Google SEO tips for newbies

People have been asking me for some Google SEO tips and hence I was thinking about writing this article for a long time. I sat down; jotted all the vital points and have finally completed it. On-page SEO is now really important after Google Panda update. Old SEO techniques that were used years ago might not be useful now. In fact, they might be harmful for your blogs. Here I am jotting down my two bits –

Domain age – Google prefers Websites that are relatively older and hence I would recommend you to buy older domains for your new projects. Or if you are buying a new one, keep it for at least five years.

Upgrade the blog at regular intervals – It is important that your blog is updated regularly. Google likes sites which are up-to-date. I make sure that all my online properties are updated at least once a week and my blog posts are regularly updated too.

Write for visitors – It is recommended that you publish articles which provide information not for Google but to the visitors. I am not saying that you should ignore the concept of keyword density but your visitors should enjoy reading the article. A high keyword density doesn’t guarantee you a higher ran. Also, you should use LSI keywords.

Press release submission – This is another great way to get powerful backlinks and traffic. But your press releases should be powerful. A press release that is written well will attract a lot of publishers and this will give you a lot of links in turn.

Flash – Flash might look very attractive to you but it is useless from Google’s point of view because Flash can’t be read by Google.

Meta tags – Using meta tags can be effective in SEO. They aren’t so important now but I still use them anyways.
Heading tab – Use heading tags like H1, H2, and H3; they are useful provided you use it in the right way. Heading tags should follow up each other and I don’t use 2 H1 tags. Also, you should put the targeted keyword in heading tags.

Setting sitemaps – Sitemaps are important. For my WordPress blogs, I don’t just set up simple sitemap but also video and image sitemap.  All these sitemaps are then submitted to main search engines. This is really important and shouldn’t be ignored.

Mark out the keywords – Highlight your keyword by making it bold, underlined, and italicized in all your posts.

External links – The external links should be built for almost all the pages of your site and not just for the home page. This will show Google that the post has useful stuff to offer.

Distribution of articles – submitting articles to the article directories are effective but aren’t as powerful as they used to be some time ago. These days, I first publish my articles and then submit them to many article directories. This can be done by some kinda article submitter software too.

Images – You should use images as illustrate your article and it is also good from the SEO point of view. The image should contain a title and description along with the keyword.