1. Page Title

Your page title is the single most important SEO factor. The title tag defines the title of the page which is displayed in the browser toolbar and shows on a search engine’s results page. Google displays 65-70 characters of a page title in their SERPs. The page title should be relevant to the content of the page and should contain a few keywords. ‘Party Caricatures in Minneapolis, Minnesota’ is a much better title than ‘Caricature Gig Info’. You’re optimizing your page for search engines, so it’s important to think about what people might be searching for and do your research.

An example of a bad title
<title>Caricature Gig Info</title>

Here is an example of a much better title:
<title>Party Caricatures in Minneapolis & St. Paul, Minnesota</title>

2. Meta Tags

The meta description is the short excerpt that shows up below a link on the SERPs. While this description is not a direct factor in SEO, it may encourage people to click through who want some additional information beyond just the page title. Each page should have a unique meta description related to the content on that page. Most modern search engines do not factor in meta keywords, so you can ignore this tag.

3. Backlinks

Building a network of quality backlinks to a website tells a search engine that a web page has meaningful, helpful content. This is a big indicator of the popularity of a website, and is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a page. It is one of the most important factors for determining a websites search ending ranking. Essentially, a link from my page to your page is a vote by me for you. However, not all ‘votes’ are equal. Backlinks from authoritative sites geared towards a similar keyword topic will have much more influence on the ranking than a link from your friend’s personal blog. So what’s the best way to generate backlinks? It’s really quite simple – create excellent content. Your art will do the work for you. If you upload amazing work to your website, people will be compelled to share it and link back to it.

4. Tagging

The title of each page should be contained within the h1 heading tag. Any sub-headings should be placed within h2 tags, and so on. It is also important tag relevant keywords with <strong> and or <em> (emphasis) to help search engines determine the most important keywords on the page.

For example, this is how not to tag your content:

Are you planning an upcoming event? Hire me and make your special event the hit of the year!

Now here’s the way to do it:

Are you planning an upcoming event in or around Minneapolis & St. Paul, Minnesota? Hire a live caricature artist and make your special event the hit of the year!

You see how I emphasized keywords that people will actually search for?

5. SEO Friendly URLs

Having a readable url containing a few keywords is very important. Don’t overdo it, as urls with too many keywords tend to look spammy and may prevent people from clicking through. It’s also a good idea to use hyphens between words instead of underscores, as hyphens are treated as white space but underscores are not. Some content management systems such as WordPress will automatically convert the title of your page to an seo friendly url.

6. Social Bookmarking

Make it easy for visitors to your site bookmark and share content they deem to be of value to them and/or others. This will help drive traffic to your site and in turn generate more backlinks.

7. Tag Images

Search engine spiders can’t determine what an image is, so you have to tell them. Give your image a descriptive alt attribute and name.

For example, the following:

<img src="Bill-Murray-Caricature.jpg" alt="Bill Murray Celebrity Caricature" />

Is much better than this:

<img src="BillM.jpg" alt="Bill Murray" />

8. Use keywords as anchor text

Anchor text helps tell spiders what the linked-to page is about, so it’s important to use keywords here too. Using ‘click here’ as anchor text does nothing for search engine visibility.

9. Start a blog

Search engines love blogs because they provide fresh, structured content. Whether you create shorter posts more frequently, or longer posts less often, never sacrifice on quality. The better the content, the more likely people are to come back, share, and most importantly, link to your page. This is also a great way to target long-tail keyword terms that will drive even more traffic to your site.