Optimizing your website or blog for search engines (SEO) can be a daunting task. Over the years I’ve provided Search Engine Optimization services to a variety of businesses, large and small. While it would be mind numbing to compile a list of everything that need or could be done in regard to optimizing a site for search engines, I have come across some tips that are more notable than others.
10 Magnanimous SEO Tips
- Black hat strategies are hit and miss, not to mention loaded with potential risk. Even if you know what you are doing.
- Grey hat strategies are often questionable. However, knowing about Black and Grey hat strategy strengths and weaknesses will drastically improve your optimization capabilities. It’s important to note that a White hat tactic can be classified Black just as easy as the other way around. It’s all relative to current search engine ranking criteria.
- Links with the “nofollow” tag attribute are only useless in terms of backlink credit from Google; many other search engines ignore this tag.
- Focus on individual web pages versus the entire site; the bulk majority of your traffic will typically be derived from just a few pages.
- In regard to focusing on keyphrases; keep it short, but sweet. Duplicating keywords/phrases and targeting a bunch will do more harm than good. Think of it more like creating a ‘theme’ for a web page that targets a particular set of words or phrases.
- Search engines typically have 1,000 results (100 pages) that are returned after a search is performed, despite the number of results that are displayed immediately after preforming a search. The top 5 positions get the most traffic, and most searchers do not often go past the 2nd page of results.
- Ideally, you want to optimize a site for search engines before it has been designed/developed. This will allow for maximization of SEO potential.
- A backlink from the Yahoo! Link Directory and DMOZ is worth more than approximately 100-200 backlinks from typical free submission directories.
- SEO audits and analysis must always come first. Targeting is VERY important.
- Using Google Webmaster Tools to submit xml sitemaps can speed up re-indexing time. This is also where you can find out if your website has incurred any penalties.
Always remember – content is king, and ‘don’t be evil’. You’d be surprised at how good the Search Engines treat websites and blogs that follow these two simple principles.
