A lot of people would say that SEO is confusing. But it does not have to be. The important thing to remember about SEO is that there are lots of ways to do it but there are foundations that need to be done in order to have a successful SEO campaign. These best SEO practices are time tested and have helped many a websites rank well in search engines.
When it comes to SEO we’ve all heard that keyword research is important. But what keywords? People do their searches differently on the web. Therefore it is important to learn and understand what and how people search in the internet. The thing to remember about keywords is to find out what words and phrases your customer use when doing a search.
- SEO Friendly Web Development
One of the best SEO practices is to develop a search engine friendly website. This simply means that website content should be original. SEO spiders do not like duplicate content so make sure that each page has unique content. URLs should also be search engine friendly. Other tips to remember: avoid flash, javascript and put up a HTML sitemap.
- On Page SEO
Write content that reads well to real people. Once upon a time web developers would stuff keywords wherever they were able to. This ultimately became spam which search bots would ignore. Also make sure each page title is unique in your website. Write titles that will make people want to click.
This is one of the best SEO techniques being practiced by almost everyone who wants their website to rank well. One of the best ways to do this is to link from pages that have authority. Examples of sites with authority are CNN.com and Wikipedia.org. Anchor texts are also very important for ranking. If your website is about SEO then an anchor text that says “search engine optimization” it should rank better compared to a link that says “click here”. Link diversity is also very important. Quality is more important than quantity. It would be better to have 100 links coming from 20 different sites compared to having 1,000 links all coming from the same site.
- Track and Analyze
This is perhaps the most important SEO practice. SEO is dynamic and always changing. The best SEO techniques now probably won’t work in the future. So it is best to keep track of SEO campaigns and analyze their results. Keep measuring efforts so that you will know if your campaign is working.
