SEO stands for search engine optimization, the process of trying to make your web site visible in the search engine results when people search for things that are relevant to you.
To critics, SEO is all about gaming a meritocratic system—using tricks to move up the search ranks before you’ve actually earned it. To SEO proponents, it’s about making sure your needle of a web site has a chance of being noticed in the haystack that is the Internet.
As with most controversial issues, the devil is in the details. How you use SEO makes all the difference, which is why online marketers coined the terms ‘white hat SEO’ and ‘black hat SEO,’ the former being perfectly acceptable, the latter being another form of spam that can get you in trouble with the almighty Google.
There’s another reason SEO has a spotty reputation—and that’s the high number of SEO hucksters making big promises and charging even bigger fees. As a general rule, the more promises to you hear, the faster you should flea the scene. The only people whose promises are worth anything in the SEO world are Eric Schmidt and Steve Ballmer (CEOs of Google and Microsoft, respectively). As I said in the beginning, SEO is a process, and it involves trial and error, a lot of guesswork, and the knowledge that you don’t always know what’s working now and what’s going to work later. The smartest SEOs are typically humble, aware that search engines are arbitrary and capricious creatures. It’s the SEOs who self-identify as ‘gurus’ or ‘wizards’ that you need to avoid.
Anyway… the tips I’m about to present fall within the ‘white hat’ category. They are subtle things you can to do your web site that will help it get found in Google (no promises!) and the best part is you don’t need to sacrifice your integrity to implement them.
1. Pay special attention to your meta data and title tags
A web page’s meta data is made up of two components, meta keywords and a meta description. They should tell what the page is about and use words and phrases that people might type when searching the web. Also, since your meta description sometimes appears verbatim in the search results, it should be persuasive enough to encourage people to explore further. Same goes for your title tag, which is often the linked text that shows up in the results. Make sure your title tags are relevant, descriptive and compelling (and no longer than 90 characters, including spaces).
2. Fix broken links
When Google’s spiders index a web site, they follow hyperlinks just like you and me. If your web site is littered with broken links, you make it harder and more laborious for spiders to index your web site—and that’s a bad thing. You want to make it as easy as possible for Google to crawl through your site. That means checking every link on your site and making sure it works properly.
3. Remove gratuitous outbound links
Links are votes in the search engine world. If your web site is full of links to other web sites, you could be sending a signal to Google that you don’t value your own content—because why else would you be voting for every other web site under the sun? (On the other hand, if you have a lot of inbound links, you can afford to link out more. You’ve got more cred in the eyes of Google if you’ve got a lot of inbound links.) If your site is new and/or obscure, avoid gratuitous outbound linking. A lot of SEO sticklers will tell you to avoid outbound linking altogether, but that’s cheesy advice, not black hat or anything, just lame and somewhat antisocial. Don’t be afraid to link to other sites, just don’t go crazy doing it if SEO is important to you.
4. Mind your anchor text
Many people still use words like ‘click here’ or ‘learn more’ as the actual clickable link. As a result, spiders read ‘click here’ or ‘learn more’ and don’t bother indexing it. This is a missed opportunity. Instead, strive to use more meaningful anchor text. Your visitors will still understand to click the text—the text formatting provides the cue—and the spiders will have even more relevant words to take back to the search engine index.
5. Know when to leave SEO alone
Here’s a disclaimer that should be applied to every bit of search engine optimization advice: Use SEO techniques as long as they’re practical, ethical and as long as they don’t make you look lame, because if you slavishly adhere to every single SEO ‘best practice,’ your web site will end up looking hollow and spammy to human readers, even if you stick to ‘white hat’ methods. In other words, if ‘click here’ is desirable anchor text, go ahead and use it. If you want to link to scores of web sites, just do it. If you’ve got better things to do than sweat over your meta keywords… you get the idea. SEO is just one tool among many in your online marketing toolkit.
There is just as much hype and skepticism surrounding SEO as there is for diet supplements! This is great advice that clears up a lot of that hype and is also straight to the point & easy to read. Thanks for posting!
awesome!
awesome!