Search Engine Optimization, 7 Golden Rules

As you may already know, web site ownership is not enough. Search Engine Optimization Strategies change a lot over time and maintaining your site optimized for engines it is a must. A good site has to be made with search engine in mind from the beginning, it has to be friendly for the so called "spiders" or "crawlers".

Most important strategies for the search engines include the following points:

1) Good Domain Name

Your domain has to be related and contain the main keywords of your site. When you choose a domain name get one that is not too long and difficult to remember. In the domain, there should be keywords that the crawlers will understand, so dashed, abbreviations, underscores, numbers and other similar characters have to be avoided. A dot com name if possible is the best option, easier to remember.

2) Include META elements

The "meta description" and the "meta keywords" should be put properly in your head META elements. The meta name="description" content="[a short description of the site 140 character maximum]" is used by Google to be shown in the search engine result pages, to show what your site is all about. When you write your description, think like if you were the customer. Think how they will search for what you have to offer, and choose appropriate terms.

3) Keyword Rich Titles

The titles for all of the pages have to be keyword-rich. They have to be easily understood by your visitors, and have to contain keywords like whatever your customers may be looking for. Search engines use the [TITLE]; as the anchor text for their link to your site. As everybody knows the title is the most important element and enables the search engine to determine the relevance of a specific page for the visitor's search. The title has to be less than 60 characters and be three to six words.

4) Great Content

Provide good, rich content for your site. The content has to be optimized for the reader and keyword-rich, don't worry about percentage of words, because you waste your time and you can get in trouble for putting three or four per cent of a specific keyword in your site. The text has to be entertaining and interesting. Content should read natural, fresh and should never be duplicate. Go to Copyscape.com and see if the person who wrote your texts copied somewhere. It will be shown there from this nice free tool if there is a similar text already online.

5) Links Leveraging, Anchor Text

For competitive niches web sites that don't get incoming links rank lower. Competitive keywords require incoming links, what is called off page optimization tactics. The best thing is if the links originate from a high ranking site, that will perform good for key phrases related to your web site. All the tactics for competitive keywords rely on link building because it will greatly benefit a web site. Avoid reciprocal link that has been proven useless. If you are in "Social Sites" go and get links from other blogs out there.

6) Site Registration

While registering with Google and Yahoo it is important for the site maps, this is going to help you site being spidered even for deep pages and that is the important aspect of registering with Google and yahoo. But the real important place to register is the DMOZ.org, known also as Open Directory Project, register there when your site is optimized and finished, takes a long time but is worth it and is free.

7) Play It by The Rules

Your pages must be search engine friendly. Avoid spamming strategies like irrelevant meta data or other technique that can put you in trouble on the long term. Things like hidden texts and similar tricks, even that may occur by mistake, and it is very important to validate the CSS to see if there is any error that the engines can interpret as a trick from you.

Go to the Css Validator and see if your Css has any errors, in case it does have some, and if you are not familiar with Css, go to Google, make a search and look for the specific error the Validator showed on the page. Try to correct those or in case you have errors you can't correct, because you are not able to do it, don't leave the errors there, contact us for a free evaluation of the corrections to the CSS code that need to be done.

Sometimes it can be not more than one hundred dollars worth of time, but it can make a huge difference on the eyes of the Search engines. Avoid SEO companies that offer strategies that sound too good to be true for getting good ranking. Most of the time things like: "Submit your web site to 1000 directories for ten bucks" are scams. Search Engine Optimization is a complicated issue and it has to be carried on the right way.