SEO Advice

Some advice about SEO.

Do these things

  • DO keep the number of links on a given page to less than 100
    If you have a navigation menu with hundreds of links to internal pages then Google may not index or crawl them all.

  • DO put your important content near the top of the page
    Most readers will assume important content at the top and google will too.

  • DO understand your rankings will constantly move, regardless of anything you do
    This is one of the biggest things. Your results are not just based on what you do - it is also based on what other people do. Your success will be based on the relative advantages you have over other sites. This means if you don't do anything to better your site and the rest of the internet is always growing and improving then your ranking will diminish.

  • DO optimize your images
    You will want to optimize your images for SEO purposes by using the keyword in the file name of the image and having an alt tag with the keyword. If you give the image a really unique name you can also sometimes do a Google images search to see if other webmasters are stealing your images. The image will come up in a search if the webmasters doesn't change the file name after they put it on their server.

  • DO be realistic about the keywords you choose
    After they find out about SEO, most newbie webmasters think they can just do some quick coding which will allow them to rank high for any keyword they want. Competitive keywords are simply simply too competitive to ever get a good ranking. For example, you can spend all the time in the world doing SEO for a sex site but you won't even come up first for the keyword "sex" - it is just too competitive. You shouldn't expect to have high rankings for many 1 word searches. Most of the time your SEO will come from 2 or 3 words searches. This may sound bad at first but this can actually be better because the more words there are in a search term then the more specific that search is (i.e. "football scores" is more specific than "football"). That means the more specific a search term is the more targeted the traffic is. Whereas if visitors find your site through a more general keyword then they may leave the site beause it isn't specifically what they were looking for.

Don't do these things

  • DON'T try to get search engine bots to crawl your site more often
    This won't improve your ranking. If you don't have a specific reason to have your content updated with the search engines then don't do it.

  • DON'T use frames
    They are bad for SEO (and they look bad). Although frame-based pages can be optimized it is harder to do so there is no need to make things complicated.

  • DON'T go to an SEO company
    It's not that SEO companies are ripoffs (although some of them are), it is because SEO can be learned by reading webmaster resource sites (like this one). You should be able to get good SEO with free resources. Not to mention, you want to LEARN about SEO and not just outsource it. The SEO skills you build up can be used for all your future sites.

  • DON'T use Flash or graphics for text
    When you design your site to be one big flash presentation then there is no actual text for the search engine spiders to look at. Therefore you will come up in practically no searches. The same goes if you have big JPEGs of GIFs that hold all your text. There is no reason to have to design your pages like this and ignored by the search engines - unless you completely don't care.

  • DON'T use services to submit your page to search engines
    Sometimes you'll see advertisements for web sites saying "We'll submit your site to 500 search engines!". Many people think that you actually do need to submit your site to hundreads of search engines in order for you to get traffic. What they don't realize is that 90% of search traffic comes from the 10 biggest search engines and directories. The extra 490 search engines your site will be submitted to will either be so small that they won't matter or they wil actually use the database of a bigger search site anyway.

  • DON'T use link brokers
    Link brokers are web sites that charge you $25 or whatever to post your links to other sites. Other than the fact that you can do this ourself for free (if you want to that is), the links will probably do low-quality. It's also a bad idea to give other companies the ability to post your site anywhere they want on the internet. If they end up posting a link to your site to a link farm or to a site that Google doesn't like then this can actually damage your site's reputation in Google.

  • DON'T use URLs with query strings if you can avoid it
    The old rule was that Google wouldn't index dynamic URLs - URLs with query strings (question marks) in them, like http://www.webpageblueprint.com/index.php?rating=5. The situation is improving and today search engines can now index dynamic URLs. But if you are going to use dynamic URL's don't use ones with more than 2 query strings and don't have a query string with the name "ID" in it.

  • DON'T use hidden links or text to fool the search engines
    Some webmasters put text or links in the same font color as the background color of the page. The text doesn't show up and distract the user but it increases the keyword count so they can get better search rankings. Google doesn't like this.


 
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