Why It’s Time To Go Back To SEO Basics

Every year, the search engines make a number of updates to their algorithms, allowing them to wheedle out the websites that use black hat, or unethical, search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. In many cases, this leaves the experts responsible for craft the content of websites in a right mess – the techniques that were once considered okay to use may suddenly get you penalized, after all. This is why it’s time to go back to the SEO basics.

So, how can you go about stripping your website back to its SEO roots? There are actually a number of ways that you can do this, including:

• Develop a list of keywords from scratch by thinking about the words and phrases that your customers would use to search for your products or services. This will make sure that your keywords are up to date with the advancements of the industry.
• Optimise your title and meta tags, ensuring that they are both accurate and descriptive. Make sure that you focus on the meta description tag, as most search engines ignore meta keyword tags, thereby making them useless for SEO.
• Create a sitemap if your website doesn’t already have one (or it needs to be added to). You also need to make sure that you submit this sitemap to the search engines. In terms of SEO, a sitemap can actually help the search engine spiders to index your content.
• Create meaningful anchor text wherever possible. Whilst it is difficult to control how external websites link to your own, you can further your SEO by using relevant keywords and the like in links that you post internally on your site.
• Create simple and easy to understand URLs, as these are extremely user friendly. In terms of SEO, comprehensive URLs can actually help search engine spiders to crawl your content and index it.
• Look for diversity in your links because the search engines look for variety in your SEO as much as they do quality. Get links from everywhere, such as respected online sources, press releases, blogs and comments, forums, articles and so on.
• Get natural with your linking, meaning that you need to set them up in a way that an average person (who is not an SEO expert) would do them; this is something that the search engines also like to see.

And the list of ways that you can go back to your SEO basics continues, mostly focusing on what you shouldn’t do (at least, if you want your website to rank well and avoid penalties). Basically, by following each of the above points and steering clear of the black hat SEO techniques that are out there, you can ensure that the search engines love crawling your website; you might even see an increase in your ranking.