SEO Best Practices

These days it is no longer simply about creating a website, but building a web presence where you establish links and reputation with other sites on the internet. Failure to do this will be detrimental to the position of your site in the search engine index. Google in particular will not usually hand out high ranking position to brand new domains, so your site position will with careful effort rise in the rankings as the domain ages.

Now given that the age of your domain is not something you can alter, here are some of the other key factors that can help in achieving top positions in the search engines.

Clean Code

All the search engines prefer a neatly coded website. When a website is coded in MS Word there can be additional tags that are not helpful when it comes to search engine indexing. Additionally website owners need to be careful about third party WYSIWIG editors as some use proprietary tags which are also not helpful when it comes to top position rankings.

Content

This is the most crucial part of any website; the content will determine which keywords and search phrases you will be ranked for by the search engines. Ideally the content should be unique, but the primary goal is to provide value to the users who visit the website.

Tags

An important part of any webpage is the title and meta-description tags these provide the search engines with vital information that helps them to determine the ranking of the website. In addition the meta-keywords tag is not as useful, certainly as far as Google is concerned, but is still worth adding to the each page with relevant broad keyword terms.

Linking

Simply put this is where other websites link to yours and is beneficial because the search engines consider each link to your site as an indication of its value. Links can come from any type of site, however, large authority sites such as Yahoo! or DMOZ will carry more weight towards the search engines perceived value of your site. It should be noted that exchanging links through the use of link farms is ill-advised due to the search engines looking down on the practice, since they are considered nearly worthless in the sense that these are directories are just a collection of links without any valuable content in them.

There are many websites that will allow you to post comments, articles or even press releases on them, which in return provide a backlink to your site. Whenever adding such backlinks it is important to ensure that those links have targeted keywords in their anchor text as this will help reinforce your site's standing with the search engines.

The overall aims of your SEO endeavours are to present your website in the best light to search engines and humans alike. It will take patience and hard work to implement this properly, but in time it is possible to achieve top rankings in the search engines and the sizable level of user traffic that comes with it.