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4 Basics of Good Search Engine Optimization

Always consider the quality of experience for real human visitors before you think of optimizing for the search engines. The search engines are always tweaking the way they rank pages. Humans, on the other hand, have a consistent expectation of things they want from websites. Remember that in the end the humans are the ones who will become readers, customers, and clients, not the serach engine spiders.

  1. Create good content. Without good content there is no reason for a human to ever come to your site. If there is no reason for a human to vistit your site, why should a search engine index your page? Make your content useful, creative, original, fresh, informative, entertaining, and tailored for human consumption.
  2. Easy to Navigate! Humans should be able to easily navigate your website and find the content they want. Try to create navigation structures that are logical and organized. You might even consider creating multiple paths of navigation within your site. The more paths their are to reach a given page, the better the chances that a visitor will find the page. Search engines also take this into account and reward pages and sites that have good navigation and redundant navigation by giving them higher rankings. Now maybe it does not make sense to have multiple paths of navigation to all of your pages, but your most important pages should be within 1-2 clicks of any page on your whole site.
  3. Your website should be alive! If a website never changes, then there will be a point when a human will have become so familiar with the material, that there is little if any reason to return. Make sure that you update with some regularity. This way visitors will also know how often to come back, whether that is monthly, daily, weekly or on any other schedule. Over time the search engine spiders will notices the patterns of when your site is updated and will re-crawl your pages accordingly.
  4. Be part of a community! By becomming part of an on-line community you have the benefit of associating with people of similar interests. You get related link benefits, which are good because people already interesting in your area or topic will be able to find you easily, and the search engines will better know how to categorize your site.