|
Five Best Ethical SEO Tips To Consider
By Joe Griffin
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-07-13
There are so many tips out there that tell us how to conduct an effective SEO campaign to help our websites achieve their full potential. Search engine optimization is the key to website success as it increases your website's marketability, and ultimately, it helps site owners achieve their end goals, whether it's profit maximization or increased awareness for a certain news topic.
A lot of these articles discuss the many different elements of SEO, so much so that you might be bewildered on which of these aspects you really want to give priority.
True, most of the existing tips on the Internet are able to cover all aspects of ethical and organic SEO. However, there are so many effective ways to increase your search engine rankings that it is often difficult to remember all of them. What you would want is to determine what SEO techniques are the most effective AND ethical and focus on them. Doing this will save you so much time while getting the most out of these techniques. Moreover, we have to utilize the right methods to avoid penalties from doing black hat SEO tactics.
Here are the five best ethical SEO tips to consider that will boost your search rankings:
1. Offer Fresh Quality Content
One of the basic techniques used to achieve success in SEO campaigns is to create well-planned site contents. Content is one of the biggest determinants of SEO success and search engine rankings. A website can only be ready to undergo SEO improvements when it has all the fresh and interesting content that it needs to attract readers to begin with. As the publisher of your site, you have the duty to regularly input unique content that are relevant to your target audience for search engines to take notice.
Always keep in mind of the quantity and quality of the topics you put in. This can be tedious, but it will surely pay off.
2. Use Anchor Texts
The relevance of the anchor text is one of the most important elements in determining rankings. An anchor text is the link text, and it is vital to review their relevance with respect to your content. Your external links carrying the anchor text should be related to the page within your domain that they all link to. Make sure if the external link's substance is relevant to the keywords or phrases with your target page. It will even bring more boosts if the external link includes related keywords that are located in sections where search engines find most important, like the body of the text. Make sure that the keywords used in your site URL, tags, the body of the content, and links directing to your pages are relevant to your site's content.
The anchor text is an important attribute that gives all of your pages ranking values that are measured by search engines. More importantly, search engines recognize that anchor texts that contain exact matches to your topic has greater ranking value than keywords combined as a long anchor text phrase, since long text phrases specify the query too much and limits your visibility in search engines.
For example, if your website features a detailed guide on cleaning and taking care of a big house, and you need to obtain external links from an online shop selling home care products, you will need to ensure whether the site has anchor texts related to your topic. In this case, it could be "home care," "clean home," etc., instead of "These affordable home care products will clean your apartment at a low cost."
3. Follow the One-Homepage Policy
This simply means that you have to make sure search engines won't think your website has multiple variations. It is crucial for website owners that search engines can only locate your site in a single location, because there is a tendency that your site can be found in various domains without knowing it. The latter would give your site some SEO problems if you are not careful with establishing your homepage URL properly.
For instance, your site has its usual address at http://www.sitedomain.com. But there are multiple ways to key in your site address, such as:
http://mysitedomain.com
http://www.sitedomain.com/index.html
http://sitedomain.com/index.html
http://www.sitedomain.com/index.htm
http://sitedomain.com/default.asp
Search engines don't distinguish the various ways of how visitors key in your site's URL. They consider the URLs above as dissimilar pages, even if they are meant to locate the exact same page. Without doing any corrections, search engines would think of them as different sites. In this case, all the link juice would be divided and make it less relevant, compared from the high value it could give if directed towards a single domain.
To correct this, start by choosing your main URL or homepage for the website and make sure that all disparities of the site address will still point to your main URL. You will need to establish 301 redirects for all the URL disparities. In HTTP protocols, a 301 redirect is a permanent command that directs the browser to another web location while maintaining search rankings. It delivers the ranking score of the URL disparity to your main homepage so your domain will show up and rank in search engines properly. You also need to fix the site navigation to check whether all of your internal links will direct to your homepage or not.
4. Fix Your Internal Links and Site Navigation
Internal links give proper structure within your site. They connect all the parts of your site to create a smooth transition from one page to another. Not only they give convenience to your visitors, but they also give search engines easier time to crawl all the pages. This only means that the PageRank values of your pages will be properly juiced out from your site to add more ranking points.
The homepage should be the most visible for search engines, and thus you can synergize all ranking points towards your homepage by properly placing the links that would direct to the homepage in recognizable areas within your site. The number of links you create will also determine whether they are all enough to create that needed synergy.
A content management system, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, can help you fix internal navigation problems. Without CMS, your pages would scatter all over your site, leaving your site disorganized especially if your site has a lot of material and giving search engine crawlers more difficult time to index your site.
The most relevant information should be collected and place them at the homepage as a navigation to give users the general idea of what your site contains. Use relevant keywords in your site navigation so your visitors can easily go to the different areas of your site while having an idea what they are all about. Another thing is to create a site map as a guide for search engines to where they should index from.
5. Use Google Webmaster Tools
Site owners and search engine optimization specialists will also definitely benefit from Google Webmaster Tools. It is a free service created by Google to provide SEOs and site owners the right tools to set and monitor the site's crawl rate, discover error logs each time your site experience unexpected glitches, look at the most common keywords used to find your site, observe the robots.txt file, and more SEO-related utilities. With Google's webmaster resources, you can scrutinize search engine traffic stats and site visibility with more precision, acquire even more insights on how to boost a website's online visibility, and maximize the potential of any business website.
Comments
About the Author:
Joe has over 12 years experience in the search engine marketing industry. He co-founded Submitawebsite.com in 1997, served as a Vice President, Media at iCrossing for 3-years, and sold Submitawebsite to Web.com (Nasdaq:WWWW) in April 2007. Joe is Managing Director at iAcquire, and oversees corporate development and business strategy.
|
|
