Some SEO Basics Still the Same
I’ve been as guilty of hyping up the changes to SEO in 2009 as anyone in this industry. And, it’s true that Google’s algorithm is expected to undergo some major revisions this year.
But, there are some fundamentals that have not changed. Let’s look at some of them.
Website Architecture
When search engines crawl your website think of as guests coming over for dinner. You want it to be a pleasant experience. You don’t want to put up barriers and force your guests to crawl over a bunch of obstacles to get inside your home. Make it easy for search engines to find your content. Tell them what your content is about through human-readable URLs. Keep the code clean and lean. Ask your developer to consolidate long scripts into files that can be efficiently called. Use header tags.
Remember that search engines see your website differently than humans. Though humans are the buyers, you want to deliver a friendly experience to search engines to deliver more humans to your website!
Content
The most successful websites in terms of SEO have great content and a lot of it. It’s no secret that Google likes blog content because it updates frequently and presumably gives your visitors a good experience. But, even a static website benefits greatly from hundreds of pages of static content. Yes, I said hundreds. For small companies that can be a challenge. Consider adding two new pages of content per month (or whatever you can commit). Get very focused in your content. Use a long-tail keyword strategy. Give search engines the food they crave with 400 or 500 words of content per page.
Links
Ever since Google invented PageRank we’ve known the importance of inbound links. But did you know how important it is to tell Google the relevancy of your link structure within your website? Google assesses and scores your website each time it crawls it. Using its link structure Google determines what your content is about. Sure, other factors come into play but your internal link structure is an important factor. Make it easy for Google with internal links anchored from relevant keyword phrases.
To avoid getting too much into SEO geek stuff, I limited this post to these big three factors.
Do you know of other SEO basics which have not changed worth mentioning? Add them below with your comments.
Bernie Borges
@berniebay
Bernie,
Maybe the biggest SEO basic is that Google is just one of many search engines. Regarding to http://www.quantcast.com/ Google has a small lead over Yahoo and MSN, which means that there is more than Google to search engines.
Thanks,
Peter
Peter,
I respectfully disagree. Sure, Yahoo and MSN are the other two major search engines. But, together Yahoo and MSN make up about 35% and Google is over 60% of all search engine queries. I say optimize well for Google and you’ll do as well as you need to in Yahoo and MSN, and if you don’t, don’t sweat it. I’d sacrifice ranking in Yahoo and MSN for good rankings in Google any day.
Regards,
Bernie
@berniebay
Bernie,
I understand. Frankly, I’m not the SEO expert. My comment simply reflected what I expirienced with my own website. I was able to improve my rankings in Yahoo and MSN into the top 10 without even considering what Google thinks about my amateur SEO afforts. But after a few weeks my website showed up in the top 10 of Google as well.
Just pure observations of an internet user.
Thanks,
Peter