Learning the Basics Is Critical

Something I read while trawling through the web made me think about the fundamentals of SEO.  Basically before you set out on a SEO campaign you must have the basic techniques before trying the fancy stuff.  This may sound obvious, but, people want quick results so may opt for the more technical techniques wishing quicker results. So before trying to do things like PR sculpting or any other more advanced techniques, ensure that the basics are in place.

You can break SEO into three main areas: Content, Architecture and Links. These are the fundamentals of SEO that need to be understood and get right first.

Architecture – Can your site be crawled?
When commencing on the road of having your website created you need to look at whether or not your site can be crawled by the search engine spiders.  You could be spending hours producing the best content , but if the spiders cannot crawl through then your hard work will be in vain.  Below I will list a few things to which will help make your site more crawl-able:

1.    Try to avoid things like flash or javascript navigation. To date search engines struggle crawling these types of navigation, but who knows in time this may change?

2.    Make your site’s architecture as flat as possible. Keeping your pages as close to the root as possible will help the spiders see your content. In other words, yourwebsite.com/folder/product is much better than yourwebsite.com/category/subcategory/product/product-description.

3.    Distance your site from parameter strings in URLs. Having parameter strings in URLs could have multiple versions of the same content and you will have to learn how to properly use the canonical element. Avoid this by not using parameters. having a static URL for each page whenever possible is the way forward. For example: yourwebsite.com/product-name.htm is much better than mysite.com/?prod-id=432hju&cat-id=abc765.

4.    Internal linking should be used appropriately If it makes sense to link to other pages within the content then do so. Make sure you do no just rely on your sites navigation to get people and the search engines to where you want them to be on your site

5.    Sitemaps. Make sure your site has both an HTML and XML sitemap

I will write next week on tips on content and the good and the bad ways of linking.

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