You could do several things if you want to improve the search engine rankings of your website. Below are some of the more important Do’s and Don’ts that you should consider if you want to improve the rankings on your website.
DO’s
Write content that people find interesting and want to share
One of the most important things that you can do, to attract traffic to your site, is to ensure that your website has great content. Without great content that an audience can be engrossed in, your keywords won’t matter for much longer.
Write content that can’t be found anywhere else
It is also important that you generate an audience through organic growth. One of the best ways to ensure that you have organic growth for your website is to have unique website content. If you have content that can’t be found anywhere else, your audience will keep coming back for more.
Refresh your content frequently
Apart from writing great content and ensuring that your content is unique, you need to have fresh and new website content frequently. Because you have created an interest in your content, you want to remain relevant and in your audience’s mind by having fresh content that will satisfy their needs.
Craft good keyword phrases
If you want your website to get noticed at all, you will want to have it high in your priority list, to have keywords or keyword phrases in your content. This doesn’t mean that you should use the same keywords throughout your website; it means that you should at least target a variation of certain keywords that you use on different content.
Use a keyword in your domain or in your website URL
If you can manage to get a domain name that includes a keyword this will be a great advantage towards optimizing your website. If you cannot find a domain name with an optimized keyword, your next best option is to get a keyword in your website URL. Search engines do assign importance to a website based on keywords in a URL.
Consider the keyword density
The keyword density is basically the number of times that you have a keyword in a particular article. Different experts have different recommendations of what this too much. However, it is best to determine for yourself what your audience will feel is too much based on your research.
Make your search terms stand out
After you have determined your target keyword /search phrases you can further highlight your keywords by making them stand out. A good way to do this is to create hyperlinks or using different font color or boldness using your keywords or keyword phrases.
Ask other’s to share links to your page
One great tactic to help you optimize your website is to have inbound links from different websites or sources to your website. The simplest way to do this is to ask other website owners for a quid pro quo, i.e. ask them to share links to your site and you shall do the same for them.
DON’TS
You can do a number of things that will make your website get banned by search engines. Once your site gets banned, it can be very difficult to get back in their good books. Most of the don’ts are more of warnings that will help you not to get your website banned by the major search engines.
Avoid redirecting to a new domain(s)
Spammers have spoiled it for the rest of the website creators. Since spammers are the ones who mostly redirect their audience from one website link to another, search engines often assume that redirects are done with ill intention and it is easy to get banned from search engines for doing so.
Don’t link invisible images
Invisible images are images that are 1 pixel in size; this means that they can be seen by the search engine spider but not by the person viewing the website. If the search engine discovers this, you will be banned because of the misrepresentation.
Don’t link invisible text
The same thing applies to using invisible text as it would for invisible images. Invisible images are usually done by using a font color that is the same as the background, therefore, can’t be seen by the viewer.
Don’t create doorway pages
Doorway pages are web pages designed to have keywords heavily optimized on a web page but are only visible to the search engine spiders and not to the website audience. This is usually intended to fool the website into highly ranking the website. Needless to say that if you get caught and you will sooner or later your website will get banned.
Lalit Sharma is an SEO consultant who runs an SEO house called Ranking By SEO. He is specialized in link building and other SEO related activities. You can also find him on Twitter, Google+ and his personal site.
