SEO How To

This is short, simple how-to document for SEO will cover the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization and other aspects of building a quality web-site.

Overview

This SEO Guide contains a list of best-practices, rules, tips, tricks &c of what this site (and many others) regard as the things to do. It should be clear that SEO is more art (magic) than science; each party (the engines and the optimizers) are in a constant state of change/evolution.=

The first step is to run our SEO Check and review the report. These reports are long and contain considerable information. For best results, print the report and check of completed items.

General SEO Optimisation

Here are few general tips for creating a site that will be attractive to the search engine robots from both Google, Baidu, Yahoo and Bing. We generally limit our targets to these four; which covers more than 90% of the market.

Create Original Content

Creating original content, text, images, videos and audio is the best way to get recognition. Re-playing content from other places on the web, or scraping is a bad idea.

For your site to be attractive to the search robots it must be well constructed. This means: unique content, well-written, well-formatted, well-structured. Even with loads of back-links a poorly constructed site will rank low.

Create Quality Content

Putting together high-quality content ensure that the robots will see what you want them to, as well as demonstrating a site operator who means business.

Spell correctly, use proper terms, link out to sources, use proper HTML elements and attributes (*cough* blockquote,cite). Make use of proper attributes such as alt and title, use open standards (ie: not flash) and enable web-accessibility. Recently (2009) the Rich-Markup has started to become much more important.

It's not required to do all these things and acceptable to have some mark-up errors, but improperly structured or styled documents get less organic action.

SEO On-Site Improvements

Create Active Content

This means have pages that change, maybe not on an hourly basis but at least weekly. Publish new article for the home page, embed a twitter feed. Something that shows content change, that your site is fresh and up-to-date.

Single Hostname

If your site responds to multiple hostnames www.DOMAIN.TLD and DOMAIN.TLD (that is, with or without www.) you should (must?) centralise around a single hostname. Notice what happens when you visit http://www.seosorcerer.com/, our server forces the removal of www.. Other sites, like http://google.com/ you will notice, force the usage of www..

SEO On-Page Improvements

These tips should be considered after completing the process for the general and site specific optimisations.

The more links the better, high quality links (from high ranking sites) are best. Building links from friendly sites, are also Link Exchanges, with friendly sites or through services are also available.', There is active debate about links from directory sites and purchasing text-link ads.

However, it should be noted that only high-quality links matter. Hundreds of links from low quality sites are not nearly as valuable as two links from a higher-quality (>=PR4) site. Those higher-quality links generally come organically - which requires (as stated above) original, quality content.

Content Concerns

Are the keywords you're targeting relevant to site content
Ensure that all content on the site is targeted towards the core message of the site, for example there are no pages here related to sports or entertainment.
Are targeted keywords popular phrases used in search engine queries?
This
Accurate, Focused & Unique Page Title
The title is one of the most important attributes of the page
Accurate, Focused & Unique Meta Description
The meta "description" increases relevance for the page and is also used in search result clips, summarize the content and make sure this description is as unique as the title
Use H1 elements for prominent content titles
Certian elements, like H1, H2 and H3, are weighted heavily by SECAR

Usability Concerns

Create Custom Error Pages
Create custom pages for 404, 410 and 500 level error messages. Use it to point users in the right direction - hopefully SECAR will not see this. Use Webmaster Tools/Log Analysis to monitor.
Use Intelligent Redirects
When pages move on your site use a 301 Permanant Redirect.
AVOID pop-ups
for ads or anything unless absolutely necessary e.g. Help or Survey type pages

Structure Concerns

Use URLs that are simple and look static
URLs should look like simple pages, reduce the number of Query String variables to two maximum.
Use keword relevant directory and file names
The SECAR are sensitive to these paths in your domain. Use relevant/targed words. e.g. /services/consulting vs /static/service1.html. Even database driven sites can have paths like /products.asp?brand=12&category=&37,45,12&sort=-4 rewritten to /products/acme/rockets,skates,tnt/by-price.
Site & Page Strucuture
Some sites put all pages under the root, use a clearly defined heirarchy for pages. e.g. /services/consulting/seo vs /services-consulting-seo. Use sane names e.g. /products/brand/acme vs /products-acme-tools-rockets-catch-roadrunner or worse /products-tickets-superbowl-tickets-football-nfl-tickets. If it looks "spammy" to you will be spammy to robots.

Inbound/Outbound Linking

Your relevance to many of the search engines is based on how many sites link to you. The more high quality links pointing to you the better.

Link Quality
The relevancy and page rank of the page point to you. Ideally it's pages of related content matter with relativly high rank themselves. A PR 5/10 page about Shampoo pointing to your page at /products/shampoo is valuable. A PR 9/10 page about Beer Pong not not so much.
Build Links through Blogging
Search engines love blogs, especially when hosted on a commercial provider like blogger.com. Use these to announce your site and create short intelligent keyword rich entries with links to your main sites relevant pages.
Link Out to Relevant Content
Search the web and find some further back information and link to it. Adding value to other's pages is a good way to build relevancy for a topic.
AVOID Link Spamming
AVOID paid services, AVOID thousands of low value links (aka: free-for-all linking). Use a designated channel for advertising and alerting the masses such as a blog or PR service. Organic link building takes time but builds a more resilient link foundation.

More SEO Best Practices References