General SEO -Dos- Explained
March 27, 2008 – 12:52 pm
For those of you that are like me and need an explanation for everything, I took my SEO dos and don’ts post and broke it down adding brief explanations for each recommendation. Again, feel free to chime in with your thoughts or experiences. Here’s an explanation for the dos; I’ll post an explanation for the don’ts later.
SEO Dos
1. Build Quality Relevant Links
It is no secret that links are one of the most important factors in ranking a website – building high quality relevant links will produce the best results. In general, a good link will first bring you traffic and second pass a little bit of link juice to your site. I believe keyword anchor links within related text are best. Some good ways to build links include: article submissions, directory submissions, social media, forums, blogs, press releases, creating web pages on Hubpages or Squidoo etc..
2. Make it easy for search engines and users to navigate your entire site
By providing your website visitors easy access to your entire site, you will give them a better user experience. In addition, user-friendly sites are generally search engine friendly sites. Just make it so there is a link to every page on your site making it easy to navigate your entire site by using only links.
3. Create Unique Content Often
Your visitors and search engines love updated content, especially if it is unique and good. Train the search engines to visit you site often by giving them something new with each visit. Unique content allows you to target more keywords and gives you something to build links back to; it gives your visitors a reason to vote for, or talk about, you.
4. Use Page Titles, H tags and Meta descriptions
Page titles help users and search engines identify the content that can be found on your website/webpage. Titles have weight in algorithms and can improve your rankings. H Tags also have weight and can help your rankings. H tags allow you to set your content up in sections H1 is the heading of your page and H2, H3, H4 tags are used to assign sections and distribute importance. Meta descriptions do not do much, if anything for many search engines but they may be what your visitors see first in the search results. A well written description could attract more visits.
5. Link out to trusted sources
You should be linking out to sources already but if you aren’t, linking out to trusted sources just adds that much more authority to your document. Think of it as a college term paper, teachers made sure you used credible sources for research and Google appreciates credible sources too. (more…)