This guide is designed to be optimally useful to beginners and experts alike, incorporating all the major factors of modern SEO in an easy-to-revise format. This guide won't turn a PC newbie into an SEO expert in 10 minutes, but if you're considering hiring one, this guide should help you to suss the spoofs from the genuine. The author is very interested in your feedback.
On-Site SEO
“Content is King”
“Text is Best”
On-site SEO is what you can do to improve the rankings of your site by changing aspects of your own site, such as the way it's designed, coded and worded.
Headings & semantic markup
Use properly coded, keyword-encapsulating heading structures
Examples
Good headings & semantic markup (coming soon)
Bad headings & non-semantic, miscellaneous markup (coming soon)
Use minimal code to properly markup as much content as you can get. Avoid excessive styling, scripting and non-semantic coding. Ensure your content is:
gramatically correct
keyword-rich
unique. Avoid repeated content like the plague! This means no copying from other sites and no sitemap on every page. Also avoid creating "doorway pages", which are batches of similar "entry pages" each optimised for different search terms via varying keywords in weighted places such as page titles tags and h1 heading tags, set up for search engines rather than human interest. If a paragraph on one doorway page is the same as on another doorway page with the exception of varying keywords in certain places, search engines will sense this and they may penalise you for it!
Off-Site SEO
Building Inlinks
Ensure you've got links from:
Lots of different sites (quantity)
Sites which are well optimised themselves (quality)
Sites relevant to the theme of your own site (relevance)
Sites which don't intend to stop linking to you any time soon (permanence). It's no good building links today if they won't be here tomorrow; the overall effects will be negative in the long run.
Methods for building inlinks include:
Directory Submission: If your site is fairly new or low-ranked by search engines, submit to free website directories (remember: quantity, quality, relevance, permanence).
Affiliates: Make partners and affiliates. If you've got a lot of industry influence offline, and have partners with popular websites, get them to link to you! Consider asking the leading relevant websites to link to you.
But beware of buying links or participating in link schemes such as reciprocal link exchanging and building webrings because this is a major breach of search engine guidelines and your search engine rankings can be penalised for it.
Example: Good affiliate links
A good example of an affiliate link is the way BWDP has linked to TopTut.com « right here! This is a link to a webmaster tutorial site, with articles on SEO; thus is very relevant to this paragraph, page and website, and genuinely improves the quality of this website for the benefit of human web users.
Good affiliate links are appropriately worded, and are often accompanied by descriptive sentences. They're placed on pages that are not over-saturated with links, and there's no evidence to imply that random webmasters could boost their PR by buying their own links on the same page or site.
