SEO and the Right Way

If you have been doing SEO for longer than a minute, you know there are a myriad of “ways to do things.” Some of these ideas are great; some are just, well, NOT so good!

Search engines have been around for around for about 10 years now. In this decade, a job market called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was born. It has evolved to keep up with Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search sites as they change the way they rate pages.

Let’s take a look at some of the some items to be aware of.

- Keyword density: Flooding your web pages with your keywords can actually do more harm than good. Flooding primarily makes your page hard to read. It decreases the quality of your content and the search engines may consider your pages “spammy”, thus lowering your page rank.
- META tags: Loading keyword into you page headers is a good idea as long as you don’t FLOOD it with the same word over and over. Keep keywords relevant and consistent to what you offer.
- Links: Link Exchange sites are usually, ok, hardly EVER a good idea. Search Engines keep a list of these sites and if you are on them, down goes your ranking.
- Search Engine Submissions: In the beginning, submitting to a search engine was a time consuming process, but needed to get a good place in the rankings. Now days, search engines tend to look for new pages and sites automatically. Manual submission is quite easy if you feel that their spider is taking too long.
- Unique content: Offer your visitors high quality content that is relevant to your site. Unique and original content is the best way to attract visitors, and search engines, to your pages.
- Voice of Authority: Offering an authoritative voice is a great way to increase your links and page ranking. Know what you are talking about. Offer interviews with others who are also involved in your specialty and post them.
- Networking: Create networking associations with others in and around your field of expertise. Add links to them and ask them to link to you.
- Robots.txt: Be sure your crawler file, robots.txt, is updated, accurate and configured properly so your site catalogue correctly. Build your site crawler-friendly. Remember, crawlers, aka spiders, are very primitive beings, always choose simplicity over complexity.

Always have a plan when you are working SEO. Just loading pages with keywords, using graphics with an image map or too much flash can kill your page rankings.

Take the time now, get better page rankings faster!