Common Sense SEO

This Thursday, David Peralty and I will be continuing our series this time, focusing on content generation and SEO. So with that in mind, I wanted to take a moment to highlight some key aspects involved with SEO that you don’t need a rocket scientist to help you figure out.

Be Visible – Think about the journey users take to arrive on your site. Keywords, search queries, phrases, etc. Queries that include your domain name, business, or company name. Also think about generic phrases that people use such as ‘blogging with WordPress’. Last but not least, there is the search queries which contain three, four, or five word phrases that identify exactly what the user is looking for. The key to success is to ensure that you have visibility at each point in the user’s journey.

Get Indexed – Make sure your website is able to be crawled effectively by search engine spiders. You can accomplish this by using clean code in your sites design, lack of on page javascript, absence of inline CSS styles, and non dynamic URL paths. The bit about URLs can easily be taken cared of by using a publishing system which supports URL rewriting. This is also a good time to create a sitemap and submit that to the various search engines. Sitemaps tell search engine spiders exactly what to crawl, hence the name.

All About Relevancy – Search engines are based on algorithms, not human thought. So while you might be able to get away with publishing gobbly gook as content on the site that search engines love, it may not be useful for visitors to your site. This means there is a fine line between writing for humans, and writing for robots. My rule of thumb and something I’ve done since day one ands that is to write for humans. I write content that is relevant to my sites purpose, the subject at hand and I use relevant titles to describe content as well as keywords within the content. All of these things put together not only makes sense to humans, but also tells the search engines that my content is relevant towards a specific subject so that I’ll rank higher for when user’s look for information regarding the subject.

Authority Is A Good Thing – Authority is a good thing when it comes to search engines. Authority is generally measured by the number and quality of inbound links to your website. For example, the more inbound links to a site from similar sites known to the engine using keywords in the anchor text, the more authority is given to that receiving site. When talking about Google, they use something known as PageRank to determine a sites authority level. Due to changes in the Google algorithm, it is advised my many to stay away from certain types of link building techniques such as buying links, reciprocal linking and site wide links. If you concentrate on creating good, high quality linkbait, the links will come to you.

These are just a few of the topics we’ll be discussing on this weeks edition of Perfcast so tune in and don’t miss it!