April 26, 2010

A brief look at SEO techniques from Google

The all revered Google and its intricate and intelligent algorithm seems to have created such a vast amount of writings from webmasters giving "educated guesses" as to how it all works and what the best SEO practices are.

So how does one weave through all the information which includes over a thousand blogs, hundreds of books and articles which say "this worked for me, so this is the way it should be done". Rather than going off on a blind search and spending sleepless nights pondering about all the information you collected, the best bet is to operate off of true SEO facts from the Source itself - Google. Though their system may be confidential, they have no qualms giving webmasters all the guidelines needed to effectively setup and manage your SEO campaigns.

An analogy could be this: An engineer must build a bridge across a large river. The bridge must support over 500 cars at once, allow for pedestrians to safely cross, take in to account all weather conditions and freak storms and also must not deteriorate by Mother Nature's unrelenting touch. The engineer must consider all of these and then work out every nut and bolt, steel beam, cable, concrete weight - the lot. Then, using exact laws and guidelines of physics and other complex calculations he puts this bridge together piece by piece.

Consider now that he did not follow these guidelines or ignored several of the laws of physics, saying to himself, "let's conserve on a bit of money by not putting these bolts here and here, and maybe we can also have a cheaper concrete" etc. Well, what you would have is a bridge which would not be able to stand on its own and collapse into the river, or at best would deteriorate rapidly

. SEO Bridge

The same goes with SEO. Google's search techniques, spiders and algorithm have been designed by men. Smart men. But these people have said 2 + 2 will equal 4 and if you put these 2 numbers together you will get that result. Therefore, not unlike the bridge, building your site's search engine optimization has exact rules, exact guidelines and these must be followed or you will get a flimsy version of what you hoped in SEO or no results at all.

Going to the source - Google

Google's Matt Cutts (Search Engineer) has been providing updates and advice on his blog for several years now. Though his blog has also accumulated over a thousand posts on the subject of SEO and Google techniques and tools to enhance a websites prominence, one can easily pick through it and take the exact information needed to set a foundation of "good SEO practices" which in turn will benefit your rankings.In addition to this, a lot of great information can be found in Google's Webmaster Guidelines and even their Webmaster blog or forums. But note: even in the forums you will find information littered around about "the best techniques of SEO" and other invented information which may not be 100% accurate. Try make it a point to only pay attention to what the members of Google are saying. After all, this is their technology.

Getting Started with SEO

Below are sixteen Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips from Google’s Matt Cutts. Definitely worth reading if you want to increase your changes of getting Google love for your site. And I quote:

Don’t put your blog at the root of your domain. This is recommended if you want to enhance a website's strength (at the root)

Name your directory ‘blog’ instead of ‘wordpress’.

In URLs, no spaces are worst, underscore are better, dashes or hyphens are best.

Use alt tags on images: not only is it good accessibility, it’s good SEO.

Include keywords naturally in your posts. See our article on SEO Copywriting.

Make your post dates easy to find.

Check your blog on a cell phone browser to make sure it is compatible. There are plugins for WordPress which can greatly enhance mobile browser capabilities.

Use partial-text feeds if you want more page views; use full-text feeds if you want more loyal readers.

Blogs should do standard pings.

Standardize backlinks (don’t mix www with non-www).

Use a permanent redirect (301) when moving to a new domain.

Changing files to another folder in the same domain you can use .htaccess to redirect all moved files to the same file in the new folder example: root/file/filename.html redirects to root/newfile/filename.html

Don’t include the post date in your URL.

When moving between domains, wait until Googlebot and traffic begin to visit the new host before taking down the old one.

If using AdSense, use section targeting.

Use FeedBurner’s MyBrand feature to take control of your feeds (i.e., feed.domain.com instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/domain).