Sunday, November 20, 2011

Five simple ways to improve your SEO

SEO is not an exact science, nobody outside of the major search engines is sure exactly how page ranking algorithms work, so take these tips with a grain of salt.

1. Web Standards
The importance of standards can be argued when you're targeting human beings, but it's when you're considering Web crawlers that they become absolutely crucial. Standards are the only guidelines a search engine Web crawler has for knowing where information resides on a Web page. Developing your Web site with valid XHTML and HTML in mind goes a long way towards making search engines pick up your content.

2. Accessibility
An accessible Web site is crawled more efficiently by search engines and will also increase general numbers by being universally accessible.

3. Metadata
Keywords, the former giants of search engine optimization, are now largely disregarded by Web developers. Keywords metadata are not so important anymore, but I would still include them if you can automate the process.

4. Check your URLs
It's best if you can control this behaviour, rather than letting the search engine's algorithms figure it out for you. Pick one URL and use it consistently across your Web site.

5. Linking Quality
Creating quality links internally and getting them from external resources is invaluable. External links are harder to get but by building content that is valuable for users you will slowly gain text links pointing back to your Web site and this is still a major factor in long term SEO success.