SEO DO’s AND DON’Ts For Newbies

Much has been written about Search Engine Optimization or SEO, how it works and the benefits your company can get from this online marketing strategy. Still with so much information online, you’d be surprised at how many companies continue to commit mistakes and fall flat with their ranking on search engines. Here are the most basic do’s and don’ts for anyone who intends to use SEO.

1. Do take full advantage of the Google analytics and related tools like WordTracker. Use this to research on the best keywords and key phrases for your site. See how the keywords can better promote your product or services online. Without determining the right keywords, there won’t be any optimization that will happen to your website for you run the risk of being classified under a site category that is not relevant to you and your product;

2. Do make use of title tags. Title tags are short descriptions of each page in your site and make sure each page gets its own title tag. Search engines use this when ranking your website. In addition, your users will find this very useful. Just keep it short and concise.

3. Do use the appropriate keyword density. Search engines rank pages if they see a keyword repeated a few times on a page. Be careful, though, that you never over do this one of search engine will read your site as a spam. The rule of thumb on keyword density is it should sound as natural as it could get.

4. Do intelligent link building. Never link to low quality websites. In SEO, link building still is the best method to establish the integrity of your website and get a good ranking. It is also best to limit your link exchange with those that are in the same field or industry only.

5. Do competitive intelligence and analysis. SEO or not, it always pays to check on what’s going on next door. You need to know the size of your industry, your market and the players, as well. This is a basic formula in marketing which should likewise be applied in online marketing strategies.

6. Don’t use Flash, Javascript or ajax technology. Search engines cannot read these techniques. Use the standard and tested technology such as HTML;

7. Don’t sweat it with Meta Tags. The only tag that will benefit your web page is the title tag. Google totally ignores meta tags because there was a time when site owners abused meta tags and tried to fool the crawlers using this. Now, meta tags are completely useless.

8. Don’t trust your web site to anyone who will commit the number one slot in the search engine. It takes time, and we are talking here of months, to get a good ranking and it entails a lot of work from your SEO provider.

9. Don’t add junk in your URLs and just keep it clean. Never use special characters, capital letters or spaces on your urls. These will only confuse the googlebots and the whole idea of making your URL as remarkable as it could be would just backfire;

10. Do not put junk in your web pages. Stuffs like irrelevant content and links will never help improve your rankings rather, it will do the exact opposite.

Again, these are just basic do’s and don’ts in SEO. As you go along managing your website, you might find yourself engaging in hit and miss tactics and since SEO up to this date is still a work in progress, you might just stumble upon some new learning that even the legends have not yet encounter. Just enjoy the ride.