SEO dos and dont's
There are many legitimate ways you can optimise your site to generate or maintain a high ranking without infuriating the search engines and causing them to drop you from their list. Below are some of the best strategies to ensure your site has a high ranking.
The Dos
1. Pay attention to keyword inclusion and placement. Keywords may no longer be the sole determining factor of a site's ranking, but they're still pretty important. The most useful places to include them are:
- In your domain name, only make sure your keywords are in the root of your URL, not the stem. For example, if your main keyword phrase is "cell phones," try to get a domain name such as "http://www.cell-phones.com/" instead of "www.mobileusa.com/cell-phones." Some search engines will actually penalize sites for including key words in the stem of a URL.
- In the title tags in your source code
- In the meta description of your site. This is much less important than it used to be, but it can't hurt.
- In your meta keyword tags
- And be sure you only include relevant keywords. Search engines will penalize you if you try to sneak in keywords that have nothing to do with the content of your site.
2. Create content-rich information pages to direct traffic to your site. An easy way to boost the number of pages that link to your site is to create some pages yourself. However, you have to make sure these pages contain valuable content that provides people with useful information. Search engines hate "pointer pages" that have no content and exist only to add to the number of links pointing to a site.
Be sure the information relates to the content on your site and has your keywords placed in advantageous positions. This will boost the ranking of your pages with the search engines and ensure they get lots of traffic, which they can then redirect to your site.
3. Ask relevant sites to link to your site. In the past, scoring a high ranking with a search engine was all about positioning your keywords in "prime real estate" positions in your text and site coding. All that has changed, however, because these days, links are king.
Search engines place a huge amount of importance on the number of sites that link to yours. But it's not just the quantity of links that matter, it's also the quality. Search engines look at how relevant the links are, that is, how much the content of the linking site has in common with the content on your site. The more relevant, the better.
Search engines also look at how important the linking site is. What kind of online presence does it have? How much traffic does it get? For example, your site will get a higher ranking if it's linked to by sites such as BBC.com or nationalgeographic.com instead of, say, the personal homepage of your friend's neighbor's kid. But that doesn’t mean that you can link unnecessarily to these sites, keep it relevant.
4. Submit your site to online directories. Be sure to submit your site to important directories such as Yahoo!, the Open Directory Project and About.com, as well as smaller directories. Your listing on these directories will help your ranking with the major search engines.
5. Multiply and conquer. Create a community of related sites that link to each other. Why stop at only one information page? The more content-rich sites that point to your site, the better.
You can also boost the number of links that point to your site by dividing it into several separate sites that all link to each other. This works especially well if you sell a number of different products or services. If you build a different site to focus on each of your products and services, then you can also concentrate the use of specific keyword phrases on each site. That's another great way to boost your search engine ranking.
The Don'ts Now that we've covered the dos, here come the don'ts. Although these questionable tactics have worked well in the past, the search engines absolutely hate them. If they catch you using any of these tricks, they may go so far as to drop you from their listings.
Beware of irrelevant links. Yes, it's a good idea to get a lot of different links pointing to your site, but the search engines only like relevant links. If they find sites that have nothing in common with the content on your site linked to your web site, they'll lower your relevancy rating.
- Beware of irrelevant keywords. Search engines hate finding irrelevant keywords on your site-especially in your meta tags. If they catch you using keywords that have nothing to do with the actual content of your site, they'll penalize you for it.
- Don't "keyword stuff" your meta tags. In the past, people used to repeat their keywords in their meta tags over and over again. This used to get them a high ranking with the search engines, but not any more. Search engines are on to this trick and will punish you for it by dropping your ranking.
- Don't create "link farms." Link farms are the evil cousins of the information pages we discussed above. In the past, some spammers used to build multiple "doorway" sites that existed only to multiply the number of links pointing to their sites. Unlike content-rich information pages, these doorway pages would usually only include a string of keyword terms that would earn them a high ranking with the search engines.
- The search engines have caught on to this tactic, however, and will drop you from their listings if they find you using it.
- Avoid "free for all" link pages. Don't bother placing links to your site on pages where everyone and their cousin is invited to put up a link. Such sites have extremely low relevancy ratings and will cost you points with the search engines.
Now that you know the dos and don'ts of optimising your site, let us introduce you to the essential tools and resources you need to utilize to optimise your site and stay on top of the search engine game. There are a lot of great tools out there that can help you optimise your site while ensuring that you stay on the good side of all the search engines. Here are a few of our favourites.
SEO Checklist Basic Title tags - make sure they are unique to each page and reflect the content of the page.
Meta tags - ensure your “keywords” and “description” both contain relevant content that is contained within the page.
Headings - make sure your headings contain the keywords based on the content of the page and are in tags.
Sub headings - make sure this heading contains more keywords and are in
tags.
Content - revise your content make sure it contains good, customer focused, relevant content.
Links - Make sure all your links are descriptive eg “download our business plan” instead of click here.
Advanced
Search engine indexing -
and have a robots.txt file.
Navigation - Do not use frames, images, flash, Image, Javascript for content or navigation.
URL's - have English URLS ie no numbers, ?, & etc.
CSS - use css for layout instead of tables.
If using CSS do not clutter the first 200 words of the HTML. These should be kept free of layout and coding and should be as much content/keywords as possible.
Do not use images to assist with layout eg using blank.gif to give space to something.
Use alt tags and try to include the keywords for the page