SEO Best Practices for Ethical Beginners
There are a few best practices to ethical SEO every webmaster should know. What astounds me is how many are overlooked or deprioritized. So, here’s JDM’s top five ethical SEO best practices every webmaster needs to know and love.
01. It Matters Who You Hang Out With
Believe it or not, it matters who you link to and who links to you. Linking to (or from) shifty people puts you in exactly the same boat. It’s the same thing from an SEO standpoint. Don’t allow pingbacks from link farms anymore than accept drinks from “that shady guy” at the bar.
02. Don’t Stress the META
There’s a lot of effort that goes into META tags, but a majority of them (Author, Generator, and even Keywords) are not worth the stress. Most search engines ignore them. The one’s that don’t use them only in the event they can’t understand your site in the first place–in which case you’ve got bigger problems. Just don’t stress out too much with META tags. They’ll go away within a few years because of all “those people” NOT leveraging ethical SEO best practices.
03. TITLE Tags are Critical
OK, so I just said META tags don’t matter, but for now the only one worth stressing out about is the TITLE tag. This is the tag users see when they bookmark a page, view it in their browser (in the tab or across the top of the window) and, more importantly, as the link in search results.
Because this META tag is the primary one used in search engine results as the link, it’s essentially your SEO Call-to-action. That makes META TITLE tags critical for ethical SEO.
04. Death and Taxes
They say there’s only two things that are certain in this world: death and taxes. The only other thing that is certain (when it comes to SEO) is that things change–and quickly. It’s important to stay on top of what SEO tactics are working and [tooltip content='Like the META Keywords tag has been made obsolete' url='' ]which have been deprioritized[/tooltip].
If there’s one piece of advise I could give to ethical beginner SEO-ers, it would be to stay ethical. Most of the changes search engines make are to stop spammers and other unethical people from gaming the system. If you’ve got something important, interesting or valuable to say, say it. SEO is simply the garnish that pulls all the elements of your dish together.
05. Quality over Quantity
Don’t kill yourself trying to build a 10,000 page site right off the bat. As you develop new and better content the site will grow (especially if you’re using a CMS). If you’re using a content marketing strategy, it’s gonna take patience.
The key is simply quality of content over quantity. Just because you have a lot of random thoughts, doesn’t mean anyone (and search engines by extension) will care.
Extra Credit?
For those ‘over achievers’ out there. Here’s a little extra-credit reading. Download JDM’s “Crash Course in SEO” PowerPoint presentation for a more in-depth and visual (lots ‘o screenshots) review of basic, but ethical, SEO best practices.
Loading...
I like what Josh McCoy recently said on the subject:
“I had spent years placing all my concern SEO-ing sites to the fullest to maximize traffic potential. At the end of the day I realized that hordes of traffic mean nothing if they don’t convert.”
See Josh’s article: Beyond SEO: Retaining the Visitor.
I look at SEO less as a tactic or deliverable and more as the thread woven through all your other marketing activities.
Muah ha ha ha… I wouldn’t know *innocent face*
Seriously though, I could list things from really old school techniques like keyword stuffing pages using text that’s the same color as your background (circa 1998) to content leeching (which is exactly what it sounds like), but the bottom line is that any gains you achieve with these techniques will be short-lived. After search engines re-calibrate their algorithm to negate whatever ‘clever’ techniques you’ve implemented to inflate your ranking, they may just remove your site from search results altogether. It’s pretty much the internet version of banishment to a Siberian gulag, and a good reason to be suspicious with SEO ‘companies’ that promise you ‘instant first page ranking in Google’.
Well said! –> Get a Gravatar, @Andy: http://labs.jdm-digital.com/2011/02/gravatars/
I wonder what would be the Top 5 UNethical SEO best practices…?