SEO - Get the Basics right, ignore the BS
While reading through the forums recently Im coming across more and more absolute rubbish advice. Most of it is given by people with 10 posts on a webmaster forum, and are putting forward arguments that are either complete rubbish, or even potentially damaging.
SEO (and many people might hate me for saying this) is not a black art, its not witchcraft, its not even really difficult.
Its about getting the basics done first, and then refining things.
By the basics I really mean the following, which EVERY website should adhere to:
1) content. make sure your site has good, original content. without content you will never rank well.
2) page structure. make sure each one of your pages is well structured, that it has the required title tags, <h> tags, keywords and so on.
3) site structure. make sure that your site is easy to navigate for a human being. if it is, then guess what, it will be for a search engine spider as well.
4) make sure you fill in all the required bits, like title tags, anchor text and so on. Without those a search engine doesn’t know things about your site that it should know to rank well.
5) links: try and get as many links as you can, as long as these conditions are met: a) they are from sites in the same topic, if not they are 90% worthless, b) they contain good anchor text, without that google doesnt know what the link is for.
As far as the basics are concerned, well, thats it. It really is that simple - but so many people fixate over one thing or another and dont look at the picture overall.
Dont get me wrong, there are another 500+ considerations to make your website “perfect” but in reality, no website is ever perfect and there is always room for improvement.
good luck with your optimizing folks!
MM