What SEO Techniques Work?
So you have your site completed and you are ready to invest some time optimising it for Google. Where do you start and what are the most important elements of optimisation?
Well, SEO can be divided into two sections, i.e. ‘off-page’ and ‘on-page’ optimisation. First you need to start by getting the on-page factors correct. I will not go into the details of on-page optimisation as there are many sites which detail this. Suffice to say that you must get this right from the start and make sure each page has a dedicated and well-defined set of keywords and that each page is optimised for those keywords (links, images, text). If you ignore this step your SEO efforts will be severely hampered and may result in messy stats for your site. Equally important in your on-page SEO efforts is following good practice guidelines and avoiding certain coding style/techniques which might be considered black-hat or even grey-hat (e.g. using Javascript to disable the browser’s ‘back’ button). These might work for a short time, but you risk being penalised by Google and having your site thrown into the sandbox.
Off-page optimisation is quite labour-intensive but a critical part of SEO. This is where most of your attention will be focused. You will need to get links to your site from other sites. These in-bound links should come from a wide variety of sites, of different page rank and with different keywords in the anchor text of the link. Google wants a site’s popularity to grow naturally, so any SEO practices which follows an unnatural pattern will flag your site to Google and potentially result in a penalty. Get your in-bounds links in an organic fashion by creating good link-bait and absorbing content. As you manually harvest links, try to do so in a gentle exponential manner, starting with a few links and gradually acquiring more and more. Make sure the links come from a statistically viable range of PR’s. I.e. most of your links should come from pages of PR 0, 1 and 2, with a decreasing number of links from higher PR pages.
The rule of thumb is to make all your SEO efforts look as natural as possible. Stick to this rule and your site should enjoy an increase in PR and traffic. Flout it and you run the risk of being sandboxed by Google.
