5 Highly Effective Website SEO Techniques

When implementing various website SEO techniques, most people focus more on the technical aspects of their sites to gain a higher search engine ranking. Getting hung up on meta tags and whether or not your site has too many or not enough keywords in it is old school.

Search engines are more concerned with how user friendly and 'content relevant' your sites are for visitors. The horns and whistles such as flashing signs and dancing figures are nice but if the site isn't easy to navigate or the content is inconsistent your rankings will suffer. Let's look at 5 easy steps to building a more 'humanized' website that will increase your search engine ranking.

1. Simplify the site structure

Insure the website format is easy to understand and use for visitors. Making the search for information on the site as simple and direct as possible will not only enhance user friendliness but also win more favorable search engine rankings as a result.

2. Maintain Quality Content

Keep your content relevant to your sites theme. Inconsistency will only confuse visitors and they will leave. If this cardinal rule is not followed you'll not only lose your visitors but you'll also fall out of favor with the search engines resulting in a poor ranking. Your content should be useful and interesting to the reader but don't overlook the value of entertaining them as well using humor or even sarcasm, when appropriate. It's important to remember we built these sites for humans and NOT search engines.

3. Rank for keyword phrases

When choosing the keywords that will help identify what your site is about try to incorporate these words into phrases. For example if your site deals with real estate instead of using the word 'houses' as a keyword, instead try using it in a phrase such as 'houses for sale' or 'houses for sale in Boston'. These are 'long tail keywords' and you'll find not only that there's less competition for them but that the traffic you receive from folks searching these keyword phrases are more highly targeted.

4. Write articles

Publishing articles you've written related to the topic of your website is not only a fabulous way of advertising but you'll also gain links from the major article directories to your site. Since many article directories have high rankings to begin with, links from their site to yours will help boost your websites rank with the search engines.

5. Blog

Start a blog that links to your website. Search engines favor blogs in their rankings due primarily to the fact that a blogs content is usually updated more frequently than a websites.

In summation website SEO techniques should focus more on simply creating a user friendly site that's easy to navigate and contains useful and maybe even entertaining content for the readers. Do this and high rankings will follow.