SEO Tips: Best Practices for Search Engine Optimization

Most of my clients are very interested in search engine optimization (SEO), and many people believe there is an easy formula for rising to the top of Google’s or Bing’s rankings. In fact, when I’m creating a website for a client, the number one question people ask me is, “How will this help my rankings with Google?” In this case, we’re talking about organic, not paid, search. The answer is to follow Google’s best practices when it comes to SEO.

Here are seven tips that will improve your website’s search engine rankings:

1. Create accurate, descriptive page titles (title tag).
2. Use the page description meta tag and have different (unique) descriptions for each page on your site.
3. Make sure your site is easy to navigate.
4. Have good content and don’t overload your copy with keywords — you should be creating web content for your site visitors not for search engines.
5. Make your URLs easy to understand — use relevant words and try for easy to remember filenames.
6. Use alt tags to describe your images.
7. Try to build inbound links back to your site, but make sure they are quality links (more about that shortly).

I could go on and on, but I don’t need to — in depth information on SEO best practices can be found at Google’s Webmaster Central, where you can find SEO tips and a PDF titled “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.” Bing also has a set of Webmaster’s Tools and best practices for SEO.

Just remember that SEO is not something you do once and then abandon. You have to work at it, and pay attention to what works, abandoning what doesn’t.

Now about those inbound links …

Getting a lot of inbound links to your website can help it rise in organic search rankings, but Google wants those to be legitimate links. For instance, if you have an online book store and book publishers and reviewers are linking to it, those would be legitimate links and would increase your site’s visibility. But inbound links to your book selling site that originate from link farms are not legitimate. You know those web pages, the ones you stumble across that are nothing but a list of links? Those are link farms. And you know those emails you get, where people ask you to trade links (“I’ll link to your site and you link to mine?”) — they’re not legitimate links in Google’s eyes, either. They call that “black hat” optimization, and Google hates it.

To find out what happens when you practice “black hat” SEO techniques and get caught by Google, read The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, an article that tells the story of how Google responded when J.C. Penney was caught using paid links to increase its organic search rankings. It’s a long article, but worth the read (thousands of others must agree as — at the time of this post’s writing — it was the most popular emailed article on the NY Times website).