The goal of all SEO is to achieve “keyword mojo” in the mind of Google. To do this, we have three areas of concern.
- On-page: Refers to the keyword optimizations you make in your web page code. This has fairly little SEO importance but is easy to control.
- Sitewide: The navigation and linking structure you use across your site. This is very important and within your control.
- Off-site: The links coming into your site. This is extremely important but very difficult to control.
For items #1 and #2 you should define good company policies. For #3 you should have an effective link-building strategy — and that strategy should be integrated into your business process.
#1 On-Page Search Optimization – Basic Keyword Clarity:
To achieve good keyword focus, limit yourself to just one keyword per content page. Appropriate use of your keyword won’t shoot you to the top of the search engines but it can help a little, especially if your keyword is not highly competitive
*Distinguish between “content” and “administrative” pages – then optimize only content pages.
*Choose just one keyword phrase per content page
*Use the keyword in your page’s file name; delimit with dashes
*Use keyword in the page title, “meta description” (twice if possible) .
*Place the keyword in the “meta keywords” area
*Use keyword in a headline (use H1 or H2). Usually this is your page title.
*Use keyword several times in the body text where reasonable.
*Make sure your content is useful. Ok, search engines aren’t that smart, but visitors are.
*Don’t stuff the keyword everywhere. It destroys your content without helping.
*Don’t stuff the keyword in alt tags: It doesn’t help and you go to hell for screwing with blind people.
#2 Site Optimization – Search-Friendly Site Structure:
The core idea is this: the search engine primarily knows your pages by through links and link text. Always link to a page with the same URL and try to use the target keyword whenever possible.
*Don’t use both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com. Pick one or the other and stick to it.
*Don’t link to your home page as index.html. Google only knows pages by link target — so you can easily divide your home page mojo by four just by linking to it in these four different ways: http://mysite.com/, http://mysite.com/index.html, http://www.mysite.com, http://www.mysite.com/index.html
*Each content page should be linked to with one consistent keyword-friendly URL, and never with parameters — ever.
bad: http://mysite.com/forum.php?topic=873736
good: http://mysite.com/my-keyword-tp873736.html
*Link to each content page with static text links (not JavaScript, not Flash, not Images) and the anchor text of links should contain the target page’s keyword phrase.
bad link: “click here for split testing tools” - this just confuses the search engine
good link: “click here for split testing tools“.
#3 Off-Site SEO Optimization – Your Link Building Strategy:
Offsite optimization is all about acquiring quality inbound keyword links. It’s by far the most important area of SEO — and also the hardest because you can’t use Jedi mind-control to get webmasters to link to your site (confirmed with extensive testing). And when webmasters do link to your site, how are you going to get them to use the correct keywords?
*Submit your site to all the standard directories
*Submit article-style content to for syndication, making sure your content contains many keyword links back to your other content pages. This will get you hundreds of quality keyword links.
*Create RSS feeds of your content and submit to various feed lists. This method will get you several hundred minor links per content page.
*Create a Google site map and submit it to Google.
*Don’t bother with reciprocal links, classifieds, search engine submission etc.
*Don’t pay anyone to “submit your site to the search engines”. All you get for your money is spam.
*Come up with a strategy to make link growth a part of your business process. So you can keep your focus on the business while your link base keeps growing.
Thanks,
Udhay.T
