The following is pretty much all I know about SEO. At least it's all that I am prepared to explain (I have to keep something back so that I can earn a living and pay the bills!)
None of the following is what is called Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is the trickery that some sites (and web designers), use to get their sites high up in the rankings.
The tips are in no particular order - they are all just as important as each other. It is the combination of all of them that really makes a difference.
Get involved in social media. Everytime you talk about something on a Forum, everytime you mention what you are up to now on Facebook - let people know the address of your website.
Not only is this a direct advertisment for your site, the big search engines (like Google), will see these mentions of your site as inbound links - that raises that authority of your site with the search engines.
We can't do this for you - We can mention your new website on our blog www.brittanywebsites.blogspot.com - we can include you in our portfolio but.... a lot of the Social Media Promotion will have to come down to you. Don't worry though, you'll see the benefits.
We will include some Social Bookmarking buttons on your site but, our best advice is... get involved in some Internet Forums and learn about www.stumbleupon.com
I used to be bad at this - then I learnt my lesson!
The images I used on my website used to be called images01.jpg or similar.
Now, the images are called beautiful_gite-in_southern_brittany02.jpg, or similar.
Google understand this; all Google understands from image01.jpg is that it is an image file - well, it knew that anyway!
My experience shows that this is one of the most important improvements you can make on an image heavy site!
Don't worry - we will do this for you! We will rename all images used on your new site so that Google (and the other search engines), can index those images as well as the text on your site.
Furthermore, everytime you display an image on a website, you may include an ALT attribute and TITLE attribute for that image. Of course, at www.BrittanyWebsites.com, we will ensure that those tags use a search engine friendly phrase such as... Beautiful Gites in Southern Brittany - Your perfect holiday awaits in Morbihan, Brittany, France. - that only goes to help the search engines index you and ensure that your site ranks higher in a potential client's search results.
Title tags matter. It's what the user first sees on Google results
Your title tags must contain your keywords. This way, the keyword will be included as link on the search engine index. Give a different title to each page, use keywords related to the page. Page Title and Meta Description gets displayed in the Search Engine results. Make it something interesting that people will want to click. Don't fill it up with keywords. Just make a quick message that entices the user to click. This way when you attain higher rankings, you'll get a better click-through rate !
Don't worry about this. www.BrittanyWebsites.com will do all this for you - it's all part of the service.
At www.BrittanyWebsites.com we always use the meta description tag. It is often shown to web users when they search on Google.
Above all, quality content counts.
It is vital that you know what information you want to get to your audience and that you have a wide knowledge regarding the topic. This way, you will be able to provide your readers with not just good, but great content. You have already gotten people to click on your site, you have to make certain that they like what they see and they learn something from what you have provided for them so that they will keep on checking your site out.
Aside from the content being great, you should also make sure that your content is unique. Do not ever copy from any sites that are related to the topic you are tackling. You don't want to be accused of plagiarism. And if that will be the case, you won't be able to develop followers who will keep on coming back to your site.
Search engines (through their spiders) are indexing text content from your pages. So the first thing you have to do, is make sure you have plenty of text, related to the subject of your web site. The context of the words is also very important, so don't just list hundreds of keywords. Write correct sentences, repeating several times the words you want to focus on. Try to use all the synonyms you know.
Pages with only a couple of sentences won't rank higher. Search Enginess need 'content' to index. Web pages with more information tend to rank better in Search Engines; but only up to a point. It's best to keep the word count on your pages between 200 and 800 words. Build as much text as you can keeping it unique and tasteful.
What do people search for? Think about what people are going to type to find your site. You must find out the keywords that people use in order to get to sites like yours. There are software and there also free sites that you can use to find more about this. You need to integrate the keywords on your content, but do not get too eager in using these because your site may appear spammy if you proceed. Each page of your website must utilize a specific keyword. Do not use only one for your entire site because you are limiting your chances and possibilities to rank even higher and be seen by more people.
You may want to concentrate on popular keywords, but do not opt for those that are extremely popular, especially if you are still new and you are only groping your way with regards to your SEO strategies. The less popular keywords will give your site more page views. Leave the more popular keywords to those who have already established their online presence and are very competitive with their marketing strategies.
Don't worry, www.BrittanyWebsites.com will do all this for you.
Use the keywords related to that page for any link text. Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself (anchor text) - "click here" is meaningless. But "Website Design in Brittany" corresponds exactly to your subject, and this specific page, even independantly of its content, will be considered as an interesting page for "Website Design in Brittany" by the search engines.
For example, the following link has a meaningful title (rather than "click here") and, when the mouse is placed over the link, explanatory text is displayed... www.BrittanyWebsites.com
This all goes to help getting your site indexed by Google and the other search engines.
Don't worry, www.BrittanyWebsites.com will do all this for you.
Try to get links from sites that are seen as authority in the industry that they belong to.
Make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links on your pages. If you have too many outbound links, search engines will devaluate the importance of your page, considering it's just making a gateway to other sites, without having a good value for the surfer.
Spend time to contact other website owners who have sites about the same subject as yours and exchange text links. Again, use the keywords that you target in the anchor text of those links. Don't always use the same keywords but sometimes, use synonyms and variations. Only consider a link exchange with sites treating the same subject. Try to get at least 40 backlinks on 40 different websites.
Get backlinks from other sites - You need as many links as possible to link back to your site because it will help you build pagerank and get your site to rank higher in search engines.
Divide your post into little segments by incorporating headings within the posts. It helps divide the writing up into bite size pieces and aids immensily in the post's online readability. Take it a step further and use your blog's formatting feature to turn these heading words into a "heading 1," "heading 2," or "heading 3." Headings within a post stand out when those little Google SEO crawlers peruse your latest post.
Don't worry, www.BrittanyWebsites.com will do all this for you.
Build a sitemap, and search engines will follow. Even if it's just a plain list of links to all the individual unique pages of your website on a page named sitemap.html, it's good enough. Creating a sitemap according to sitemaps protocol and submitting it via the webmaster tools section of each of the popular search engine is even better.
Don't worry, www.BrittanyWebsites.com will do all this for you.