Howdy ho, SEOers! How’s it hanging today? Search Engine Academy sticks with the best SEO practices for its’ attendees. If you do, you end up sleeping better at night, unless you have the conscience of honey badger, which, as we all know doesn’t give a poo. Just sayin’!
Anyways, you, dear gentle reader, do give a poo and then some! When people ask me about doing SEO, or learning it, they often want to know what the best practices are when optimizing web pages. There are a lot, but I thought I’d go ahead and outline just four of the best SEO practices you can diligently apply. Ready? Here goes…
Keyword Research – I swear, I don’t know how many times I’ve said, but I’ll keep on saying it: if you don’t know the keywords and phrases your target audience uses to find your business products and services, then how the hell are you ever going to get your pages visibility in the search engines?! Do your keyword research – use free or paid tools, I don’t care, but whatever, just.don’t.guess. Umkay?
Writing Useful Content That Actually Means Something – do not just vomit some words onto a page and publish without really thinking about what you want to say. Everyone can spout about being a world-class organization that provides outstanding service to our clients while valuing our employees above all else. Riiiiiiight. Tell me something more important…what problem of mine can you solve? What is your solution? Give me the deets!!
Optimizing Every Page Element At Your Disposal – I have never, ever understood why folks leave the meta title and description blank. As freakin’ anal retentive that I am, I hate having blank spaces that the search engines ignore. Take the time and write out unique, useful titles and descriptions. Throw a term in that alt text tag! Create a text link to the next most important page! Do a compelling, attention-grabbing headline in your H1 tag! And so on and so forth.
Judicious Link Building – Lord love us all, Google Penguin doesn’t just have a pruning knife; it is an automated machete when it comes to de-valuing sites that just link all over the place without a thought. It is getting harder and harder to get high quality links, but that being said, submit your site to reputable business directories. Set up and implement social media with links back to your most important pages. Join your local chamber of commerce adn other business organizations and do an optimized description and listing. Just don’t submit your site (or pay someone) to elebenty billion directories that are nothing more than glorified link farms, umkay?!
Alright, there you have it. There are a lot more best practices, but these are fundamental, “white hat” SEO processes that have stood the test of time, and I expect they will continue to do so.
Which one of these could be done more or better on your site? Why not make some time and tackle some of your URLs that need optimizing?
Until next time, keep it between the ditches!
All the best to you,