SEO: What works?
In my last post (“SEO: A Cautionary Tale“) I pointed out questionable tactics that some “SEO Experts” employ. However, there are some best practices that make your site easier to index and most of them can be done by you, free of charge.
1) Create a Google Webmaster Account: Use Google’s free webmaster tools to optimize your site’s searchability. You can also use this tool to submit a sitemap (a list of all the pages on your site) which ensures search engines have access to all of your content. Don’t forget about Bing’s and Yahoo’s webmaster tools too.
2) Sign up for Google Local Business: If you’re a local business, the major search engines now offer enhanced business listings (often for free) which appear at the top of local search results. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have these types of listings and you should make sure your company is listed with them.
3) Read Google’s SEO Starter Guide: This is an incredible resource, directly from Google, which details the various web design/layout techniques including URL patters, header tags, unique titles and meta descriptions, etc that help Google index your site.
4) Write good content and make your website useful: There’s no substitute for simply making a good, useful website. If you make a website that people enjoy, they will reward you with quality links which will eventually lead to your site being listed where it belongs in Google.
When it comes to your search engine rankings you need to be honest with yourself. Do a search for your most sought after keyword for your business and there are likely millions of results. Now add a state or even a city to that term and there are still probably 10s of thousands of results. Anyone making promises that they can get you to the top of these lists are likely full of it, but the tactics above should at least setup you site so it can be crawled effectively by search engines.
