My Guide for You on Good SEO Practise

Well everyday I seem to read the same posts about people asking how to get lots of traffic to their sites from search engines, as I'm nearing 2000 posts I've decided I'll share everything I know about SEO with you and I hope you find it to be useful.

Pagerank

What's pagerank

Where better to start with than the mystifying Google Pagerank, everyone has it or wants it yet most don't know how to use it to it's best use. Most people know the basic formula to get a half decent pagerank is to get More Inbound Links than Outbound Links. If your site has 1,000 links to one page and that page doesn't have too many outbound links then you will achieve a good pagerank.

Getting an affective pagerank that will help

The best tip for a useful pagerank is to target any links that are coming to that page of your site with effective keywords, if you site targets arcades then have the link content structured as a keyword that you target such as:

<a href="http://myarcade.com">Games Arcade</a>

Code (markup):

If you were to get 1,000 links to your arcades homepage with this link content then you would receive a good pagerank... but more importantly Google would like this and your chance of linking in the first few pages for "Games Arcade" would be greatly increased.


Content

The next major factor is content, Google will rank a site with unique content better than a site that is full of copy and pasted content from other sites/ forums. If you don't have time to create thousands of words of content for your site then why not head over to the marketplace section and hire yourself a content writer to save you some time?!

Keywords
Before creating your website you should always analyse the keywords you want people to find your site for, bare in mind that higher search keywords such as "Games Arcade" are much more competitive than "Play Free Online Flash Games" thus harder to achieve a good point on the search engines.

One you have decided your keywords I always recommend including them in the following ways within your homepage:

<title>Arcade Games</title>

<h1>Arcade Games</h1>

<strong>Arcade Games</strong>

<a title="Arcade Games" href="http://myarcade.com">Arcade Games</a>

HTML:

Of course when I give these examples they should be spread throughout the pages, the header should be as near the top as possible and the link to your own site may be good in the footer out of the way? But make sure not too over do it as that could have a negative affect upon your work!

URLS

If your site is using a language such as php then you may find your site creates ugly looking URLs, it is always better to use the apache mod-rewrite to change these urls so that they look like static html pages. If you do this then some search engines are more likely to index more pages of your site.

Here is a good guide for getting started with this method: http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite

Domains

I very good tip I find is to ensure the domain you select for your site includes the keywords you want your visitors to find your site for, In my experience it also helps to have a .com name without hyphens.

An example could be arcadegames.com would rank better than pinkblue-arcadefun.biz for the keywords "Arcade Games", this is quite self explanatory but you'd be surprised how people make it harder for themselves right from the start!

Feeds & Sitemaps

I also recommend creating sitemaps and rss feeds for your site, you can then submit these to sites such as feedburner or the sitemap section within Google Webmaster Tools. These enable search engines and everyone on the web to find your sites new content faster and the chances of those new pages being indexed on the search engines faster greatly rises.

You can find many good guides on feeds and sitemaps as they are widely used, you can also link to your own sitemaps and rss feeds within your site.

Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords

Long ago Search engines would concentrate strongly on the meta tags to determine the genre and content of your site, nowadays they are less important. It's more or less a trial and error with meta tags too see how/ if they affect your site. If your using them just to spam in as many keywords as possible then I wouldn't advice on this. If your using them as recommended to give a brief overview of your sites content then this is good practise.

Domain Expiration

Not many people talk about this and I think it's a less known yet golden tip for SEO, if your domain is set to expire within a year then some search engines may not see your site as ambitious whereas if your domain is set to expire in 4 or 5 years time then you may receive more search engine love.

This also works with how long your domain has been registered and not altered or changed accounts, sites that have been around longer naturally rank better so try not to move your domain around too much.



I hope some of these tips are useful and if you have any queries feel free to post them up in this thread and I'll do my very best to help you out,

Have fun with your SEO!

 

Great tips, edxcept that I dont agree with the last point you mentioned, about domain expiration. That is just a ploy made by domainr egistration companies so people would register their domains for longer periods of time hoping it would give out seo benefits.

 

It's worked well for me in the past and if you think about it all whois records display the registration dates.

 

great tips, thanks for sharing

 

Getting an affective pagerank that will help

The best tip for a useful pagerank is to target any links that are coming to that page of your site with effective keywords, if you site targets arcades then have the link content structured as a keyword that you target

You're mixing up 2 concepts here - PageRank is influenced by the number of backlinks and the quality of those backlinks - backlinks that come form a high PageRank page, from a page that has few backlinks and one that has contextual relevance to your site are of better quality.
PageRank is not influenced by anchor text. Your position in serps for the keywords in the anchor text is.

What you say about meta tags is also a little confused. Major search engines don't read keyword meta tags, Google has been unambiguously clear on this. The meta description, however, whilst not a ranking factor, is one of the most vital meta tags, as it directly affects how your listing will look in serps, which will have a direct influence on whether your link gets clicked on when it appears as a result.

 

ok i will use that if it useful in SEO so its great tips for me

 

My point is what is the point in getting a pagerank if it doesn't help you with your rankings? You may as well try and get backlinks that have anchor text that will help you move up the search engines.

With meta tags I meant they are not needed but can be used, your right that the description tag is used for your description, but it's not vital because the search engine will simply use content from your site as the description if you don't specify one.

 

great post