SEO Basics

SEO is a process, not a haphazard activity you just throw together. You can’t just start off blindly and hope it works out down the road. That is as sure a recipe for disappointment as there is. You need to plan ahead so that you can implement good SEO at every stage of your project – not just here and there or when you think of it. By following the bare basics you need to implement from day one, you can start with good habits and continue with them until they are second nature.

You have to conduct extensive research to not only find which keywords are good bets for traffic, but which ones you actually have a chance of ranking for. Chasing the long tail is the proven way to get rankings and drive traffic to your site. There is no use wasting time and energy chasing down keywords you have no hope of gaining a decent ranking for. Pick your battles, and move forward appropriately.

After you have chosen your keywords you have to take the time to ensure that your website is correctly formatted and that all the proper elements like H1, H2 etc, have been incorporated into each web page. If you skip this step, you lose much of your ability to draw attention from readers and spiders crawling your site. Make sure that all images appearing on your site are properly tagged for crawling, and surrounded by keyword rich text. This is often overlooked, but it is a great way to get a little extra oomph.

Your content needs to be informative, captivating and well written. This means you need to keep it free from typos – and of course, keyword optimized according to the findings of your prior research. Maintain a balance between the relevance of the content and the keyword density. There is no need to get carried away and go crazy stuffing your page with keywords, or resorting to hiding keywords in white on white text or other black hat tricks – this can get you kicked off the SERPs! If that happens, there is no magic to bring you back!

Categorize links on your web pages. You have essential and non essential links, the non essential links including the no-follow property inserted into the <a href=>. This keeps you from bleeding out page rank, or having paid ads show up as links that are paid for and causing you more trouble than you ever want to deal with. Distribute links evenly across your site. There is no point in  wasting them all on the home page. Deep linking is preferable than having fifty links all pointing to your one landing page! Be democratic and spread it around.

Your site map helps the search engines index of all your web pages and it helps in even distribution of links across the site. That is no small trick, so don’t skimp on making an accurate and well thought out site map. It should be user friendly as well, with a link to it from the bottom of every page for easy reference.

If you launch your site the right way, keeping it easy to navigate and indexed by search engines should be no problem. It’s easier to do things right the first time than play catch up with patch-fixes later.