Basic SEO Tips

So in my last blog post I addressed the question, What is SEO? In this post I will be running over a few basic SEO hints and tips that you can do for any website, even with limited internet or dev knowledge.

1. Gather Links

Ever wondered how Google came to be so dominant in the search engine world? Do you regularly use anything other than Google? When Google came along way back in 1996, they shook up the search engine landscape by ranking pages on their implied “reputation”, and they did this by seeing how many other websites were linking to your site for example.  So even if you had the website www.news.com with the keyword “news” used repeatedly, it knew that CNN.com (for example) was much more relevant as many people linked to CNN.com when talking about “news” on their website.

This would be one of the most important things you can do for SEO, gather links which point to your site (preferably using keywords you want to target, i.e. News which shows Google that I am linking to CNN.com and it is about news).

2. Fix Your Page Titles

Be sure to include the keyword/keyphrase you are targeting in the page title. Google also seems to provide more weight, the earlier you place the keyword in the title. So say I’m targeting ”basic SEO tips” in this post, I would make the title “Basic SEO Tips | Matt Taylor”, as this is good for SEO but still good for the user.

Take a look at Mobile Phones, and you will see the title is “Mobile Phones @ Mobiles Australia”, so it gets the keyword in there right away (“mobile phones”).

3. Make Your Site Easy to Naviagte

Make sure your site layout is easy to get around, and try to make it so no page is ever more than two clicks away. This will help both users and search engines. One way this can be achieved is through an HTML sitemap which helps search engines find every page on your site.

Avoid using ridiculous javascript on your website as well. It may look pretty but is totally unreadable by the search engines.

4. Keep Your URL’s Short and To the Point

Check the URL of this page. I have kept it as simple as I could while ensuring it includes the title of the page. This is the best URL structure for search engines. Avoid things like domain.com/09-10-2009/index.php?styleid=4 as this can just confuse the search engines. If you can’t avoid this, try using canonical tags (which I won’t delve into here).

5. Content

Seemingly obvious, but I know I have overlooked it in the past. Be sure to have compelling, interesting andunique content. DO. NOT. PUBLISH. DUPLICATE. CONTENT. I implore you! DON’T DO IT! Google is smarter than you and will find out then will ban you, which may result in you dying a bit on the inside.

This is the best SEO tip I can give. Write good content and your site should rank well naturally. It should also attract natural links as people are always interested in linking to sites which genuinely offer great content for it’s users.

That’s what I’ve got for the moment, but I will more than likely come back and update this page in the future. Feel free to throw me any questions you have, and I might go ahead and post a more advanced SEO post in the future. Here is a great overview of basic SEO from someone much smarter than me!