In this post, I will outline 12 things that you must know and do for proper Search Engine Optimization.

Ask any webmaster out there what one of the most important things for a site is. He/she will tell you search engine optimization. If you own a site and want to get ranked highly in search engines (therefore getting a lot of traffic from them) you will want to make sure it is search engine optimized.

Here are my tips (in no specific order):

1. Keywords! You need to have good, strong keywords that relate to your subject matter. Make sure you have keywords in your meta description and keywords area. Although any expert will tell you that meta tags are not nearly as important as they once were, however they are still important nonetheless.
2. Make sure you have fresh, original content. In your content, make sure you include your keywords. However, do not spam/ overuse them.
3. Describe all of your links and images. In the html of your site, make sure that you add the “alt” attribute for images and include good anchor text for your links.
4. Page title. Make sure you have a good, solid page title, preferably with some of your keywords in it. Also, try not to have the same exact page title on every page of your site, this could cause some search engines to disregard your pages if they all have the same title.
5. Remember that backlinks are golden! The more sites that link back to your site, the better off you are. This is especially true when concerning Google ratings specifically. Plain and simple, whenever you have an opportunity to get a backlink, seize it. Try to mixup the anchor text for inbound links to your site. Too much of the same and your links may look automated. I do not recommend using link farms/link cloud websites.
6. Have deep links in your own website that link back to your main page on every page (this can be accomplished with a site-wide footer/header/sidebar link. Try to include them in your content sometimes as well though.
7. Have good, valid HTML coding. I have heard numerous times from experts that poor coding can and will hurt your rank with some search engines. Good URLs are equally important. Search engines are more likely to index a “static” .html page than a dynamic .php page.
8. Do not get too many backlinks at once, and submit to directories and search engines manually. If you use automated services to do these things, you could get banned from some search engines or be ranked poorly because of it.
9. <h1> tags! Many people forget about this small aspect of SEO. Every one of your pages should have <h1> tags on it, with good keywords and content. Search engines look at these tags more and more as of late. Also use <b> tags around keywords sometimes when they appear in your content. The same sort of idea applies here.
10. Spelling. How can you have good content and search engine results if there are numerous spelling and grammatical errors on your website? Always proofread all of your content!
11. Have a sitemap. This is especially true if you have a big website (such as a forum). Make sure to link to this sitemap from every page on your site. This will allow search engines to find all of the pages of your site.
12. Finally, be ethical, and be patient. Ranking highly in search engines is a long, time consuming, and, frankly, slow process. Success comes with time, and there is not a super fast and easy way to do it. Just be patient. And furthermore, stay away from “shady” and underhanded SEO tactics.

I hope this will help some people. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will try to answer them!

NOTE: You may notice that not everything I’ve stated here is being “practiced” on this site. The reason for that is simply that I am not trying to get the bulk of my traffic on this site from search engines. I do have some SEO done on this site, but not as much as I would on a different type of site. I know I could do some more for SEO on this site, however I really don’t feel it is necessary for this particular site.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.