Pratice Your Best SEO

Best SEO Practices
By Shannan DuShane
October 29, 2012

     

Search engine optimization is a new venture for many business owners.  When we first meet and we get into discussion about it is definitely a lengthy discussion because it is new to them, they have only heard about it, but never went into much detail because they didn’t think it was a big deal.

What most people need to realize is that you can have a beautiful visually stunning site, but it will not work for you on the search engines for the reason that search engines are not human - they are text driven.  They can’t determine if you have a stunning website, beautiful graphics and a cool logo.  They can only read and interpret text. So if you aren’t up to date on the latest trends and methods with SEO then your website is not virtually doing anything for you.  They (the search engines) will need to crawl, index and process the text on your site in several different formats and locations before they can deliver search results - effectively what you see on page when you search for something. 

·         Below are just some of the best SEO practices that you can make sure you are implementing.  This is not a complete list but it will get you started….

·         A picture might be worth a thousand words, but search engines don't read pictures. Make sure your key search terms are written out in text

·         Develop your Meta Tags – Title, Keywords, Description, H1 tags around your products and services.  These should reflect what your customers are looking for as well as how you want to be found.

·         The Meta Title should be no more than 3-9 words or 60-80 characters maximum in length containing your primary keyword. Remember it will be displayed in search results so choose sensibly. This should be your primary location, service or product and company name. The title should also reflect your keywords on the page of the website.

·         Each page of your website should have a unique Meta Title to be indexed by the search engines.

·         The Meta Keywords -try to include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can but keep in mind it should not be exactly same as title of your page. You can use (H1 H2 H3) tag for specifying anything important. These keywords should be reflected on your pages in your website.

·         Meta Keywords in heading of document should be limited it to approximately 75 words.

·         The Meta Description needs to contain keywords and concentration with the verbiage in your webpage. These will appear on the results page of the search engines.

·       Use text for navigation menu instead of using images or Java scripts; if you use images, embed alt text in your code to ensure proper indexing

·        Write posts and articles on a blog or website related to your industry or company to warrant you having higher page ranking and leave your websites links for them to link back.

·         Use Google Webmasters Tools-You can make Google do a lot of work simply by adding your site to Google Webmasters Tools, that is linked to your Gmail/Google account. It shows you how Google crawls and indexes your site to help diagnose problems, and many other functions.

·         Create a sitemap.xml file for Google Then Submit It!

·         Make a site map-besides creating a sitemap.xml, you should also make a detailed html sitemap page that links to every page on your site. It helps your users and search engines find the content easily. The fewer clicks it takes to get to a page, the better.

·         Add a robots.txt file to your website directory-by default, search engines crawl and index everything in a website. You can block some files or folders that aren’t relevant or don’t want to get indexed by placing a robots.txt in your root folder.

·         Check for broken links and images -if your page has links pointing to content that doesn’t exist, it will probably never be found. It’s also a fact that search engines penalize sites with many broken links, so don’t forget to use the W3C link validator tool to find them.

·         Avoid duplicate content-duplicate content can be dangerous to your search engine rankings. But, what is duplicate content? You can solve these and others duplicate content problems by using noindex, follow in your robots meta tag, using a 301 redirect or with a robots.txt file.

·         Create an Informative Error Page - if a user mistakenly types a wrong or incorrect url, it will show a default server page with an internal error message. That message is not very helpful, so instead you should create a user-friendly 404 error page that links back to the homepage, shows alternatives for navigation or links to possibly related content.

·         Utilize search engine friendly url’s -Search engines cannot make sense of urls with dynamic and session id names, so instead of:

·         Design an Effective Footer - User your footer links to help search engines navigate through your site, replicating your main navigation and linking to the most important pages on your site.

Write Good Quality Heartfelt Content – don’t forget about keywords and all that, the best SEO advice you can receive is to just write valuable verbiage and content, interesting articles, connect with social media; that your clients will like and interact with and find useful.