Search Engine Optimization
Advice & Tactics
Unique content
is King. Search engines love new, unique and updated content.
If you produce new content at a rate of just one reasonably sized
page per day and tied in with the other advice throughout the site,
I can almost guarantee you will get good listings. Remember though,
write for the visitors but cater for the search engines. If your
field of expertise fits into a niche in the market, all the better
for you but you must get unique content all you will fall behind.
Page Structure.
Search engine bots can sometimes get confused with poorly coded
html, javascript and other web languages. If the bot has to wait
too long or cannot decipher the web language then it will just abandon
your site and move on to the next, even if it manages to get through
the code it usually leads to poor search engine indexing of your
website. You should also keep to widely used file extensions like
.htm, .html, .php, .asp for your pages.
Loading Speed. The
loading speed of your website should be kept to a minimum, if it
takes long than 5 seconds on 256kb+ connections then you lose visitors
- both real and search engine bots. There are a variety of reasons
why pages can load slowly, it may either be your web server, poorly
coded server side code like php or client side code like javascript
which can slow or even stop your page from loading.
Visitor Navigation.
This is more an aesthetic feature of your website focused at real
visitors but you need to have some sort of standard navigation that
is the same throughout your whole site. People can be put off and
leave your website if they find it difficult to browse easily, search
engine bots may also miss links if they can only be found deep within
your site. Try to make as many internal links as possible available
on each page.
Site Hierarchy.
Site hierachy can be great for adding keyword density to your web
site. An example of site hierachy working effectively would be this
page, seo-advice.php. The full link contains SEO twice - www.exchangesteel.com/seo-advice.php
which is very beneficial in the way search engines determine your
sites relevance to a particular subject. Use your domain, folders
and file names to your advantage.
Avoid Blackhat SEO.
Blackhat SEO is a vast topic that commands little respect from real
webmasters as it means using underhand methods to gain search engine
rankings, although the site is usually banned quickly. Blackhat
SEO includes using link farms, search engine spamming, hidden or
disguised text, fake meta tag data, using duplicate content and
using doorway pages. I would recommend you stay away from tactics
like this as you will end up losing out in the long run.
Targeted Linkswaps.
Link swaps are great but you must make them work for you. It does
little good for you when your going for top search engine positions
when your link swaps are untargeted. You should choose some specific
keywords for both the link text and the link title text then make
sure before you link swap that the other webmaster adds those specific
keywords with the link.
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