1. Know your market. By spending time getting the right target words and phrases, any work on the optimisation will have more chance of sending the right customers to your pages. The first brain storming sessions for your products, services and generic market terms are of upmost importance.
2. Use a friendly template. Having a tabular website is now a very difficult platform on which to ‘SEO‘. CSS pages help reduce the clutter in your HTML, and gives a much clearer picture to the robots of your website theme and structure.
3. Get the menu right. Don’t just concentrate on the right selection of words for optimisation purposes, as they are not always what the consumer wants to see. Keep them in mind when preparing the menu.
4. Make it simple. A structure of 100 landing pages crammed into the site navigation will confuse both the user and the search engines. It’s better to have a simple layout with clusters of information (the further down the directories you go).
5. Inform, don’t bore. SEO works better if you create better content on page, but does your customer want to see this? Maybe not, so put it somewhere that gives the visitor a choice to expand the information provided. Try to offer just bullet points to keep browsers from bouncing, unless it’s really neccessary to have lots of content.
6. Use images and multi-media wisely. It may be easier than ever to post pictures and video clips on your site, but make sure they are in keeping with the theme of the pages and that they have the right properties attached to them.
7. Don’t keyword stuff. It’s the easiest but worst thing to do. Having a phrase density that is too high will alert the spiders to bad, ‘black hat’ SEO practices, and most likely you will lose your rankings.
8. Link build and reciprocate. Having one way inbound links is great, but they are hard to come by and it’s fairer to exchange links. This also gives a better chance of retaining the link long-term.
9. Code to text matters. Having a web page crammed with flash, pictures and links will increase the amount of code needed to load the page. This ultimately devalues the text on your page, and the text is the main reason you’ll get ranked well.
10. Maintain a good work ethic. No website gets to the top of Google in a short space of time, especially now SEO is growing in popularity. It may be that 12 months of hard work is required, but the rewards are great when otimisation is done right.
Tags: Inbound Links