This is the continuation of our article on Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Techniques. Read Part One of Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Techniques here.

#4. Anchor Text. What is anchor text? It’s the underlined part of a link to your site. If you post an article about your product and create a link that says “Visit my website, click here.”, the words “click here” tell Google absolutely nothing about what is on your site. The underlined part of the text should say something about your content. Try “For the best movie reviews, visit my web site.” Now Google knows what’s at the web site. Use your keywords in the anchor text and it will help Google rank you better with those keywords.

#5. Links. Links are an integral part of the web and they can also serve to guide the search engines through your site’s content, leading them to the most important pages. If all of your site’s pages have a link back to the home page, it helps Google determine that the home page is important, no what it’s name is. Even if it’s not the first page your users come to. There are ways to tell the search engines not to follow a link to reduce the importance of other pages, such as a terms of service or policies page that you should also have a lot of links to, but does not really add to your site’s content or keyword strategy.

#6. Relevant Content. More content isn’t necessarily a good thing. It doesn’t hurt, but if you’re going to take the time to create content then follow your keyword strategy. If your site for used cars has an article about cleaning products, it may not be contributing much to your content. Focus your article on your keywords and tie in your keyword phrases. Write your article on cleaning products to make your used car look like new. The more pages on your site that use your keywords, the better.

#7. Meaningful file names and paths. The URL for your site’s content tells Google a lot about what is on the individual pages. A long and complicated path to your site’s content won’t tell users anything about what’s on the page. When someone searches for something, keywords found in the path are shown in bold. So when someone searches for “natural shampoo” and your URL for this product is mydomain.com/store/products?id=321 the searcher is unimpressed. If your URL for this is allnaturalproducts.com/shampoo/mybrand then the searcher sees their search words in the domain name and URL. They are more likely to think that you are selling exactly what they are looking for.

To be continued… Read Part Three of Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Techniques.