SEO (a.k.a Search Engine Optimization) is way to improve your websites / pages ranking search engine results. People use search engines to receive information as quickly as possible with accuracy and relevancy. They enter some text in search engines and it drives them to the information they have requested.

To understand how to improve your websites SEO, let’s first understand how major search engines work.

How search engines work

When we search for any information in any of the search engines, we are not actually searching on web, but we are actually searching on Search Engine’s index of the web pages.

Crawling

Search engines crawls few pages and then follow the links in those web pages and crawls the links in those pages and so on.

2. Indexing

It indexes all these links and content in their servers.

Tools to Improve SEO

Google Keyword Planner :- helps to provide Keywords for the pages, products or website.
Sitemap :- Build your sitemaps
https://majestic.com, http://www.semrush.com/features/backlinks , https://moz.com , https://ahrefs.com :- Link Analysis tools provides deep analysis of backlinks.
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly :- helps to identify whether websites are mobile friendly or not.

Ways to Improve your website SEO

When Search engines search the web, they mean content specially text only content.

- 1. Avoid images/flash/pdfs etc wherever not needed
  2. Avoid frames and frames in the pages as pages inside the frame index separately as orphaned pages
  3. Avoid spaces between the words use (“-“) dash instead. This is Google’s recommendation
  4. Use 301 redirect when redirecting example.com to www.example.com. This tells google to indexed the site only once.
  5. Use keyword in urls.
  6. “Title” tag is very much important in the web page. It appears in browser window, browser page history and browser bookmark. Google use title tag for 2 purposes
    1. Page rankings (conveys information about the page to the search engine)
    2. Hyperlink to your website pages.
    3. Recommended it should be in between 50-75 character long
  7. “Description” is one of the important tag for search engines. It should contain brief description about the page. (recommended size is 130-150 characters). This tag is basically to highlight the benefits of visiting your website
  8. “Keywords” meta tag. Not much important. Google doesn’t use keywords meta tag. Use it but don’t spend much overtime
  9. Use cleaner HTML to load the pages faster. e.g. Don’t use inline JavaScript, stylesheet which is cluttered coding and also impacts performance of the page. Use image maps at the end of the page. All this will lead index your page efficiently.
  10. Anchor tag title should not be “click here”. Search is all about the keywords. Think of contextual keyword and reference them in hyperlinks
  11. It will be helpful to identify businesses by location. Use Geotag generators to generate HTML.
  12. https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool Structured Data testing tool from Google for testing markup.

Markup Formats

- - Microdata
  - JSON-LD (not supported by Bing)
  - RDFa
    
    Sitemap
  - Use Sitemaps to get index pages in your site. Add your sitemap url to robots.txt
  - https://www.google.com/webmasters tool to submit your website sitemap to google.

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster tool to submit your website sitemap to Bing.

Local Search

Google considers a website popular when your website has lots of back-links. i.e. lot of the sites referring to your site for some information.
Local search is very important as it came from separate index.

To Add local listing in search engines, please use below urls

http://www.google.com/places

http://www.bing.com/businessportal

http://listings.local.yahoo.com

Add listing for each location, if you have five location make sure you have five listings