SEO Tips

These are some quick, basic SEO tips which will help your website rank high. I’m posting these SEO tips because they’re so basic but people still miss them.

• Submit a sitemap to the major search engines. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all have Webmaster Centers where you can submit a sitemap.
• Use a validator to check your HTML markup. Having invalid markup only makes it more difficult for search engines to crawl your site. I recommend the W3C Markup Validator
• Don’t serve different content to search engines and to people. (Why would you be hiding anything in the first place?)
• Check for broken links. Search engines navigate around your site through your links and any broken links will hurt the deep crawling of your site.
• Make sure your site loads quickly. Google recently announced that sites with quicker load times may rank higher. You can check your load times in Google Webmaster Tools (that information is collected from users with Google Toolbar).
• Don’t have all your content in images and flash. Search engines read text, and that’s what you’ll rank best with.
• Don’t overuse tags. I don’t know why some people think they can have all their content in H1 and use CSS to make it look normal, but some people do that. Use these special tags for important words or titles.
• Take some time to review server logs. Are there any 401 pages? Identify these problems and address them.
• Consider rewriting your links to have static pages. You can get very creative with Apache’s mod_rewrite and this can greatly help your rankings.
• Don’t spam for links. Spamming links will inevitably hurt your website. You don’t want your links on link farms and bad-neighbor websites.