Top 10 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Do's and Don'ts

Strategic Ranking’s Top Ten “Do’s and Don'ts" when optimizing your website for the major search engines are listed below.

10. DON’T use remote search engine submission programs

Remote submission programs are no longer the traffic generators they once were. These days, they mostly submit to free-for-all link pages. Most major search engines block (do not accept) submissions from these programs. Submitting your website to the search engines manually will reap the best results. Make sure you read the submission guidelines of each search engine carefully before manually submitting your web pages. It’s best to let certain crawler-based search engines (like Google) find and index your web pages on their own.

9. DON’T “keyword stuff” your meta tags

The days of cramming irrelevant keywords in meta tags and the text of web pages are gone. Well, at least the days where this practice is helpful to your search engine rankings is in the past. Use “relevant” keywords in meta tags sparingly—do not repeat them over and over again. Because of past abuses, many of the major search engines no longer give weight to meta tags. If the search engines find you using irrelevant keywords or stuffing keywords in your meta tags, they will penalize you for it.

8. DON’T participate in free-for-all link exchange programs or link farms

Yes, it’s a good idea to have a lot of links pointing to your site, but the search engines only like relevant links. If they find sites that have nothing in common with the content on your website linked to your site, they will lower your relevancy rating; thus lowering your overall ranking on their search results pages.

7. DON’T use doorway pages

In the past, spammers built “doorway” pages for the sole purpose of ranking high in the search engine listings. These pages would consist of a string of irrelevant keyword terms and links pointing back to their original site. If you use gateway pages, make sure that they are content-rich information pages that are relevant to the main topic of your original site.

6. DON’T use hidden links or text of any kind

The most common method of hiding irrelevant links or text is using the same text color as your background so that the text is “hidden” from the users view. The search engines will penalize you if they think you are attempting to hide text of any kind.

5. DO take care in the choice and placement of relevant keywords

Although, keywords are no longer the only factor determining a site’s rankings, selecting the right keywords or keyword phrases is key to generating traffic to your site. You need to choose keywords that people are actually using in order for your prospective visitors to find your website. Once defined, include those keyword phrases in your title tags, meta description, meta keyword tags and throughout the text of your website for optimal search engine rankings.

4. DO validate your code

Search engine crawlers like “clean” code. They are able to scan accurate code much faster and easier without stumbling over erroneous tags and other errors. It can be extremely beneficial to validate your website code before publishing—it will produce better indexing results. The W3C has excellent code validation tools.

3. DO submit your site to directories

Submitting your site to reputable online directories will help your rankings with the major search engines. This includes primary directories like DMOZ, Yahoo! and About.com as well vertical directories, like FindLaw.com, Realtor.com and Business.com. Make sure you read the submission guidelines of each directory carefully before submitting your web pages. It is also important to ensure that you place your site in the correct category of each directory.

2. DO establish relevant links from authoritative sites

Today’s search engines place an enormous amount of importance on the number of websites that link to yours. It’s not just about the number of links, it’s about the quality of those links as well. Search engines look at the context of the incoming links—the relevancy of the content of the two sites. Search engines also look at the significance of the site linking to yours. For example, your site will get a higher ranking if CNN.com or Fortune.com link to it as opposed to your Uncle Mike’s neighbor’s personal home page.

And the number 1 search engine optimization “DO” is…

1. DO create up-to-date content-rich pages that provide useful information

Creating content-rich web pages that contain useful information will not only help you with your search engine rankings, it will also please your visitors. After all, isn’t your audience looking for information? If your site does not provide valuable relevant content, your visitors will leave. They won’t likely come back either. Web-crawlers will visit your site more frequently as will your visitors if your content is updated regularly. So, if you want your web pages ranked well in the search engine listings, the most significant thing you can do is to provide ample valuable content.

Learn more about Strategic Ranking and our search engine marketing solutions!

top