10 Best Internet Marketing Tips

Basically, when reviewing a website for the first time, there are 10 fundamental SEO steps that are definately a MUST:

1 - Content - It is already known that "content is the king". The thing is, that in order to be a king, you have to make sure that the content is oriented and optimized to the target audience, unique and inspiring. Moreover, keyword stuffing is not recommended (use a decent keyword density).

2 - Meta Tags - This is the second most important thing. If you don't have meta tags - especially meta title and meta description, it's no good. Writing temporary meta tags is better than nothing at all. The final meta tags have to be written only after a vast keyword research.

3 - Headers - Are there any headers? h1 tags? h2 tags? Are they located in the best places? Is there more than one h1 tag in a page? When reviewing a website for the first time, make sure that all these issues are taken into consideration.

4 - Site Navigation - Surf this site as if you are a potential customer/user. Is this site friendly? Can you navigate easily? What can you do in order to make life easier for the site's users? If this is a business site, the odds are that bad navigation will lead to lower profits.

5 - Search Engine Friendliness - If your goal is high rankings - search engines, especially Google, have to love you. In order to make their life easier make sure to avoid using JavaScript or Flash massively, spamming or stuffing keywords, using white (hidden) content, writing in small font size or creating a link farm. Likewise, uploading a sitemap is considered a friendly act.

6 - Check your competitors - Competitive intelligence is one of the things that will teach you the most about the industry you're getting into, the level of the game you're about to play and future moves that should be considered. Use Google/SEOMOZ or any other SEO tool to learn about your competitors - but before you start implementing their strategy, check if they are a leading player in the industry. Play fair - don't harm you competitors intentionally and don't use any black hat tactics.

7 - Use Web Analytics Programs - Google Analytics and Clicktracks are great common example. These softwares enable you to examine a variety of statistics that are crucial for a webmaster/marketing/SEO person. These tools present the data in such a way that makes it easier to evaluate your site's performance in various aspects.

8 - Use Google Webmaster Tools - This is a great tool to understand many technical issues regarding your site. Uploading a sitemap using this tool is also very important.

9 - Alt text tags - Make sure all your images have alt text tags that are optimized according to the site's keywords, in many different variations. This is a very important SEO move, and it's a great way to achieve higher rankings for your chosen keywords. The added value of this function is that you can get lots of traffic from Google images search, once your images are indexed.

10 - Links - Internal links (a.k.a inbound links) are important to create an organized structure. This way, Google crawler will have the ability to find each internal page of your site, index it, and pay attention to it. External links are also important, if they're relevant to your site, but you have to be careful that these links will not "drink" all your link juice. Anchor text is crucial - if you want to get ranked for "SEO expert", make sure all the links pointing to your site contain this anchor text. Remember never to use your chosen keywords in the anchor text of your external links.

These tips may also come in handy to someone who is about to create a new site and is looking to achieve positive results rapidly.

If you are interested in reading more about SEO tactics and Internet marketing, visit my Internet marketing blog.