Warning – It’s difficult to do anything blackhat with the title element and meta tags. That said if you make really spammy parts to your pages and a manual Google reviewer sees it, it’s not going to look good. There’s no benefit in spamming your meta tags, so don’t waste your time trying. You could make a really long title element, (Google counts a lot of characters, far more than it shows on a SERP) but every word you add to your title shares the benefit, add 100 words and each receives just 1/100th of the titles benefit!! So don’t spread this valuable SEO real estate too thin.

ALL the above SEO tips have been thoroughly tested and confirmed by myself over the last 5+ years through countless SEO tests and observations of real world SEO examples.

Author: David Law (SEO Consultant)