The Basics of SEO

If the nuts and bolts of SEO seem too technical and frighteningly mathematical for you, rest easy. This post provides you with the known and established ways to boost your search engine ranking without delving too deeply into the “whys”.

Link Love

• Go about getting as many inbound links to your site as possible. This is all part of the infamous search engine algorithms. The more links to your site there are, the higher your ranking will be. Make sure the links are from “good” pages and not spammy or off topic ones.
• Make sure that you have a site that is worthwhile to visit. Linking works a lot like high school popularity. You want to cultivate the right crowd or connections. Why would anybody want to put a link to your site if there isn’t anything useful or interesting on it? You have to make the owner or author of other sites want to link to you.

Keywords are Key

• Keyword density is essential to the content of a site. Your titles should bear it (it should be incorporated into each page’s Title tag), your links should spell it out (as opposed to click HERE or read THIS ARTICLE), your body should be peppered with it (make sure that your copy mentions it as many times as possible without the content appearing like senseless gibberish), etc.
• Familiarize yourself with your site’s target audience or market. Get to know which keywords they are likely to type into the search boxes. There are sites that have conducted surveys and studies and they can provide the necessary demographic details so that you can construct your site with the correct keywords. You should also look into keyword research tools such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. These can help you choose the optimal way to phrase your keywords. Avoid general keywords because they do not specify to the potential visitor what your site can really offer them. In fact, “keyphrase” should be the operative word and not “keyword” as it is all about the phrasing.
• Design your site so your keywords are easily spotted by search engines. Graphics and Flash can make your site seem cool, but text content is what search engines can connect with.

Code ‘n stuff (Sorry, but you can’t completely escape technicalities.)

• Place ALT tags on images you post on your website. Apparently, Google acknowledges the text in ALT tags of images. Make sure that you label these tags with a clear description of the image.
• Construct your website to be easily navigated by search engine crawlers.  Remember that search engines cannot fill out fields, read Java Script, interpret graphics and Flash, or search your entire site, so have equivalent HTML links to the important pages of your site in the main navigation of each page. These links should offer as much information about the pages they are directing visitors to. If people won’t bother guessing what could be at the other end of a link, search engines are even less inclined to. Keywords also figure into this, so give it plenty of thought.

SEO Myths

• Caching. Is Google really so spiteful as to punish you for not allowing it to cache your pages? Google has denied these allegations, but if you do not have any specific beef about caching (copyright infringement, pricing-related issues, product updates, etc.), just allow it. It’s always good to stay in the good graces of Google.
• META tags are ignored by Google and the majority of search engines, so inserting them does little for your ranking. However, this can change, and some of the search engines do look for them.