Seattle Web Design 
SEO Tips and Tricks #1
Improve your website rankings on Search Engines
If you are a website owner or a website administrator, it is time to improve your website rankings on the famous internet search engines. In this tutorial I am going to talk about SEO. If you do not know anything about it, do not worry! I am here to teach you how to do it.
What is SEO?
It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it means you should do series of works to improve a website in order to increase the number of website visitors your website receives from search engines like Google, Being, Yahoo, and etc.
Why does my website need SEO?
Your website needs SEO because you need more visitors on your website. The basic way people visit your website is search engines. Your website's visitors do not know anything about your website. They just know what they need. This is a start point for them to find some keywords and search their needs on search engines, AND exactly those keywords are your answers for getting more visitors.
Is your website recognized by search engines?
You should check your website to see how is your website doing on particular famous search engines. For example Google some related keywords about your website and check the result page. If your website does not show up on the first three search result pages, you seriously need to work on your website.
Always remember to check robot meta link on the header of your website. No follow tells search engines to not follow your website and not index it.
<meta name=”robots” content”noindex, nofollow”/>
Change it to
<meta name=”robots” content”index, follow”/>
How do SEO?
People are entering their keywords in search engine boxes. Search engines crawl websites to index individual pages inside every website. They collect search directories from different websites. It means Search engines look at your website to find out what they are all bout. This is a magic time for you to introduce your website and tell them what you need about your business and your services. This teaches us SEO is a collection of actions to help search engines find your website ( your business) faster and easier.
Start optimizaing your website
The first thing you should do is finding a website name (Domain name or URL address) which most describe your business. Try to find a complex name which includes your business services or goods’ keywords in the shortest format. If you already got it and your website’s name is unrelated to what you are doing, put your pages’ filename and path with meaningful keywords. For example if you are a carpenter and your page is about different types of woods, then call your page “types-of-woods”. Your URL address for this page would be "http://www.domainname.com/types-of-woods".
Website Title
Each website has title.. Search engines check web titles because they need to recognize types of websites. They need to know what kind of information can be found on a website and this is one of the first things they can do. Put a short really nice sentence including your business keywords in it. For example for a typical website you can choose
<title> Name of your business – Keywords, locations, owner </title>
Note: 70 characters is a good general guideline for title length.
Good heading is treasure
Headings are so important for your website SEO. Use <h1> to <h6> in your website's content. Use <h1> for the main heading (title) and use the rest of headings lower on your website pages.
Alternative description for images
Always use <alt> tags for your website’s images. they are descriptions for them. All you should do is using alt=”” property inside img tags.
<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”describe your image”/>
Use keywords
Try to use keywords among your web contents. Bold some of them by using <strong> tag. Always remember you can repeat your keywords along a text on your site. If you are using WordPress, always add tags for your posts and pages.
Links on website
Most search engines read anchor tags to find out what information each link points to, so this is important to use <a> tags and address different parts of your website.
Note: Use keywords for your links as much as possible. Using “click here” or “download here” does not help your website. Use actual key words instead of using “click here” or “download here”.
Note: Try to put your web link (URL) on trusted websites like .gov , .edu sites or newspapers and magazine’s websites.
Inbound and Outbound links:
Inbound links are more important than outbound link. Search engines give more credits for them. More links to your website shows that it has valuable information. Ask your friends and put your web link on their website. Avoid putting your web link on useless and spam maker websites.
Website Description Tag
Although description tags or website Meta data on your header of your website is no longer used for ranking by Google search engine, you still need to use it because the tag will often appear in other search engines pages. Use suitable keywords and put it on the header of your website.
<Meta name-“description” content=”describe your website here by using good keywords”>
Note: Optimal length for search engines is roughly 155 characters
Although above points were good SEO points to start, there are lots of other works to do on your website. In part 2 of this tutorial I will talk about site map and robot file. Also I will talk about Google and Being web masters.