For the past couple of weeks I completed a whole slew of phone and on-site interviews with potential employers who wanted to hire me as an entry-level SEO/SEM Analyst.  A recurring question amongst my interviewers was, “what do you think are the most important factors to look at for search engine optimization?”  With that in mind, you will find below what I consider to be the Top 5 Important SEO Fixes that anyone with a website can work on immediately.

  1. Title Tag - if you don’t plan to do any SEO work for your website the least you can do is optimize your

    <p>tag for each and every page.  I can NOT stress this enough as this is one of the factors that search spiders put on the top of their priority list.  What I’d recommend is to insert the name of the title page first followed by your company name:</p> <title> <p>About Us << Nutty Galore</p>

  2. Meta Description Tag - although the

    tag does virtually nothing now, it’s still quite useful to the searcher.  Once optimized, searchers will get a peek into what your website is about just by reading your quick blurb…aka….

    description.  Which link would you click on if you saw the following image on your SERPs? Meta Description on Google SERPs I reckon you’d probably pick the first one.

  3. Link Anchor Text - the days of “Click Here” are gone if you want your website to be search engine friendly.  The reason for this is it gives the spiders an idea of what the subsequent page is about if it follows the link.  A “Click Here” sign doesn’t provide much detail about what’s on the other side of the door.  This was one of the first things I learned since my SEO journey began.

  4. Alt Image Attribute - unfortunately for us, spiders can’t read images (for the time being) so we must optimize them with the ALT attribute.  This should tag should be inserted into every picture.  And yes, there is such a thing as over-optimizing your image tags as I saw one website doing this for their “upper-left-navigation-button.”  That’s unnecessary and you could even get docked for that.

  5. Internal Page Linking - find a way to connect all your pages together to form some sort of “network.”  This is useful for spiders so they can move unrestricted throughout your website which increases the chances of indexing all your pages.

Although I may be a newcomer to SEO, I consider these my Top 5 Important SEO Fixes which anyone can work on right away.  Do you have an important suggestion I might have missed?  Or better yet, what’s YOUR Top 5?  Do not hesitate to let me know by leaving a comment below!