21 Basic Search Engine Optimization Techniques

• 1. Your domain is key, choose a domain that completely reflects your business. For instance, smithcompany.com will not get as much exposure as smithcontruction.com due to the descriptor ‘construction’
• 2. Register your domain for several years, domains that are due to expire within a year or less can be interpreted as potential short-lived spam sites.
• 3. Add or remove www from your url via .htaccess file. Not doing so will result in search engines indexing duplicate sites, (yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com) which will penalize you for duplicate content.
  Here’s the code to do it
  # Rewrite to www.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteEngine Off
• 4. Code it right! Hiring a professional web design firm will ensure you are getting a properly built website that is tailored to search engines.
• 5. Make your visitors feel secure by using industry standard security measures to protect their information.
• 6. Monitor your traffic with analytics from Google, Urchin or Mixpanel. Understanding your traffic sources is the first step towards controlling them.
• 7. Not all hosting providers are created equal. Spend the money to get a proper host, which will result in faster page load time, which is factored in to search results.
• 8. Update your site as often as you can, fresh content means there is new information for your audience and that your site is not stagnant.
• 9. Target you page content. Each page on your site should have a focused key phrase that remains consistent throughout the page.
• 10. Use alt and title tags to make your site Section 508 compliant to allow your site to be accessible by people with disabilities.
• 11. Define your site and terms with a clearly labeled privacy policy, terms of use and site map.
• 12. Submit your site to the major search engines using their webmaster tools.
• 13. Use meta description to identify the general content on each page off your site.
• 14. Blog platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Tumblr are optimized from the start to give you an advantage over static html site.
• 15. Separate your page title descriptors with a pipe ‘|’ or shift+backslash above most enter buttons.
• 16. Validate your html to make sure you have no errors, we prefer the W3c Validator
• 17. Hosting your deliverable files on a content delivery network (CDN) ensures your visitor’s browser loads your site as fast as possible due to the reduced geographical distance between visitor and host server. Search engines will rank sites that load faster higher.
• 18. Build backlinks to your website by posting links to your website wherever you can.
• 19. Compress css and javascript files by removing all whitespace, reducing size and load time.
• 20. Have a 404 error page to help lost visitors find their way.
• 21. Remember that SEO is a fickle beast that constantly updates. It is more of a strategy than a rulebook. You will never be able to hit every mark, but having a basic guide should put you on the path to success.