http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-content/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-coding-and-hosting/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-metadata/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-linking/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-submission/
http://blog.south.co.uk/2009/seo-tips-conclusion/

Keep in mind that the purpose of ranking sites is (from the search engines perspective) to provide the web user with the most relevant results and therefore give them the best customer experience.

The search engines see traffic they send to your websites as their traffic, not yours. The search engines are lending you their traffic so it’s in their best interests not to dissuade people from using their service by directing people to slow, irrelevant, poor quality websites.

We’ve gathered together a short series of hints and tips, to help you understand some of the processes behind good SEO:

• SEO tips – Content
• SEO tips – Coding and Hosting
• SEO tips – MetaData
• SEO tips – Linking
• SEO tips – Submission
• SEO tips – Conclusion

Fortunately those days are gone. Today’s search engine model is considerably wiser in the way it crawls content. You can’t con search engines with reams of keywords as it will be seen as spamming and therefore  negatively affect your website’s search engine rankings.

Populating your site

The more pages you have the more times you’ll be crawled by search engines and the probability of appearing in search results increases.

However, don’t be tempted to duplicate pages. Each page should be relevant to the product or service you are trying to sell and duplicate pages are the equivalent to spamming, which does not do your website any favours. Remember: do not attempt to hoodwink the SERPs (search engine results page), they do not react kindly! Yahoo says:

Pages Yahoo! wants included in its index:

• Original and unique content of genuine value
• Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary
• Links intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable
• Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page
• Good web design in general

When populating your site remember that search engines rank individual pages rather than entire websites, hence apps like Google page rank. Your homepage is probably not going to be your most important page and linking externally to only this page is a plan we do not recommend.

Copy

All copy you have on your site should be relevant and to the point.

When updating your content bear in mind that it is all relative. If you update five pages a month you practice good SEO, but if you update 50 pages a day, you practice great SEO.

To ensure frequent, fresh content try starting a blog and add your own news releases. Giving your opinion on industry news can also help create a following online.

Search engines weight newer content more highly in the SERPs, this is why news articles and blogs appear in the rankings soon after they have been posted.

Optimise each page around one key term.

In our experience updating website content on a regular basis helps keep pages fresh and boosts rankings as search engines appreciate up-to-date information.

Images

Ensure image optimisation across the site to benefit from traffic from Google image search. To effectively optimise your images you can keep images on a folder level rather than a subdomain, use a descriptive name for the image as it affects the image content and include a keyword if relevant. Use alt text for all your images and give it a caption where possible.

Also consider new content such as video.

An Introduction to SEO
Next – Coding and Hosting

South˚ write and develop code according to Google Page Speed’s best practices; http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rules_intro.html Recently Google has published a website dedicated to making the entire internet faster.

Good HTML

Search engines prefer standards-compliant and semantically correct sites so make sure HTML code is well formatted and make suitable use of the H1, H2 and alt tags.

Reliability

A reliable site helps boost your search engine rankings. Firstly because customers appreciate it, return and boost traffic levels; secondly because if the Google bots which crawl your site cannot access pages, those pages cannot be indexed thus negatively affecting your rank.

An Introduction to SEO
Next – MetaData

Titles and descriptions are used in the snippets (that is the text in some search results) think of these as your websites advertising space. The more people that click on your listing and stay there, the more likely you are to move through the rankings.

Remember to make them relevant include keywords but don’t spam!

Don’t cheat

Don’t include hidden links, keywords or cloaking. Search engines can find cheaters and sites that get found will be penalised, if not emitted completely.

Keywords

Keywords and phrases however are still very relevant to ranking – as long as they are used wisely – i.e. where necessary. It is vital to strike a balance between engaging informative content for people and keywords for search engines. Don’t repeat the key term more than three times so to avoid keyword stuffing. A rough rule is to have one of your keywords in every 20.

URLs

Keyword rich domains are beneficial, as they will give your website visibility in the search engines relatively quickly.

Keep URLs short for better SEO and use your key term in them – shorter URLs are more memorable and key terms are easily visible to crawlers when placed here.

Specific phrases

It is more effective to use a specific phrase rather than a generic keyword or keyword combinations.

Definitely don’t use popular, yet irrelevant search terms to attract traffic as it just won’t convert, this in turn will reduce the amount of time a visitor stays on your site which will reduce your rankings.

Site structure

An optimised site structure is one that adds weight to a specific page and term by breaking out niches in each main keyword area – this is known as siloing. Another benefit of this structure is that the visitor is funnelled in a logical order to the service or product / information they were looking for.

An Introduction to SEO
Next – Linking

Only relevant and useful content will generate those all important organic links.

Reciprocal links have now fallen out of favour with search engines as they are an obvious sign of SERP (search engine results page) manipulation – online marketers use three way linking to generate links to a website.

Use HTML and avoid framesets to ensure a crawler can index a page.

Externally building your brand online

A good way to get links back to your site is to post articles and press releases to other sites. Additionally, start a social media campaign. Sites such as Twitter, Blogger and Facebook can provide a vast array of links back to your website.

An Introduction to SEO
Next – Submission

Firstly make sure you submit your site to them all. A great website is useless unless Google et al know you are there and ready to do business.

Usability

Create XML sitemaps and make sure you submit it to the search engines. Offer an HTML site map which is auto updated based on the XML site map. Plus, make sure you don’t have more than three levels of navigation on your site – the more levels, the more difficult information becomes to find, and so crawlers struggle to index these pages.

GoogleBot is made up of several algorithms, DeepBot and FreshBot being the most obvious, FreshBot visits ranked pages regularly DeepBot less so.

By submitting your XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools you can see how many pages on your site Google is indexing.

An Introduction to SEO
Next – Conclusion

So think not of what you are doing just for the search engines. Think of your customers – what would they want? – and give it to them. You will find sites which follow these rules are invariably those in poll position.

The moral of this SEO tale is to be good to your customers, give them a great customer experience, and the search engines will reward you.