SEO Best Practices for Search Engine Optimizations
Last Update: November 28, 2007
I am often asked the question, "What do search engines like and what don't they like in terms of SEO?" It is the most basic SEO question that we can ask ourselves when entering the online marketing arena. The answer is fairly simple, though the process is more complex. The answer starts with the end user in mind, aka your site traffic, or target visitors and connecting them with what they want.
Typical counter question ~ "So how does one compete with all the other competitor sites out there for top position?"
Answer ~ "By using SEO within an over-all design structure that is efficient for users, as well as search engines and their various mechanisms, and doing it better."
Since I am an SEO or Search Engine Optimization professional first and a web designer second, I personally try to approach web design through a search engine's lens during construction, (right down to file names, and their access levels) and then begin introducing design elements into layouts minimally, avoiding frames and heavy graphics files that slow down page load.I believe there can and should be a balance of both search engine optimization, and design elements within your site's composition, because in the end successful SEO is unarguably a matter of both "user friendliness", and also, robot accessibility, aka giving search engine spiders or crawlers the ability to access "efficiently" your site's primary relevant content. Your relevant human "would-be" visitors need to find your site first, then have a comfortable experience navigating through your pages, accessing the content they are browsing for without hardship. These two areas of SEO are critical to meeting current SEO best practice standard guidelines.
Optimizing for Search Engines
The easiest approach to optimizing your site for search engines is to first learn what not to do. I have composed a list of the most common SEO no-no's. These are based on the web's most popular search engine, Google. Since most search engines to some degree, model, or aspire to model after Google, and/or go through Google for indexing new website's, Google should be thought of as the trend setter for the rest of the search engines, in my opinion.
SEO Best Practices Guidelines
Avoid these SEO no no's while developing your site and you will save yourself a lot of potential hardship later..SEO No no's:
- Avoid attempting to deceive your visitors, or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
- Avoid using certain unethical tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A useful test is to ask yourself, "Does this help my users, or mislead them?
- Avoid link schemes designed only to increase your site's ranking or Page Rank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. (Reciprocal linking is ok, provided it is to quality sites, and in a manner that helps your visitor experience, as opposed to just pages full of url's.)
- Avoid using hidden text, and/or hidden links.
- Avoid using cloaking and sneaky re-directs.
- Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Don't create numerous pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware. Someone will report you and then your in the sandbox, or worse.
- Avoid using "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. [Note: The key word here is "just" and presents a setback to those particular pages getting ranked if they are detected. Since there are many articles with duplicate content distributing legitimately through feeds, I see it mostly becoming a concern when this content looks to be spammy according to a google representative who happens upon it, or a visitor reporting it as spam, or fishy, and likely violating any, or all, of the above criteria. Also remember that feeds are encoded as feeds so search engines have ways of identifying feeds from doorway pages, however there are spammers who attempt to use feeds in place of traditional doorway pages, but it is a less direct form of spamming which not only takes time to do, it must pass some level of credibility via viral social networks distributing based on relevancy, as opposed to one distributor doing mass submissions from one ip address.]
SEO Do's:
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
- If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
Now that you've had a chance to review these SEO Best Practice Guidelines you may be wondering which software programs on the web are violating these standards. I have found that in many cases using the software is not the problem issue, though it may be a violation of some search engine's user terms, its more of an issue with how a person chooses to use a particular software, in my opinion. This is where it becomes a menace and violators sound a silent alarm that might ring something like this, "WARNING! New site reaches top 20! Offering irrelevant, non-useful content with poor navigation and misleading information! How did this happen!??".
Beginning to get the picture?
In summary
Do not think that you can get your site to the top 20, top 10, or even number 1 for a popular keyword and not get reported if your short-cutting on quality, relevancy, and authenticity as a viable functioning business, or information site, and your using obvious seo malpractices. Your visitors will be disappointed and they will report you, or a competitor will report you, so use common sense when using any seo program. Use it to enhance your website and advertising and promotional campaigns, not spam search engines with content that is not useful to visitors who may access it and for the most part, you will not likely be found in violation of seo best practice standards.
If you have a well designed website offering useful, original content to your visitors, using ethical SEO techniques will only enhance the user experience. Internet marketers should be sure to use any seo or marketing software program with the intent to market wisely your valuable, "sought-after" content, not to foolishly exploit irrelevant unnatural content a visitor cannot appreciate. Choose your seo software as an enhancement to your established ebusiness which should already be offering valuable, unique content and products, presenting them in an honest fashion, and you will be on track for search engine success.
Be patient and stay in the race! ~ Mark Rossi, eMarket Group, llc
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