As one of the cornerstones of internet marketing, search engine optimisation (or SEO) is an important component in ensuring a site's success and longevity. Certainly, SEO is becoming increasingly popular and well-recognised as a legitimate marketing technique, especially with more and more businesses moving online or, at the very least, setting up websites as a compliment to their existing marketing channels.
Of course, having a website is the just the starting point for effectively marketing yourself or your business online. Other factors such as usability also play a role, but that is perhaps a topic for another day.
When it comes to do-it-yourself SEO, there's really no shortage of advice available on the best way to optimise for search. There are a plethora of blogs and websites dedicated to internet marketing related issues, some of which provide useful and concise advice, and others that don't.
At the end of the day, there really is no substitute for experience, and so I've compiled a list of seven top tips for killer SEO.
1. Benchmarking
The online landscape is forever changing. For this reason, it's important to be aware what is happening on your competitors' websites, not just in terms of rankings, but in terms of where they position themselves in the market.
Also, benchmarking yourself allows you to accurately assess the relative successes of your own internet marketing efforts.
2. Unique Meta-Data
You should create unique meta-data for each page on your website. The title tag is perhaps the most important, and should contain keywords that describe the page.
The description and keyword meta-data do not appear to play an important role in most major search engine's algorithms, however, they are a good place to present your proposition clearly.
The meta description tag for example is what is displayed as the page description on many search engine results pages. This is why it's important that these are well written in a way that will encourage click-throughs. Once again, use keywords that relate to the page.
3. Content
Content and content structure is very important in SEO. Content should be unique and not duplicated anywhere else on the internet. Your content strategy should be based on a carefully researched keyword strategy.
Content writers should also ideally understand some SEO basics such as keyword usage, and, from an accessibility point of view, how to write for the web.
4. Internal and External Linking Structures
Linking is an important part of the way search engines determine relevance and, subsequently, rankings.
It's important to have quality inbound links from relevant sources. These links should not only be to your homepage either, but rather deep links to relevant pages in the site. Avoid link-farms and gratuitous link exchanges as these offer no value.
Internal linking in your site shows search engines what pages are important and can also give an indication what your site is about. In this regard, it's also useful to consider your directory structure carefully - how you group and link content says a lot to search engines about your authority on a topic, and this influences rankings.
Remember to use proper anchor text to link pages. This anchor text should contain keywords that describe the pages to which they are linking. "Click here" and "read more" are a waste of valuable online real-estate.
5. Semantic URLs
Avoid using URLs that are overly long or contain masses of variables. It's far better to use static URLs which contain keywords. Also, as mentioned above, it's a good idea to think carefully about your directory structure.
For example, if you sell blue widgets, rather than having a URL like yoursite.com/ prod=2/id=123, use something like yoursite.com/widgets/blue_widgets instead. This can be achieved by using mod-rewrites.
6. Images Instead of Text for Headings
Many sites use images as their headings. Search engine robots can not read text in images - and can therefore not see your heading (which is some of the most important text on the page!) if it's in a picture.
It's much better to use proper heading () tags in your mark-up and to style the headings using style-sheets.
7. Add a Sitemap
Google's search master guidelines specify that each page on your site should be linked to from at least one static anchor text link. One way to ensure that this best practise is adhered to is to create an HTML sitemap, and link to it from your site's footer.
Remember to use proper anchor text for the link text, and to arrange the links in a logical taxonomy. You should also use full URLs (i.e. /directory.html).
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