Time after time after time I keep seeing people peddling the same old cruft about the so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) “secrets”, so I thought a quick entry was in order to reveal the “secrets” to help people avoid getting ripped off.
- Use sensible URLs for your pages. Try and make sure that your URLs would make sense to a real person reading it. Avoid URLs like “http://…/index.php?id=3456″ - they don’t mean anything to anyone; aim for URLs like “http://…/fishing-tips/best-bait-choices/”, where you have a human-readable and keyword-rich URL.
- Use a title for your pages. A sensible title - added using the <title>…</title> HTML tags - containing the title of the article and not just the site’s name will do wonders.
- Use meta tags correctly. This is a bit of a arguing point for some - people say that the search engines no longer use the meta tags for indexing purposes. I don’t see why - hedge your bets and make use of the description and keywords if nothing else. Stick to a maximum of 20 keywords though or you run the risk of getting a “keyword stuffing” penalty.
- Incoming links. The Page Rank algorithm that Google use ranks pages by measuring the implied value of a page from the number of links it gets - think of it like sites voting for yours by linking to it - many other search engines do similar things. The more high-quality links you get the more valuable your page is.
- Now the most important one: Think Semantically! We aren’t quite at the semantic web yet, but we are inching there slowly but surely. Use standard HTML to semantically mark up your page - i.e. important headings should use the <h1> tag, not normal text styled with CSS to make it look like a heading, important passages of text should be marked out with <em> or <strong> etc. Google (and most likely other engines) use the semantics of HTML to help them pick out the prominent and salient information on a page, so do your best to stick to the HTML standards.
Obviously there are a whole load of other good bits of advice you can use, such as adding suitable alternative text for images for example, but this is what I consider to be the top 5 most important techniques for SEO at the moment, without delving into the “black hat” areas of promotion.