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This is a guest post from Kristi Hines . It is part of The “Bad Ass” SEO Guest Blogging Contest.

There are many SEO tips that are not only good for search engines but they are very helpful for people looking for and perusing through your website. Here are nine SEO tips you can do to help search engines and visitors love your site.

1. Keywords and Research

If you choose the right keywords for your homepage and your internal pages, blog posts, etc., you will be helping visitors find what they are searching for easier. The best way to do this is to think of a keyword that fits your page, then a 2 – 3 word phrase that fits including that keyword. It’s really as simple as that.

Keyword Resources

• Google Adwords Keywords Tool
• Google Insights (plus ideas on how to use Insights)
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence plugin for Excel (plus how to use it)
• Popular Searches
• Anchor text

2. Titles

The title tag is important because it is the heading for search engine listings and it is usually the anchor text when people bookmark your homepage, blog post, or single page on your website. The easiest way to create a title for your page is to include the keyword phrase you thought of during keyword research and include it in the up to 70 character description of your page.

Title Resources

• Title tag best practices
• Creating Killer headlines
• All in One or Platinum SEO for WordPress

3. Meta Descriptions

The meta description is essentially your sales pitch for your page when it comes up in search engines. It is also usually the description that is picked up when people bookmark your site socially. To create a good meta description, create a short sentence or two under 155 characters that includes the main keyword phrase for your page.

Meta Descriptions Resources

• Ultimate guide to meta descriptions
• Meta description best practices

4. Header Tags

Header tags break up your page into easily digestible sections to help readability. Think of your page’s content in outline form – the header tags break up each main section of your text. Header tags should include keyword phrases you would like your page to rank for.

Also, note that the text right after your header tag can play a significant role. For example, I had an H3 header in one of my recent posts that said Most Valuable Guides (not the best keywords, but bear with me). In search results, without any other optimization, link building, etc., search engines pick up that phrase as follows:

So needless to say, header tags are valuable and need to be optimized as well as careful consideration given to the first sentence after the header tag as well.

5. Images

<img src="seo-optimized-image.jpg" alt="A SEO Optimized Image" title="A SEO Optimized Image" />

To get the most out of your keywords and help break up text for visitors with something eye catching, be sure to include an image in your post with keywords in the filename, alt text, and title.

Where does the alt tag come into play outside of SEO? If you were visually impaired and using a screen reader, the alt text would be read to you by your program.

Image Resources

• SEO optimizing images.
• Creative Commons and Flickr image search
• Image copyright laws
• SEO friendly images WordPress plugin

6. Internal Linking

Once people get on your site, you want them to stick around and find more relevant content. Using internal linking will help them learn more about what your site has to offer, especially if you are using the right anchor text as a guide.

Internal Linking Resources

• Never use nofollow on internal links
• SEO Smart Links WordPress plugin

7. Link Building

So what benefit does link building have to offer potential visitors without mentioning any SEO benefits? When I am seeking out link building opportunities, I find that pages already offering their visitors resources for a particular topic. Link building is simply offering another site’s visitors more resources to choose from for more options.

Link Building Resources

• Top 100+ link building resources.
• Link building for beginners.

8. Social Media

Social networking allows you to really connect with your website’s audience, which helps you learn more about their needs and create content, product, and services that will really appeal to them.

In link building, even though Twitter, for example, only gives you nofollow links, someone who sees your link through Twitter may like it so much that they link to it in their blog or elsewhere on their website, which essentially means that nofollow social media link turned into a dofollow one.

Also, it’s not just the social networking you do – it’s the social sharing you make possible. Installing buttons or widgets to make your site more socially sharable makes it easier for your visitors to tell the world about you!

Social Media Resources

• Top social media blogs
• Social media snapshot series: your hub, content, network, and impact, plus creating a dashboard on a spreadsheet.
• Add This, Add to Any, and WordPress plugins

9. Guest Blogging

Last but not least is the ever popular guest blogging. If you have expertise that others would benefit from, then guest blogging will help you share that knowledge with an even wider audience. If your visitors are also bloggers, you can even help them by guest blogging on their site, sending some of your visitors in their direction. The benefits to doing both of these (the right way) are really exponential in helping establish yourself as an authority in your industry.

Guest Blogging Resources

• My Blog Guest
• How guest blogging gets subscribers, links, and even a better Google ranking
• A comprehensive guest blogging guide

Your Thoughts on Search Optimization for Visitors

What ways do you optimize for SEO with your visitors in mind, and what tools and resources would you suggest to help other website and blog owners to do the same?

Chrome Seo for modern search engine optimizers, search engine marketers and webmasters. Now more than ever seo is tied directly to the live web and real-time actions. Blog farms and scrapers, gave way to mass social spam and vote rigging. Brokering links was safe, then unsafe for Google whitehat seo, and everything in between. Page rank was abandoned even though its still with us. No-follow links and page sculpting turned out to be a shame, even with proof of concept.

Now oddly like once before we must track the structure and wider statistics. Serp rank, page rank, site rankings and social authority all now weigh against the new real-time focus. Links are still important but reputation global impact and social reach are just as much a search ranking factor in modern search analysis.

Google’s chrome browser has been with us now for many month but only recently opened the extension arsenal to the world. Social tools, blog extensions, seo plugins and more can all be found. That was half the problem. With so many changes happening every day in the world of search more than the same old tools were needed. With so many old idea once again seeing the light of viable search marketing use, the old tools were sorely needed.

After weeks of trolling the Google extensions directory I was able to round up a multi-layer seo toolkit of chrome extensions. Combine they can take a large chunk of dismay in your conversion to chrome, the extensions we need to assess our clients sites, links and reputation are now includable. The list includes three sections of focus, seo data, site research and technical helpers for the search marketers and seo’s trade.

The SEO ranking and Analysis Section:

Chrome SEO

The Google Chrome SEO extension provides easy access to Search Engine Optimization Tools that can help you with Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Checks and other daily SEO tasks. [link]

Current functions list:

• Pages Indexed on: Bing, Google, Yahoo
• Backlinks as reported by : Alexa, Bing, Google, MajesticSeo, Yahoo
• Current Traffic and Rankings as reported by : Alexa, Compete, Google PageRank, Quantcast, SEMRush, Technorati
• Social Bookmark counts on : Delicious, Digg, Dmoz, StumbleUpon,
• Cached Versions of the website from : Archive.org, CoralCDN, Google, WebCite
• Domain Details such as : DNS, IP Address, Server Location, Whois details

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If you read Internet marketing and SEO blogs on a regular basis, you undoubtedly come across posts about free SEO tools quite often.  While there are a lot of great free tools on the Internet for SEOs, I have recently noticed that almost all of these posts profile the same core set of free tools (such as SEO for Firefox).  Since you most likely already use the most popular free SEO tools, I want to look at five SEO tools today that are very useful, but simply don’t get as much attention as they deserve:

Google Insights Bookmarklet: While Google Insights can provide very valuable keyword information, you can waste a lot of time switching from one window to another window in order to use Google Insights.  To eliminate the need toswitch browser windows , add the Google Insights Bookmarklet to your browser, and anytime you are browsing one of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo or Live), you can instantly access the Insights data for the keyword you were searching with a single click of the bookmarklet.

Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin for Google Analytics: I know I’m not alone when I say that Google Analytics is one of my favorite analytics packages.  Although it’s not perfect, this package can provide you with a significant amount of very useful information.  In addition to the information that is already provided, you can increase the data you have at your fingertips by installing the Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin.  As you can see from the screenshot above, this plugin not only adds data for content from all of the major social media websites, but it also adds Yahoo’s backlink data directly for you to see.

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