Starting SEO

Posted on August 27, 2007 by Neil

Categories: Development, Marketing, Web Design

I just started using a great website called LinkedIn. It’s basically MySpace for professionals. One of the neat features is that users can ask business relevant questions in order to find answers from anyone around the world. Today, someone asked what are the most important aspects to starting SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? I narrowed it down to three core areas.

Content
First off, content is key. The more dynamic and keyword rich your content is from the homepage all the way through the site, the better relevance you will have in searches. Also, if you make many updates to just your news or blog sections, that should increase your relevance as well. Finally, using bold, underline, italics, and more links in the actual physical content will create higher relevance to certain words in a given page.

Site Development
Secondly, the actual development of your website is very important. Your website should be coded using web standards and should not over use javascript or flash. This is especially significant with the navigation system of your website. This is the one area where flash and javascript are used a great deal. Using these for the navigation usually hinders the spiders (the search engine bots) from being able to crawl from page to page. Images should use Alt tags. A Google compliant XML site map of your site should be developed.

Linking
Lastly, consider your exposure. Get your site linked from other popular websites in order to drive traffic. This could be as simple as submitting your website to a bunch of design galleries (if your site is of exceptional design) or more complex as building affiliate relationships with similar businesses. The more cross traffic you create, the higher you will go up in search engines as well.