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What are the best ways to increase your site's position in Google?

What are the basic things a webmaster can do to make it's site SEO optimized? I know of adding page relevant keyword and description in the meta tag... What are the others?

Thanks.

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Explore Google's SEO article. There is a LOT of information there.

For a little more detail:

  • Create a sitemap.xml for crawlers to know your site
  • Keep your URLs organized and short (if possible)
  • Make your titles relevant.
  • URLs closer to the domain can be considered more important
    • i.e. www.site.com/hi.html is more important than www.site.com/one/two/three/hi.com
  • Make the content the focus of the site.

Update: There is also one more thing I found very important (at least for my site): Make sure that it is logical and can be completely (as in all text) viewed in a text based browser (such as lynx). This is important because crawlers will typically view the site as text based and JavaScript disabled. So if you rely heavily on dynamic content and load everything onto the page after it is loaded, a search engine will probably not pick up on any of the data.

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There is a lot more than this to SEO, it being a "black art" of sorts. But here are a few of the tips I've received over the years.

  1. Descriptive page titles with the <title> tag.
  2. Use of the heading <h1>, <h2>, etc. tags for heading text
  3. Key words in URLs, like compiler-course.html as opposed to course4.html or something equally cryptic.
  4. Have a complete site map
  5. Have footer links on every page.
  6. Focus on the written copy/text of the page over the meta tags.

Six Revisions has a nice article on this.

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Make your site load faster...

Run your site through a performance profiling tool (Firebug + YSlow on FF | Developer Tools on Chrome).

As of April 2010, Google includes site speed into their algorithm for page ranking.

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  • Have original content.
  • Create a sitemap.
  • Make sure your pages are actually crawlable. Google can't crawl (well) JS content! Try opening your website with a command line unix browser.
  • Use semantic HTML
  • Use meaningful <title>s, title="" attributes, anchor texts
  • Add nofollow to all user submitted links; otherwise you can use page rank if one of your user links to a phishing/spam/bad website.
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  • You'd be surprised what Google can crawl :p – Dan Gayle Jul 14 '10 at 21:08
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A big point to make: content is king.

Write good content, with appropriate markup, and the visitors will come.

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P.O.S.H.

Plain Old Semantic HTML, which is the primary basis for microformats.

Specifically, you should ID or Class things what they are or what they're for, not for how they function or how they look.

For instance,

<p class="author">Dan Gayle</p> vs. <p class="green12b">Dan Gayle</p>

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Do not use images in place of text, regardless of what a designer tells you. Any text you read (with a few exceptions, such as logos) should be coded as text, not as an image. Sure, you can use alt tags, but that just isn't the same.

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SEO is not a small thing to do, there are lots of others things a webmaster can do. here are the list:

Business Understanding - Keywords Research - Content Optimization - Canonicalization - Competition Analysis - Image Optimization - Link Validation - Internal Linking Structure

And Many More......

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