12 Tips to Better SEO

http://www.howsthe.com/blog/2009/sep/15/12-tips-better-seo/

 

Advertising is very expensive, studies have shown that it is not as effective as being on the first page of search results. These SEO tips will help you rank higher on the search engines results, and who doesn't like free referrals.

1. Content is King
   Search engines want something to index. If your website doesn't have much content the search engine will not rank you as higher authority for these keywords. Also it gives other websites the opportunity to link to you. For instance if you have a blog, this can generate many links to your website. These links will allow the page rank to flow, the more links to your website the sooner it will be indexed and more often.

2. SEO Friendly URLs
   URLs that use query parameters to get a website like http://www.howsthe.com/blog?id=100, have nothing in the URL that describes what the website is about. On the other hand a URL similar to http://www.howsthe.com/blog/12-seo-tips-for-beginners/ gives a brief description of the content on the page.
   It's important to optimize your website for keywords that match what your user base is searching for. Using URLs with less query parameters allows these keywords to be placed within the URL.

3. Create unique Titles, Meta keywords and Meta description for every page in the site.
   These can be used as information displayed to the user on the search result page. It's a good idea to keep these descriptive of the content on the page. Another reason to use the Google webmaster tools is it will show you which pages have duplicate title and/or descriptions.

4. Implement valid HTML (or XHTML) and valid CSS The easier you make it for a search engine spider to crawl the page the more it understands your page. Always use the correct HTML tags for your content. If its a header use one of the Header tags, etc...

5. Always Use alt and title Attributes
   Not all elements on a page can be read by the search engines. If you have images on your pages the search engines don't know what is the content of these images. It's recommended that you use the alt and title attributes to describe these images.

6. Create a site map that lists every page in the site.
   The easier you make it for the search engines to find your website, the faster and more thoroughly they will index your pages. You can also ping Google to let them know that your site-map has changed. If you are using Django look in to http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/sitemaps/ this Django application makes it really easy to implement a site-map.

7. Keep Adding Content
   Search engines love to crawl for fresh and new content. Sites that don't have fresh content on a regular basis remain stagnant, and will not be crawled as often by search engines. One great way to keep the content on a page fresh is by running a blog and blogging about your interests or important aspects about the market your in.

8. Maintain your CSS and JavaScript files Externally
   This does not clutter you HTML documents and the search engines can get just what they want most, the HTML.

9. Use Google Webmasters Tools
   Google provides this great tool that every webmaster should be using, it shows the stats about the last crawl of your website and gives you suggestions to raise your page rank. Also allowing you to submit a site-map and display any errors that have been found on the website.

10. Check for Broken Links and Images
    People hate when they see a 404 page on a website and search engines don't like it either, it is a known fact that sites with many broken links get penalize for this. A tool that can help check your site for broken links is provided by the WC3 at http://validator.w3.org/checklink.

11. Avoid Duplicated Content
    Duplicated content may trick a search engine into thinking it's spam and penalize you for it. This is especially penalized when the duplicate content crosses domains, duplicate footers on the other hand will not be penalized.

12. Use robots.txt
    robots.txt file gives the search engines the direction of what to index and what to ignore. The Google webmaster tools has a great tool to create this file.

If you have more great tips on how to improve your SEO please leave them in the comments.