Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is very important for any website owner, but especially important for Home-Based Business Owners because there are so many other home based business work from home entrepreneurs out there vying for rank and attention. Here are some basic SEO rules that will help put you ahead of the pack.
- Check your HTML code. Search engines don’t like messy HTML code. Use an HTML code validator to make sure that yours is clean. Many HTML editors and WYSIWYG editors have a validator included. If not, you can find many free validators on the Internet. Make sure that you validate the code, and fix any problems.
- Write content for people first, and search engines second. Keywords are important, and should be used between one and three percent of the time on a page, but if the keywords don’t make sense in a sentence, it is a wasted effort. Search engines are quickly learning how to read, and they don’t like improper grammar.
- Use the bold tag wisely. Make three or four of your keywords on the page bold, but don’t make them all bold. Furthermore, learn how to use the H1 tags. Search engines give more weight to words that are bolded – but again, you don’t want to look spammy while doing this.
- You need inbound links. You need inbound links from authority sites that have content relevant to your own content. The good news is that you don’t need hundreds of such links. Try to get at least ten, and then go from there. Search engines are also very suspicious of sites that generate tons of inbound links in a short period of time.
- Internal linking is also important. Link from your pages to other pages on your site, using text links. Search engines really like this – but don’t overdo it.
- Learn to use the ‘alt’ tags. These tags are available for all links and graphics. Don’t repeat your keywords over and over again in the alt tags. Instead, write an actual sentence that includes your main keyword or keyword phrase.
- Meta tags are not dead! So many people don’t realize this. Use meta tags, and make sure that the title, description, and keywords that you use in the meta tags are highly relevant to the content on the page that the meta tag is used.
