My Top 10 SEO Rules

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me to help them with SEO or my thoughts on SEO, I would be about $300 richer. Below are, in my experience, 10 extremely successful rules to live by for SEO. This obviously isn’t everything there is to know about search engine optimization, but it’s the main things I focus on, and it’s always worked for me. So here goes.

1. The domain name – The domain name is the first thing one should think about when starting to SEO their site. Exact match keyword domain names weigh very heavy on how Google will rank your site for said keywords. For example, if your domain name is “classictruckparts.com”, with any decent content and page rank, you should achieve first page results for the keyword search “classic truck parts”. This domain could also rank well for searches such as “truck parts”, “classic trucks”, “classic parts” etc. Also, I always avoid lesser used extensions such as .biz, .info, .us. Not to say that these can’t rank, it’s just usually harder, for various reasons. Many times, because these domains are typically cheaper, spammers love them.

2. Quality Inbound Links – I cannot stress this enough. Quality inbound links are HUGE in determining trust with Google, and your page rank, achieving higher search results. I would also add that, links to your site should be relevant to your site or page that it is linked to. Be sure not to be involved in any bad “neighborhoods” or “link farms”. These are sites that all interlink with each other and have little to no relevance and also many times are spammy, or even worse. You do not want your site associated with these sites. It’s a great way to get banned from search engines.

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.” http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34432&topic=8524

3. Page Title – This is the text that shows up at the very top of your browser, in the code it is the text between the <title></title> tags. The page title is also what Google and other search engines use as the big bold text for the link in their search results. The page title does exactly what it says, it tells Google and other search engines what the page title is, and should always reflect what the content on that page is about. The structure of the page title is very important as well. The keywords you are targeting should be the first exact matched words in the page title. For example, if you are targeting the keywords “classic truck parts” and “truck accessories”, your page title should be structured as:
“Classic Truck Parts, Truck Accessories | Company Name”.

• The page title should not exceed 70 characters including spaces. Typically 65 characters or less.
• The page title should always reflect the actual content of the page.
• Many times, I think it is a good idea to put your company name at the end of the title. The person searching will see your company name at the end of the search result title. This builds trust with the potential customer/person searching and is more likely to click on that link.

4. Page Description – This is the text that shows up in search results under the page title. This text is basically what should convince the user to click on that link and should accurately describe what content is on that page. The description text should also contain the keywords you are targeting. A well written and accurate page description can be the difference between and visit and the user skipping right over your link, or in many cases not helping your page to show up at all.

5. Quality Site Content – The site should contain useful, information-rich content. Each page should have unique content as well, so content found on one page should not be exactly duplicated on other pages, or on other websites. Your server should also support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This tells search engines if your site content has changed or been added to and whether or not to spider it. This can save you bandwidth and also not waste resources on the search engine’s side of things.

6. URL Structure – The URLs in a website should contain the keywords about that page. For example: www.yoursite.com/classic-truck-parts/. Naturally, the content found on this page should be all about classic truck parts.

7. Internal Linking Structure – The site should have a clear hierarchy and text links. Think about how you want your pages to rank and order of importance. Pages that are one click from the home page generally receive more of the link juice and therefore rank better.

The links should also be text based and as descriptive as possible. You are your own authority, and whatever link text you use is what you are telling Google what the linked page is about. In other words, if the linked page is about “classic truck parts”, the link text should be “classic truck parts”, not just “parts” or “trucks”.

Placing links to different pages within your site from content is very helpful for search engine indexing and helps describe the page to search engines.

One should also ensure that there are no broken links within your site, and be sure not to put too many links on any given page. A general guideline is no more than 100 links per page. Creating a site map is also very important. They are helpful to users and to search engines as they should be able to locate, spider, index, and click on any page within your site from the map.

Using a robots.txt file and nofollow links are also important for roping off pages or entire portions of a site that should not be crawled.

8. Performance and Design – A well designed site that loads quickly is important. In today’s “now” society, people don’t want to wait for your page to load. If it takes too long, people will click off of your site. If your site does this too much, Google can track it and make adjustments to your ranking. Design is also becoming more important as a good looking site builds trust and is many times, more legitimate.

Your site code should also be clean and semantic. For example, you should only use one h1 tag on each page, and it should contain the exact match targeted keywords for that page.

9. Social Media – A good social media plan can boost your presence in the public eye immensely and create brand trust. The marketing efforts in the social landscape cannot be over looked. Anymore, it is almost a must.

10. White Hat SEO – Last but definitely not least, don’t EVER try to trick users or search engines. Just be honest and make your site FOR THE USER. Hidden text, bad link farms, cloaking, purposely misspelled words (especially in domain names), keyword stuffing, malware, etc etc. Avoid all these types of “Black Hat” SEO strategies. They may pay off in the short term, but it will bite you in the long run. Not to mention, it’s just unethical and slimy.

Good SEO practices require extra effort and it isn’t exactly fun, but it will mean the difference between your site showing up in organic search results or not. The main thing to remember is to create sites for the user. Your site will rank better, benefiting you, the user will find what they are looking for, and it produces good results and more business for the search engines supplying your traffic. Win, win, win.