SEO: 5 Things You Must Pay Attention To
A lot of people run around thinking that SEO is really complicated. Well, it can be, when you’re heavily testing every element on the page or when you’re paying big money for AdWords campaigns or you’re talking rewriting code and such. But it doesn’t have to be. You really don’t have to be a genius, and if you pay attention to these 5 elements of your site, you’ll be in the game.
#1 Make sure that the spiders see your pages easily
Don’t add tons of code that spiders have to wade through to get to the important stuff. Use XML sitemaps to let spiders know every page that you want spidered. And use a robots.txt file to tell them about the ones you don’t want shown. Verify your code and make sure that there are no broken links or any missing tags or other messes that will cause spiders problems. Think of search engine spiders just as you do your customers. Make it as easy as possible for them to crawl the important pages in your site.
#2: Get things organized
Be sure that your site is well constructed. Lead off from your front page to what I’ll call “category” sub-pages, and then be sure that everything on those pages and the pages they link to pertain to the topic of that category. It’s easy with a blog, so think of your website in the same way. You create categories, and then, every time you post, you add your page to a category that is relevant to what you’ve written. Same thing with a website. Be sure anyone can reach any page in your site within three clicks or less.
#3: Spend time on keyword research
Keyword research is enormously important and it’s amazing that many webmasters overlook it entirely or do it haphazardly and use whatever keywords they think might apply. And remember, Google ranks PAGES, not entire sites. So, you need to perform solid keyword research for every page on your site. Spend more than a couple of hours… spend a couple of days.
#4: Create good, fresh content on a regular basis
You know the saying, “Content is King!” right? Well, that’s still very true. It doesn’t have to be all written content. It can be video, audio, or even just images now and again. It’s all good, as long as a great text description appears with those elements on the page. Spiders just LOVE fresh, unique content. The more you give them, the more they’ll come back and the more they’ll love your site.
#5: Work on getting good backlinks
There are lots of ways to do that. You can write articles and send links back to the page you want ranked. You can submit your URL to quality, human-edited directories. You can do some guest blogging and send links back to your page. You can create content that people LOVE so that they come and link back naturally. You can send links back from some Web 2.0 properties, but check before you put a lot of time into using them. Many are “no follow” links, which means they’ll do you no good at all.
And that’s really it. If you follow these 5 simple routines, you’ll see… Your pages will be indexed quickly and rank highly for the keywords you have chosen and use religiously in your work.
But solid SEO takes a long time to build. One article won’t do it. One video won’t do it. You need hundreds, if not thousands of links pointing back to your site, and that requires creating content and getting out there and bookmarking and tweeting and so on.
Is it worth the effort? Well, heck yeah!
What do you get?
Targeted, free search engine traffic. What’s better than that?
