When we embarked on our journey to best practices for organic search engine marketing, we looked to the pros: Google.
Remember, nobody knows exactly how the search engine spiders from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft work. What we do know is that by not having an SEO plan, you're doing your bottom-line a great disservice.
To save you much learning curve agony, here is a summary of primary necessities for proper Web site SEO.
1. Learning to Crawl
If a search engine can't crawl and index your content pages, nobody is going to know you exist when they search for your product or service. What to do?
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Don't use Flash for links
- Avoid employing complex DHTML for navigation.
- Put session cookies in a cookie rather than your pages.
- Employ a robots.txt file
- Preflight your Web site by employing a spider simulator, such as on Webconfs.com
2. Keyword Research
This is a biggie. You must focus your content around searchable keywords. There are tons of discovery tools online, such as:
3. Page Titles
By far, the most important on-page SEO factor. Tips:
- Use different content keywords for each page in your Web site.
- Ideally you want to grab page title keywords from the page content itself.
- If you must put your company name in the title, put it last.
4. Content Rules
You don't need to write a book, just focus your expertise on what you do know and try to educate in the process. Get into the details of your offerings so that you may improve your chances of leading the pack.
5. Link Building
Basically, inbound link building refers to the amount of quality incoming links to your Web site. Search engines love them, but they must be relevant to your site's content. The more of these inbound links you gather, the higher your search engine rank.
Take these 5 steps and get your SEO on the right track. Any questions, please feel free to drop us a line.
