The Do’s and Don’ts of SEO
October 24th, 2010Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated beast, and it takes a lot of hardwork and knowledge to master it. But you can reap the 80% of the benefits of Search Engine Optimization by following the simple tips below.
Even if you really don’t care much about SEO, you should do at least the bare minimum so you get the benefits of SEO with minimal effort. So here is the SEO quickstart guide for you:
1. Create a well designed website that contains readable urls, relevant page title, meta tags, content, graphics and keywords.
2. Don’t abuse your keywords. Only use them in the context and keep it natural.
3. Get some genuine links to your site. The best way to do it is to write quality content that people want to link to you.
4. Enhance traffic to your site through paid advertising, real life marketing, sharing links whatever makes sense.
5. Submit your site to web directories and to the search engines index.
Search Engine Optimization is, in a way, the process of pleasing the search engines so that they love and rank your sites above others. However, your audience should also be the focal point in the whole process. If you think about it, search engines are only trying to mimic what sites the users will find readable and credible. So you should never overdo it and try to ignore the user in the attempt of pleasing the search engines.
Just like there are several proven best-practices to SEO, there are SEO antipatterns too. Following are the dont’s of SEO that you should watch out for:
1. Don’t ever try to fool the search engines by stuffing hidden keywords in your website. Your site will most likely be banned by the search engines.
2. Don’t try to generate backlinks to your site from lots of unrelated sites in any unnatural or automated fashion. Most search engines also look at the quality of the backlinks.
3. Do not generate artificial traffic to your website to make it look more popular than it actually is.
4. Don’t repeatedly submit your site to the search engines for inclusion in the rankings. Most search engines will find your site by themselves, but you can submit it once and may have to wait for a few weeks before your site appears in search engine.