5 Free SEO Website Design Tricks to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Do you have to pay big money to search engine optimization (SEO) consultants to get your site ranked in the search engines? 

NO!  Here are 5 of my favorite no-cost web site design tricks that can help your web site attract more customers for FREE.

Note – none of these free SEO techniques require spending any money with SEO consultants!

1. Upgrade Your Domain Name – Search engines rank sites based on their relevance to the searcher’s queries. If your web site’s domain name does not include your most important keywords, it may be time to upgrade. Change your domain name to one that includes key search terms and you’ll see a rise in SEO rankings for those terms. (This only applies to new sites or sites without much established SEO history, so be careful.)

2. Focus Your Keywords and Use them in Titles - Use free keyword tools like Google’s Traffic Estimator to determine the most popular words and phrases that customers use to search for your key products. Pick a specific version of that keyword phrase to use repeatedly in the titles of your blog posts and pages, especially on the product detail pages.

Being specific and focused in this keyword deployment will help drive your site’s search engine rankings up for that key phrase more effectively than if you try to use multiple versions and synonyms of your keywords. So use the words “hot dog” as much as you can in the titles and on the pages that sell your hot dog products.  And don’t confuse the search engines (and human customers) by also including on that page mentions of other your products like bratwursts, sausages, hamburgers, too.

3. Ditch Your Old Slogan – Replace your “corporate speak” slogan from the 1990s with a modern, keyword-driven one instead. No one knows what “Reaching for Excellence” means anyway. And they certainly aren’t searching on that phrase when looking for your web site that sells hot dogs.

Try something specific that both humans and search engines will appreciate more like “The Most Award-winning and Tasty Hot Dogs in Omaha”. Post that keyword-rich phrase in text (not graphics) at the top of your web site pages and it will help boost your SEO.

4. Use Keywords in File Names – Both web designers and developers like things “efficient” and “clean.” This often means that designers name their images and developers name their web pages with short, secret code-like names.

Instead, you want images of your hot dogs titled with names like “tastyhotdog.jpg”. Similarly, your web site’s pages should have names like “tasty-hot-dogs-and-catering.html” instead of “h4rrjxb.html”. The repeated use of keywords in both of these not so obvious types of file names will provide Google, Bing, and Yahoo additional clues about how to categorize your web site and where to rank it higher.

5. Anchor Text - When other sites link back to yours, ask them to include your keywords in the text that they link. For example, a link to your site XYZ.com is good, but much better from a search engine’s point of view is a link that says “XYZ.com Hot Dogs” if you are a hot dog merchant.

In all these cases the more keywords your site has on the page, the higher the search engines will rank your site for those keywords. Pick your keywords wisely and you can attract tons of free traffic from search engine users searching for info on those topics.

 What tips are working best for your web site?

What did I miss?

[For more free SEO strategies, check out the "SEO" category on my blog at ScottFox.com here.  And, if you would like my help in improving your web site, learn about my personalized site design review service here.]

Comments

[paul]

Scott, all good advice thanks!

On this topic, another easy to do but important tip is to mention these same keywords when linking between pages of the site itself. (for example, from a lower level page, link back to "homepage keyword" rather than simply linking back to homepage).

This will help reinforce what the site's all about to the search engines.

Here's my example:
http://www.musthavemotorcycles.com

[Scott Fox, Author of e-Riches 2.0]

Good point, Paul.
More keywords in the anchor text means more SEO points from the search engines.
Thanks for commenting.

[Susan White]

Scott,

Thanks for these tips. It took me awhile to learn about anchor text, but that has really helped us.

[Scott Fox, Author of e-Riches 2.0]

Hi Susan - Great!
It's hard to believe but little steps like that add up to make a really big difference for SEO.
Thanks for commenting to let me know I'm on the right track to help you.

[Amit Kumar]

Thank you very well advise for best seo trick.

[Sarkari Naukri]

Its sound good i will try this technique in my blog thanks for sharing this ultimate tricks and i wish it will work for me.

[relly]

I recently started my blog and I was thinking of ways on how to improve my layout and raise my PR. I didn't know much until I dropped by your website and read your simple tips above. Now, I'm starting to use anchor texts on my content and edit my slogans. Thanks for sharing, it was such a great help!