Article: SEO Best Practices.
While SEO techniques change constantly, the following five points and there key components should be considered the foundation for good SEO Practice.
Site structure: Using accepted standards within the layout will make life easier for users who have been conditioned by other Web sites and who have come to expect a similar functionality. A User friendly navigational Layout should be adopted , Menu's consistent in structure and location throughout the site with a visible draw. Effectively link related content within your own site, try use a minimum of three clicks to your key content and optimised pages from the home page. The use of keywords in the link text will reinforcing the relevance of pages on your site and provide effective traffic filters to the key content required, 'Alt' Tags also Known as image tags give an image the same principles of a text link. Use CSS image replacement in graphical navigation on the site. Text layout by using keywords at the beginning of paragraphs and in headings and the use of Meta Tags will allow you more control on how your listings are viewed and reinforces your keyword selection to the search spiders. All your meta tags should be unique and apply to a specific page providing a title, description, keywords and heading.
Search engine visibility: Sites should avoid using designs with heavy graphics, frames, Flash, dynamic databases, or none HTML based codes as they will require additional optimization techniques to get properly indexed by the major search engines. Insure the exact same content is visible to both users and search engine spiders. Accommodate the search spiders with a site map robots exclusion file and make use of a custom error page for mistyped or removed URL's. Use simple and static URLs in your dynamic, database-driven pages.
Marketing and Link Popularity: Listing your site on accepted online directories and getting relevant sites as external links to your pages is quite simply a matter of selling your content, tools or services as a product to the potential site from whom you want a link. So you need to review: Firstly do you have a great product this could be a unique article about your area of expertise, a tool or application that people will want to use or is in demand, a focal point to a unique community, a major source of news and information in your area of expertise or simply a product or service that stands out from the rest. Secondly do you know the demographic for your market and its potential and lastly do you have the strategy to approach and promote what you have on offer, this all comes down to building relationships, trust and a good name for your business.
Effective Keyword Development: Choose keywords relevant to site content and popular phrases used in search engine queries. Include targeted keywords in the site's filenames and directory names , make sure the keywords are located in all the tags and other locations in which they count, make sure your page has a good keyword mapping. Other pages in your sight should use these keyword to point the intended page. It's best to target two or three word phrases on a page by page basis. Make sure that you target achievable objectives and are not outgunned by competitors page rank.
Subject-Matter and Relevance: How should your site be categorized you need to identified this, it is very important that there is no confusion and that the site purpose can be identified in order for all parties concerned to established relevance or categorize your pages with ease. You need to have useful content, search spiders need readable content from your pages and HTML tags to index and categorize your site. Directory editors and web masters decide whether or not to list your site based on unique and relevant content. Put some thought into your domain name, directory and file names so they are relevant and produce options to include keywords.