10 SEO Tips Everyone With A Website Should Know
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October 27th, 2006 
Posted in: Search Engine Optimisation 
34 Comments I’m going to start with the basics here. The following are ten things everyone with a website should know to gain online visibility in search engines. These are the basics of the basic and when applied will give you a firm basis to start a long term Search Engine Optimisation campaign. The structure of your website is important, just as much as the structure of your link building campaign. I know these may seem rehashed, but they are the building blocks for a good SEO campaign.
1) A Keyword Rich Domain. While not always possible, when setting up a new website, consider setting it up on a domain that contains the sites main keywords. Search Engines give considerable weight to a website with keywords in the URL. Never use a keyword stuffed domain (ie. www.your-key-word-here-and-another.com)
2) Title Tag.
The title tag on your page is the most powerful on page factor you can control as a webmaster. Use it wisely. Carefully choose which keywords are going to go in here and remember that it will be read by humans as well as search engines. Never stuff keywords into your title. It only devalues its weight and makes you look spammy.
3) Heading Tags.
The second most important on page factor you can control is the heading tags. Not only are they useful for search engines to determine the context of your document, it is semantically sound HTML practice.
4) Bold, Strong and Emphasis Tags.
While there is no set answer to which carries more weight, assume that both are the same. Emphasize keywords in bold using the BOLD or STRONG tags. Search engines give more weight to keywords if they are emphasized.
5) Keyword Rich Text.
It is always possible to rank for search terms when they are not on your page but using them sparingly will only help increase your search engine visibility for these keywords and
6) Structured Navigation And Correct Internal Navigation.
Make it easy for search engines to index your entire site. Use a text link navigation. I this is not possible, use a sitemap or second text navigation in the footer of your site.
7) Keyword Rich Internal Links.
Use your sites main keywords in the anchor text when linking to pages within your site. This not only describes the link to your visitors, it also lets the search engines know what content is on the page being linked to.
8) Avoid Flash.
While some search engines claim that they can index some flash content, it is still in its infancy. An entire website does not need to be built in flash. Use it wisely and make sure any text that is output by flash is rendered as HTML text so search engines can see it. If possible, avoid flash completely.
9) Avoid Duplicate content.
Search Engines do not like duplicate content. Make sure all the content on your website is different on all pages. Many navigation elements, headers, footers etc. is the same, but make sure that each page has marginally more unique content. Some search engines give a penalty for duplicate content, while others just ignore it. Just make your content unique. If anything else, it benefits your site visitors.
10) Keyword Rich, Relevant Inbound Links.
A relevant, keyword rich inbound link is the holy grail of online marketing. There are many ways to get quality inbound links to your website. Directory Submissions, Article writing/marketing, Press Releases, Posting in forums and blogs, Link Exchanges. Obtaining inbound links is the undisputed king of SEO tactics.
We will be going into more detail on each of the above methods over the coming weeks. Am I missing any? What other basic SEO tips are essential to today’s SEO?
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November 27th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Excellent Post Dave.
And are meta Tags not as Important anymore?
Cheers
November 27th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
Well, over the years as meta tag keyword stuffing became prominent, search engines adjusted their algorithms to give less weight to the tags. A LOT less weight. Now, meta tag weight is so negligible that many webmasters no longer even use them.
You will notice that I use them here. The main reason is because Google will normally list a sites meta description ( Of course we all know this is query dependent ) as the description in SERPS. I would prefer to have control over this rather than let Google choose what to display.
Of course, Google will also, again query dependent, show the DMOZ/Google directory listing description unless you use the <meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” /> tag. Matt Cutts has a nice take on this over at his blog.
November 28th, 2006 at 12:36 am
Thats assuming your lucky enough to have a dmoz listing.Some of us are not quite as fortunate.
November 28th, 2006 at 7:55 am
Yahoo and MSN give a lot more weight to meta tags than google. I don’t think Gbot even reads them but i read somewhere that Slurp! spends 30% of his ‘botting’ on meta tagging.
November 29th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Good to see you’re up and running Dave :)
Nice post. Google are increasingly using the META title and description as part of their duplicate content filter. Using the same METAs throughout your site will probably raise a flag.
PS there’s a meta in here that’s breaking validation :)
November 29th, 2006 at 11:40 am
@Cormac, thanks for the comment. I think I will do an experiment on two brand new domains on a zero competition keyword, or something along the lines of that to see if the effect is even measurable.
@Richard, thanks for the comment too. I was actually making the noodp tag into an image to solve that problem. Content here is basic and will be basic for a while so I have something to refer back to with more in depth posts (Most of which are already written). At least now I have somewhere to rant and rave and not go crazy on other…. search engine optimisation blogs ;)
November 29th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
You’re always very welcome to pop in at an time :)
January 30th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Hello Dave,
Are keyword density, keywords meta tag and PR of web page not important?
Jon
February 22nd, 2007 at 8:15 pm
You’ve written a very good list of advice! Thanks.
1) I’ve noticed that MSN really favours you if you have keywords in your domain! (more then Google)
4) I’ve followed what Matt Cutts from Google was saying on strong/bold issues. First he said Google favoures “strong” a bit but some time later he said that they changed the rule and that strong and bold are completely the same for Google.
9) I agree if by penalty you mean your content might not show in the search results on that particular copied page but it’s hard to image duplicate notent can do other harm .Sites can have duplicate content for perfectly valid reasons like a version of the page for mobile and many others and it would be funny to penalize them. I tend to believe that the duplicate content gets filtered in the search results but doesn’t penalize your site.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:52 pm
I am surprised that there is no “dynamic linking” in that list.
For some resaon many SEO experts use it on there own sites but then don’t promote it to there customers. Works great for increasing not only ranking but all PageRank.
Personally I have found that most webmsters don’t want to spend the extra money to dynamically link their site, especially if a large site.
Be interested to know what others think about it here?
Cheers, Chris
March 19th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
good post Dave, however you left out the old ‘link to authority sites” gag (which I think is reasonably important)
regarding “avoid flash completely”, I feel this is not the best advice (however good for novices).. providing [non-flash] equivalent content is what is required, and of course using the accessibility features of flash is essential.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Maybe I was a little hash on avoiding flash completely, but if you do not know what you are doing and do not really need flash, it’s best to avoid it.
About linking to authority sites, I am firm believer that this holds weight, but due to the ten point limit I set in the title and the fact that it is a deep, research driven topic, I decided to leave it out (Along with MANY others).
Thanks for stopping by Erigena.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
thanx for the neat list!
does anybody know more about mirror pages? i’ve heard sumtn like if you have mosty flash content (like webapps n stuffs) it’s recommended to build a mirror of the complete architecture and content which will be read by robots only.. is it possible to develop such a virtual site like this, for strictly non-human purposes? or i’m just dreaming.
thx in adv
cheers, geza
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Geza, I wouldn’t reccomend it. I would however advise as I said, use XML to parse all text into a nice readable format by engines and users without flash.
Better yet, avoid using flash for text output and navigation. You can create a fantastic looking flash site using standard HTML and navigation.
September 3rd, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Just stumbled across this page. Some great advice here!
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Just came across this article and although it was written nearly a year ago all the points mentioned remain valid today. It just goes to show how basic and honest white hat techniques will never fail you if done correctly. Even if Google’s Algorithm changes you can bet on most of these simple techniques staying strong.
Great Advice!
April 6th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Thanks for the advice.
I had no idea that search engines recognized and gave weight to bolding, nor that a main keyword in the domain name was important.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:46 am
It seems that this page good score because i was looking for some articles about using of bold and strong tags and come here.
It is very clear and good explain without going into more details and it looks to me as 10 golden tips for anyone who start with SEO.
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Thank you for the advice. I am trying to follow almost all of these rules but it is always useful to read them and remind them once again.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
I also just stumbled across this page. Great advice, but very standard.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Absolutely fine Dave davis. I always follow this standards for my website but I feel the most important factor which we should never forget is unique content which is the root of any website.
In my seven years of experience I found many techniques for making website appear looks google friendly with respect to visitors.
Also as you said that internal linking should be accurate and the greatest benefit of this is teleportation. ( being an seo you are well aware of it)
Even I was not aware of that but after long research I came to this conclusion.
Thanks dave again for this helpful information.
July 1st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I still believe in meta “description” tag. If that conveys clear message then the possibility of CTR will be high even in natural listing from search engines.
August 25th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
thanks for ur TIPS, I have used almost every but Bold, Strong and Emphasis Tags.
March 7th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Great tips for newbie SEOS, cheers
March 31st, 2009 at 8:00 am
I think that this page has a good score. I was looking for some articles about using of bold and strong tags and arrived here.
It is very clear and good explained without going into more details. It looks to me as 10 golden tips for anyone who wants to start with SEO. Thank you!
April 12th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
These are some really useful tips. Thanks and greetings!
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Is it good practice to do a internal link back to the same page at the bottom of your page on your pages keyword?
June 8th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
These are great tips and good thing that I am implementing all of them. I can attest that those are real effective tips that anyone in the internet marketing business should employ.
July 24th, 2009 at 5:55 am
In my experience, meta tags still matter a great deal, altho’ i didn’t know about BOLD.
December 20th, 2009 at 2:47 am
Thanks a lot for the tips. Great info.
February 20th, 2010 at 9:37 am
Thank you for the tips. This is very well written.
Also, I totally agree that meta tags have really fallen off for Google. A site should still have them, but they really don’t change much as far a Google is concerned.
March 3rd, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Thanks for these tips. They are basic but they are the very foundation of any successful SEO ventures out there.
March 11th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Great post it really helped to optimise my site.
However I have found that it has only gotten me so far I have tried to generate links by adding my site to as many directories as possible…is this a good practice?
I have also tried genering what I understand as anchor text links but not sure I am doing it right.
Is this the correct format?
March 11th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Not sure if that was genuine or incredibly cheeky Jonathan, I’m leaning toward the latter. Just so you know, the links in the URL field and the link that you posted are nofollowed so they will be of absolutely no value to you.
Regarding directories, VERY few hold any value any more. DMOZ, Yahoo, Business.com, Joeant and BOTW are the only ones we submit to any more. I suggest that you head on over to SEOmoz and read their guides and there are thousands of articles on linkbait and link building. There’s ALWAYS something you can write that can get you links.