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Guest post by Michael Martine, who does SEO work as well as all forms of site and blog consulting. Michael has been designing sites and blogs and advising people since 2000. SEO is just one of the topics he covers at Better Blogging with Michael Martine.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is often seen as a bit of an occult art. In many ways, it is more art than science. There are some SEO techniques that have a learning curve and require technical acumen to implement, but to begin with you can pay attention to these five important areas for simple but effective SEO.

1. Page file names
   It has been shown that the site URL doesn’t matter as much for SEO as page file names. A page called mens-watches.html is more likely to be in a search result for a search using the keywords “mens watches” than a page with the file name womens-swimwear.html. Google prefers word separators such as hyphens “-” or underscores “_” to no separators at all. Having said that, site URLs do matter: luxury-watches-now.com/mens-watches.html would be better than anythinggoes.com/mens-watches.html. Create page file names that are important keywords and keyword phrases.
   
2. Site subdomains and folder names
   If your site is, say, myaffiliatesalessystem.com, a subdomain would be something like adsensetips.myaffiliatesalessystem.com. Google really, really likes subdomains. It uses them in many of its own services such as Blogger and Google Pages. Site directories or folders can also be important in this regard, such as: myaffiliatesalessystem.com/adsensetips. The folder adsensetips has its own index.html page in it to act as a homepage for that folder. Note that these folders don’t have to be real folders on the web server. If you’re using WordPress, you never see a page extension appear in the browser’s address bar. All you see are virtual folders separated by slashes. WordPress sites have pretty good SEO “out of the box” (although it can and should be improved), and this is partly why. Create subdomains and folder names that are keywords and keyword phrases. Subdomains may be beyond the reach of an absolute beginner, but folders are easy to create when designing the structure of a website. If you’re using a blogging platform such as WordPress, your categories act like high-level folders.
   
3. Title tags
   A web page’s title appears in the title bar (or tab) of a web browser. Google places a tremendous amount of trust in the content of title tags and uses them in SERPs (search engine results pages). If you want to see how many ignorant people there are when it comes even the most basic user needs being met–let alone good SEO–then do a Google search for the phrase “intitle:untitled document”. Create title tags that contain keywords and keyword phrases, and eliminate redundancy in your title tags, such as the name of the site on pages after the home page. Or, at the very least, put the name of the site after the keyword-rich page name.
4. General page content
   The best advice you can follow for this is to create compelling content that people will want to consume, bookmark, share, and–most importantly of all–that causes them to convert. That is absolutely the most important thing you can do, period. To help it out a little bit, though, do be conscious of using several appropriate keywords in your text and variations of them. Don’t put text in images: it’s not crawlable by search engine spiders. Use structural markup such as headings, levels 1 and 2.
   
5. Link anchor text
   Link anchor text is the words of a hyperlink. In HTML, hyperlinks are called anchors. Creating a hyperlink by saying click here, where the words “click here” are the anchor text is not good SEO. Creating a hyperlink that uses search keywords in the anchor text is far more effective SEO. So if the link were to, oh… say home biodeisel kits, then you want the words home biodeisel kits to be the words that people click on. Larger sites or blogs, which create a lot of content over time, benefit from a lot of internal links that contain carefully considered anchor text.
   

There is certainly much more that could be done with regards to SEO, but these five areas are so important and basic that if you’re not paying attention to them, you needn’t bother with anything else. A common piece of SEO advice is to create content for humans, not search engines. But that saying doesn’t provide a detailed description of how to accomplish the goal. If you look over the five tips above, you’ll notice that every one of them helps improve the overall experience of your site’s visitors. Another angle on this is that good web design and good content is also good SEO.

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