Search engine optimization (SEO) can prove to be an expensive exercise both in terms of money and time if you don't have a clear-cut idea of what to do and what not to do. Sometimes we go for expensive short-cuts (that are often counter-productive) and sometimes we toll day-in-and-day out on things that are not really needed, or that are passé.
A good SEO strategy involves following only the highly recommended, fully legitimate steps and staying away from activities that adversely affect your search engine rankings or worse that can get your website blocked. Here in this article I'm going to discuss 10 do's and 10 don'ts of SEO that will keep you steered towards the most appropriate SEO path and help you improve your search engine rankings tremendously.
Focus on long tail keywords.
People don't just search for your service or product by your primary keywords, they may also use vague expressions. Suppose you are a web designer; don't bet only on expressions like web designer, web designing, web design company, etc.
10 Do's Of SEO
1.Research your keywords thoroughly. The real purpose of SEO is to get lots of traffic for all the right keywords. Target wrong keywords and all your effort goes down the drain. Since SEO takes lots of effort, and sometimes money, from the beginning itself you should be crystal clear about for what keywords you want to get traffic. Although there are many services available on the Internet that can help you figure out your relevant keywords such as WordTracker and Google AdWords Keyword Tool but I recommend you use your own discretion. Use these tools just to know how many searches are conducted for your chosen keywords and then concentrate on them accordingly.
2. Focus on long tail keywords. People don't just search for your service or product by your primary keywords, they may also use vague expressions. Suppose you are a web designer; don't bet only on expressions like web designer, web designing, web design company, etc. Also focus on expressions like professional web designer, web designer for hire, web designer for lawyers, web designer for small business website, etc. I mean, these are just a few examples but keep on targeting expressions that may sound like sentences, because people do use longer expressions to search for very specific products and services.
Have a unique title for every page.
All your pages are unique and so should be their titles. Don't just put your company name on every page, whether you have two pages or two hundred pages.
3. Have lots of relevant content. Relevant content helps you on many fronts. It makes your website information-rich; it increases your overall keyword density; it makes your website link-worthy and fetches you high-value inbound links; it helps your visitors make purchase decisions and it conveys to the search engines that your website is constantly evolving. Constant generation of new, relevant content is an integral part of a well-formulated SEO strategy.
4. Have a unique title for every page. All your pages are unique and so should be their titles. Don't just put your company name on every page, whether you have two pages or two hundred pages. Web page titles are heavily used by the search engines to rank and display pages. State in your title what your page represents. Your page titles are a good way of highlighting keywords relevant to a particular page. Your page titles appear on the search engine results pages as highlighted links. Leverage your page titles to enhance your rankings and increase search engine traffic.
5. Have a description on every page. Within your description meta tag, describe your page in either one or two sentences. This gives you an opportunity to use your keywords. Your description too appears on the search engine results pages and people often click the link after reading the description. So make your page description as compelling as possible.
Don't be impatient.
The effects of your SEO begin to manifest like a child's growth. You cannot be impatient as everything takes its own time.
6. Keep your important stuff near the top. Don't let there be a big gap between the top of your page and your relevant, keyword-rich content. Say the most important thing as soon as possible because the search engine crawlers mostly read 250-300 words, or even less sometimes, on your page. Don't waste space by having needless JavaScript and other bells and whistles that make your website look cool, but don't solve any real purpose, and eventually harm you by blocking your textual content from the search engine crawlers.
7. Use your HTML tags intelligently. Use the heading tags to highlight your main points and try that your keywords appear within your heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.). Similarly, once or twice, highlight your primary key expressions using the tag. The search engines also pay attention to words used with bullet (·) tags. Text appearing as anchor text too helps a lot in your SEO efforts (text appearing within and ) as it tells the crawler where the link is heading to and it is especially crucial when you are interlinking to your own pages from other pages.
8. Have search engine friendly URLs. Instead of having obscure, dynamically generated URLs use search engine friendly URLs because your URL too helps the crawlers decide what your page is about. Many contemporary content management systems use your page title to generate the URL (individual words separated with dashes/hyphens).
9. Maintain a sitemap and a friendly navigation. All the links on your website should help search engines travel through your website unencumbered. A sitemap should be a separate web page containing links to all your web pages you want indexed by the search engine crawlers and the link to this web page should preferably appear at the top of your every web page so that no matter from where the crawlers and spiders enter your website, they cannot miss the link to the sitemap. Similarly, have a navigation system that not only assists your human visitors but also directs the search engines to your important links.
10. Submit your website to online directories. Directories like DMOZ and Yahoo! (it's the original directory) can significantly enhance your search engine rankings if your link gets included in them. Some of the online directories are human-edited, very old and greatly trusted by various search engines. Your website will be quickly indexed if it appears on these online web directories.
Don't use images as navigation links.
Images, at least as of now, mean nothing to search engines. You should preferably use text links in your navigation and you can make this text look startlingly pretty by using CSS definitions.
10 Don'ts Of SEO
1. Don't stuff your pages with your keywords. Needlessly sprinkling your keywords every where on your web pages will make them sound like gobbledygook not only to your human visitors but also the search engines. This can actually harm your rankings significantly. Some people do succeed and get a better ranking but two things happen if you indiscriminately use keywords on your web pages: your pages make no sense, and as soon as the search engines figure out what you are doing they block your website.
2. Don't remove a popular page from your website. A popular page means: it's getting lots of traffic, many external websites are linking to it and it enjoys higher search engine rankings. Since in all probability a link to your index page exists on this page, you stand to lose a lot if you remove this page. There might be a chance that your main domain is getting a higher ranking just because of this particularly popular page. Even if you have to rename the page, use the 301 permanent redirect setting in your .htaccess file to redirect people and search engines to the new URL.
3. Don't use images as navigation links. Images, at least as of now, mean nothing to search engines. You should preferably use text links in your navigation and you can make this text look startlingly pretty by using CSS definitions. Even if there is no escape from using images in your navigation bar don't forget to use the ALT attribute and put relevant text in there.
4. Don't use a badly defined robot.txt file. A robot.txt file can totally block search engine traffic by mistake sometimes. Even a single command existing in this file can block an entire folder. In case you need to use this file make sure you know what you are including in it. This file is often used to tell search engine crawlers what to index on your website and what NOT to index.
Have a description on every page.
Within your description meta tag, describe your page in either one or two sentences. This gives you an opportunity to use your keywords.
5. Don't wait long for SEO. SEO as a practice should begin the moment you begin conceptualising your website. Remember that SEO is as important as the existence of your website because without proper SEO you are never going to get relevant traffic to your website. How you define your URLs, how you write your content, how you define your navigation, how you manage your markup, etc. it all affects your SEO. If you start your SEO work after your website has been built you may have to re-do 70%
of the job again.
6. Don't exchange links indiscriminately. Exchanging links with other webmasters and bloggers should be a meaningful exercise and it shouldn't be done merely for search engine optimisation. Always keep in mind that links coming from disreputable or unrelated websites can adversely affect your search engine rankings. Similarly, if you link to websites distrusted by search engines you too will lose trust. Link-exchange should always be value-based. If you are web design company getting 100s of links from casino websites is not going to solve any purpose.
7. Don't neglect your human visitors. Don't neglect your human visitors to please the search engine crawlers and spiders. Remember that eventually it's the human visitors who are going to do business with you, so keep them first. Reputed SEO consultants firmly believe that websites that are human-friendly are search-engine-friendly automatically.
8. Don't forget to use web analytics tools. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics and others help you know how much traffic you are getting from various sources including search engines. They also tell you which are your popular pages and for what keywords you attract maximum number of visitors. They also help you decide what pages you should optimise further. Some of the latest web analytics tools even tool you which long tail keywords you should focus on more.
9. Don't focus just on a few keywords. In the previous point I mentioned long tail keywords. Your main keywords may get you lots of traffic from few sources, but your long tail keywords can get you small chunks of traffic from many sources. Your primary keywords are generally very competitive and very difficult to optimise for, but you can always focus on fuzzy keywords that are used by few people but that are definitely used, and these fuzzy keywords don't even have much competition. It means more work, but actually is it not. It's always easier to get good rankings for abstract search terms rather than your primary keywords.
10. Don't be impatient. The effects of your SEO begin to manifest like a child's growth. You cannot be impatient as everything takes its own time. For instance it may take more than 5 months for your website to even start appearing in the search results. Lots of things need to be tested as no matter how many time you have handled SEO jobs, every SEO project is a unique project. You'll have to test and re-test again and again, and your changes only get reflected when your pages get crawled and this happens when it happens -- you cannot expedite this process. Even when you add new content or improve/optimise existing content it shows results after weeks or even months. That's why, the sooner you begin, the better it is.
This concludes my list of 10 SEO do's and don'ts. I won't say it is a complete list but most of the additions will be the subsets of these points.
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