SEO Dos and Don’ts

When first beginning to implement an SEO strategy into your company website, it can seem like a very daunting task – one that you don’t want to get wrong. The internet is full of advice on what you should and shouldn’t do in SEO, and here are a few of the most important ones:

Do:

• Upload good quality content to your website. Content is very helpful for SEO, but make sure it is worth somebody’s reading time.
• Have an awareness of your keywords. It is amazing how many businesses these days don’t know which keywords are going to be most beneficial for their SEO strategy. Think about what people would type in if they were looking for a service like yours.
• Research your keywords. There are many tools available that can help you to determine which keywords are most likely to result in sales for your business – make using them an integral part of your SEO strategy.
• Use navigation that the search engine spiders can follow. The most important things in SEO is making sure that the spiders can find your website, read all of the content, and follow your links.
• Try and get good quality external links. If you get other websites to link to your site, this is highly beneficial to your SEO. And it works even better if they use one of your keywords in the link.

Don’t:

• Pay to have links to your website featured on other sites. This is known as link buying and it is a big SEO no-no.
• Cloak your website so that it appears one way for the search engine spiders and another for human visitors. While this was a popular practice years ago, it is now considered very bad SEO practice.
• Hide keyword rich text around your website. People have been known to do this by making the font the same color as the background, using 0.001 sized font or using a z-index to hide it behind pictures. The search engines are onto these little SEO tricks.
• Upload fake content to your website. Some people will create SEO pages that are solely to be used for getting keywords past. Not only is this against the terms of service for most search engines, it makes anyone who reads the page think your business is a joke.
• Use Flash or Javascript as a part of your SEO if you can help it. Search engines cannot read these languages and will just skip over them.

By adhering to these SEO dos, you can be sure your website will be optimized for the best possibly chance at receiving good rankings. Implementing too many of these SEO don’ts will just get you banned or blacklisted, which isn’t really worth the trouble.