Basic SEO Rules
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)has become the crucial element of a newly launched website.
Still, some website owners very often neglect basic SEO Rules which could prevent numerous problems with both website ranking and content management.
They say practice makes perfect. That’s why we decided to review the main SEO tips again.
- To keep your site user-friendly use internal linking. Search engines like good anchor text to your pages and several links with strong pages.It is useless though to link to the same page several times – it means nothing for search engines while visitors to your website will simply get annoyed. One more point to remember is not to leave pages that are not linked internally at all.
- Search engines like when headers and sub-headers are used wisely. The most important parts of the page should be <h1> and <h2>. Avoid spamming your website with numerous headers of lower-level tags.
- Building your footer links hierarchy, keep in mind the following: these are good for internal navigation, but search engines pay close to no attention to this part of your site.
- One more rule goes as follows: images are for viewing, not for linking. This means that you should not use images as links. The reason for this is that it is much easier for search engines to read proper text, rather then linked pictures. Another wide spread mistake is to rely too much on flash files that are invisible to search engines at all.
- Your website URLs should be user-friendly too. For more information read here.
- Proper use of the noarchive and noindex tags is very often overlooked by website owners. Not all of the content should be crawled and indexed by search spiders. Sections like “About Us”, “Privacy Policy” or “Returns Policy” etc. can be marked with noindex tags without any damage for your website.
- Social bookmarking is what both search engine and visitors enjoy. Social bookmarks can be easily shared with friends, since they are saved to the web. Still, be careful with external links generated by social bookmarking plugins since too many external links can devalue all the links on the page. That’s why it is recommended to make social bookmarking icons ‘nofollows’.
- Do not overuse Ajax. A big mistake among many developers and designers is the overuse of Ajax. Ajax is generally not indexed by search engines and visitors to your website will not be able to send the page to their friends, since the URL does not reload.
