There is a lot of hype when it comes to SEO, so we thought it would be a great idea to provide you all with an excellent outline of best practices. This list includes white-hat techniques that ensure your website has a long term, and healthy, relationship with the search engines.
- If you don’t have any content, don’t create the page. It’s all about content nowadays, so ditch the under construction page and pages with little or no content.
- Make sure your website is submitted to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Next, find someone with a good PageRank to link to you. Submit also your website to DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and other reputable directories. Send out press releases, if necessary, and submit your articles to social bookmarking websites (ie. Digg, Slashdot, etc)
- Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster tools to train Google how you would like them to crawl your website. Also submit your sitemap to Ask and Yahoo.
- Create an HTML version of your sitemap to assist other search engines in crawling your website.
- Have one domain only. Don’t scatter your content throughout subdomains and alias’s. Have fresh and quality content and make sure it is not duplicated.
- Target only relevant keywords in your copy, keep it dense, but not too dense. Your content should be natural to read.
- Replace your images with plain text anywhere you can throughout your website. Text menu items, for example, are more SEO friendly than images links.
- Include your most relevant keywords in your TITLE tag and ALT tags.
- Keep the TITLE meta tag between 60-80 characters
- Keep the DESCRIPTION meta tag between 160-180, about 25-30 words
- Keep the KEYWORDS meta tag between 15-20 words maximum.
- Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.
- Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.
- If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines’ spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.
- Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.
- Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)
- Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.
- Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.
- Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about Robots.txt file.
- Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.
- Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.
- Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.
- Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.
- Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.
- Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your visitors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.
- Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.
- Make your site useful and informative.
- Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.
- Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.
- Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.
- Do not buy or sell links.
- Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.
