13 July 2009
I've been posting a lot of industry news and not enough tips, my mistake. Here's 20 Quick Tips to get you started, check back soon for another 20 quick SEO tips.
- I always advise against using Javascript drop down menus, but if you feel you absolutely MUST, make sure you place text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow as search engine spiders cannot parse javascript.
- Common sense dictates that content is king, so make sure you have well-written and unique content that focuses on your primary keyword or keyword phrase. If you outsource your content writing I would suggest using an American writer or service. The gibberish that blackhat content generators create reads a LOT like a poor English translation.
- Links, links and more links...but watch where you put 'em. Build up as many quality backlinks as possible using your keyword phrase as the link, or "anchor text". Try to stay from spammy or adult topic related websites (unless that's your niche).
- PageRank obsession is unhealthy. To be quite honest, PageRank has little or nothing to do with where your site will end up in the search engine results. A site with low PR can quite easily outrank one with a higher PR.
- Be sure you have a keyword focused Title tag on every single one of the pages of you want indexed on your site. If the title must containt the companies name in it for branding purposes, just put it at the end after a seperator character like - or |.
- Adding new content can help you improve your search engine rankings so add new, keyword relevant content to your site regularly.
- Make sure your anchor text for both your internal and external links is keyword relavent. In short, if a page on your site is about "purple nurples" then the anchor text of any link pointing to this page should be "buy purple nurples" and not "Click here".
- Typical users search for keyword phrases much more than single keywords, they also tend to search for location names too so make sure you put it in your content (“houston internet marketing” not “internet marketing”) to make sure you are found in local searches.
- If you are not the one designing your site then make sure your web designer fully understands what your expectations are for organic SEO. Currently date search engine spiders can only crawl text, and are starting to be able to crawl Flash as well - though success has been limited.
- Use the appropriate keywords and keyword phrases image ALT attributes, your domain name and directory structure.
- Use a 301 redirect to point http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com. This will help to keep your content from being seen by the seach engines as duplicate content and helps keep your links uniform.
- Check the links to your home page throughout your entire site. If index.html is appended to your domain name then you're splitting your links. External links to your site will point to http://www.yoursite.com while internal links will go to http://www.yoursite.com/index.html. Get rid of the the index.html/default.php or whatever and just link to your domain.
- Frames, Flash and AJAX - use them all sparingly and never for your main navigation bar, search engine spiders just can't read them.
- File extension doesn't matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it makes absolutely no difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
- If you are launching a new site, getting indexed by submitting through Google's regular submission or sitemap form can take weeks. Currently the quickest way to get your site spidered and indexed is by obtaining a link to it through quality site.
- If your site's content is rarely updated and doesn't change often, your site will need a blog. Search engines looove fresh text. A good starting point is to blog three times a week (at least) with good, keyword relevant content.
- When link building quality and quantity can both come in to play. A single link from a topic relevant and established site will usually do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, however, the poor quality links are typically easier to come by. Keeping a good balance will ensure you get the number of links you need, while staying relevant to your targeted search terms.
- Search engine algorithms tend to have a preference for natural language content - so don't stuff your text with keywords. The search engine's spam guard algorithms will look at how many times a term appears your content and if it's unusually high, can acutally work against you instead of for you.
- The text around your links should be related to your keywords. Basically, surround your links with descriptive text.
- If you are on a shared server and have been experiencing problems, do a blacklist check against your server's IP to make sure you're not sharing a host with a link farm or banned site.
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