10 SEO Principles To Live By

by Darren McLaughlin

February 8, 2007 – 7:11 am

Yesterday, I spoke about how far SEO can take a website. I concluded that SEO is a vital and needed process, but can’t take the place of other forms of marketing. SEO is something that should be “built-in” to every website, but it’s not something you “do” to the exclusion of all other actions.

I think it’s important to talk about long-term SEO principles which can only help your website.

1) People always tell you to build incoming links to your website, and it’s a very important step. The more incoming links you have, the more likely your website is to be spidered frequently, and the more likely it is that your pages will rank high. You have to try and “get links” until all of your content pages are listed, at least.

2) Make life easy on the spiders. Spiders have a lot of work to do, so you need to help them do it well. Using robots.txt and .htaccess you can control your URL structure and you can make your website more search engine friendliness. Search engine friendliness is almost always a good things.

3) Go social to find other sources of links. If you end up getting all your links from one or two methods, you may find yourself “profiled” in a negative way. That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to add a bit of a random factor and get social to get links. Friendships, etc. may end up getting you links you couldn’t get normally.

4) Offer something truly unique and your SEO and marketing job just got that much easier. If customers or surfers recommend your website to others (especially through links), your job gets easier and your traffic goes up without you having to work hard.

5) Having a high-quality website makes your SEO job simpler, too. The better your site looks and functions, the more likely you are to have success. If you look too shady, many people just might now trust you. Tidy up your website at the beginning of any SEO or marketing initiative.

6) Stay on-topic. It’s easiest to do SEO for a specific niche. If your website is about a subject, be faithful to that subject. If you tend to veer off topic, people will probably not be as loyal to your website, and you may have trouble attracting incoming links.

7) Define the goals of your website as clearly as possible. If you want SEO to help your website, you need to define your expectations and implement a plan that fits in with your current goals.

Stay within the guidelines for maximum longetivity. It’s easier than ever to get knicked by a search engine and find yourself out of luck and out of the index. Follow the rules, and tend to be less agressive in some of your techniques. Better safe than sorry.

9) Be patient. None of this happens overnight. In fact, to rank well in Google will probably take you much longer than you expect. You can’t get to the top as fast as you used to, so you need to do the right things to rank, and exercise patience.

10) SEO is “part” of a well-balanced marketing campaign. Don’t rely on SEO to do things it’s not capable of. Don’t forget there are many other important considerations to running a website,
and you can’t forget them in your quest to rank well.

All of the principles are “common sense”, but well worth pointing out. SEO is a marathon, and the most motivated people tend to succeed in the long term.