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SEO Principals 2011

David Correll on October 25, 2011 | SEO | Comments (0)

The world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is ever changing. Today I wanted to highlight some of the most important aspects you should be paying attention to in your SEO work.

There are a number of areas of importance:

1. Utilising all search engines available
2. Promoting your product/ landing pages
3. Building Links and traffic to your website
4. Minimising duplicate content
5. SEO friendly web hosting
6. SEO friendly site design
7. Social sharing

So lets touch on each of these points:

1. Utilising all search engines available to you

Any good SEO professional will case their net as wide as possible. In my opinion you should signup to both Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools. Bing is gaining more and more momentum and continuing their global rollout of powering Yahoo Search. As a result don’t just submit your site to Google, submit it to Bing aswell.

Google webmaster tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Bing webmaster tool: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Make sure you submit an XML sitemap to both of these webmaster sections.

2. Promoting your product or landing pages

If you have product or landing pages you want to promote, give them some extra link juice. Add a link on your homepage to these important pages. The search engines will see you placing greater importance on these pages and rank you higher. Don’t overdo links on your homepage however – try and keep it below 100 links.

3. Building Links and traffic to your website

One of the single most important aspects of good SEO is quality incoming links. Try get as many as you can, ask your friends and colleagues if they can link their sites to yours.

4. Minimising duplicate content

Minimising duplicate content on your site is an important step in achieving good SEO results. Don’t copy and paste press releases onto your site or it could actually damage your SEO work. If you are posting press releases try alter the wording and phrases so it’s more unique. This will put you ahead of the competition as many other sites won’t bother in rewording press releases.

5. SEO friendly web hosting

To further enhance your SEO efforts you want to host your site on a faster server, preferably having your own unique IP address. This ensures that no other sites can impact your search engine rankings.

If you are on a shared host and sharing an IP address with hundreds of other sites, one of these could get the IP address banned with Google which then goes on to impact all other (non-related) sites sharing this IP address – ouch!

6. SEO friendly site design

When building a website, HTML is the preference search engines like. PHP is still ok, but consider caching pages to increase page speed and reduce server load.

If you are using iFrames on your site, try remove them for a more SEO friendly web design – search engines don’t like iFrames.

7. Social sharing

We are now seeing that how much your article gets shared on social media sites can actually impact your search engine rankings.

If you have a piece of content that gets a lot of social sharing, some of the search engines will pick up on this quickly and you can rank very well.

Ask your friends, colleagues and acquaintances to share your content on a daily basis if they are willing.

We hope you find these tips useful. In the SEO world you want to give your site every possible advantage you can. Read over these points and check how many of these principal SEO elements you are adhering to. Got any tips you’d like to share with us?