SEO Basics

Li over at Search Marketing Gurus wrote a great little article on the 5 Basic SEO rules to keep in mind when launching a new website. If you can only follow a few SEO rules for your new website, this is a list of “must follows”. Here is Li’s list:

1. Don’t Re-Use Your Title Tag On Every Page

You would think this would be a “no brainer”, however, I still see websites that have “Welcome to our website” as the title tag for every page. For an in-depth discussion of title tags and their importance, check out our Title Tags SEO Article.

2. Keyword Research

If you are designing your web site yourself, You must perform keyword research. If you are hiring a professional web design company, they should do this for you. Without keyword research, how will you know what search terms to target?

3. Don’t Use Keywords In Images

Any text you put in an image will not be read by Search Engines.

4. Check Your Robots.txt File

This is the best way to make sure the good Search Engine robots go where you want them to go.

5. Provide An HTML Version of Your Sitemap

This is in addition to the sitemap.xml file you should create. However, the HTML version of your sitemap “lives” on your web site and is important to use to make sure that the robots find all of the pages of your site.

Li ends her article with more great advice: These steps are the very basics and do not cover the complete SEO process. There is a lot that goes into building a web site that will have SEO success, so make sure to do your homework and get help if you need it.

Read Li’s entire article here.