SEO Best Practices
There are a number of techniques that can be used to ensure your site is indexed and well positioned in the major search engines. While SEO techniques are changing constantly, the following are currently considered important for good positioning:
- Keyword research
- Themed Pages
- Site Structure
- Web Site Copywriting
- Meta Tags (Title, Description, Keywords, Heading, Alt Tags)
- Basic Links, Hypertext Links and Site Map
- Directory and File Names
- Link Popularity
- Programming Code
When a search engine robot hits a site to spider it (read the content), certain things are looked at when ranking a site. Well I take that back, Google has over 100 in its ranking criteria, but lets look at the basics:
When a robot hits the page the first thing it reads is the:
Meta data
This is not as important as it used to be but the title and the description will help you in the SERP’s (search engine results pages). The title and the description need to have the main keyword phrase for the page as close to the beginning of the title and the description as possible. Prominence is the key, as in life if something is important we say it straight away this is how the search engines think too.
It’s not Rocket Science
URL Ranking Methodology and Promotion Tools
The objective of search engine optimisation is to increase website visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site. This relative ranking is often viewed as a struggle to best use a few keywords, instead of a struggle to out-do your competition. If you search on your target keywords, you will see the leading site in the rankings. All you need to do is to be better than that number one site.
Beware - there are a lot of companies and individuals claiming to be offering ‘SEO’ services, some of these are amateurs and some are outright con-artists. Here are some good indicators you can use to spot those who are NOT going to provide you with a good SEO service.