Unique content is King. Search engines love new,
unique and updated content. If you produce new content at a rate of
just one reasonably sized page per day and tied in with the other
advice throughout the site, I can almost guarantee you will get good
listings. Remember though, write for the visitors but cater for the
search engines. If your field of expertise fits into a niche in the
market, all the better for you but you must get unique content all you
will fall behind.
Page Structure. Search engine bots can sometimes get confused with
poorly coded html, javascript and other web languages. If the bot has
to wait too long or cannot decipher the web language then it will just
abandon your site and move on to the next, even if it manages to get
through the code it usually leads to poor search engine indexing of
your website. You should also keep to widely used file extensions like
.htm, .html, .php, .asp for your pages.
Loading Speed. The loading speed of your website should be kept to
a minimum, if it takes long than 5 seconds on 256kb+ connections then
you lose visitors - both real and search engine bots. There are a
variety of reasons why pages can load slowly, it may either be your web
server, poorly coded server side code like php or client side code like
javascript which can slow or even stop your page from loading.
Visitor Navigation. This is more an aesthetic feature of your
website focused at real visitors but you need to have some sort of
standard navigation that is the same throughout your whole site. People
can be put off and leave your website if they find it difficult to
browse easily, search engine bots may also miss links if they can only
be found deep within your site. Try to make as many internal links as
possible available on each page.
Site Hierarchy. Site hierachy can be great for adding keyword
density to your web site. An example of site hierachy working
effectively would be this page, seo-advice.php. The full link contains
SEO twice - www.seoassistance.com/seo-advice.php which is very
beneficial in the way search engines determine your sites relevance to
a particular subject. Use your domain, folders and file names to your
advantage.
Avoid Blackhat SEO. Blackhat SEO is a vast topic that commands
little respect from real webmasters as it means using underhand methods
to gain search engine rankings, although the site is usually banned
quickly. Blackhat SEO includes using link farms, search engine
spamming, hidden or disguised text, fake meta tag data, using duplicate
content and using doorway pages. I would recommend you stay away from
tactics like this as you will end up losing out in the long run.
Targeted Linkswaps. Link swaps are great but you must make them
work for you. It does little good for you when your going for top
search engine positions when your link swaps are untargeted. You should
choose some specific keywords for both the link text and the link title
text then make sure before you link swap that the other webmaster adds
those specific keywords with the link.
