Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices (Part 1)
“Best Practice asserts that there is a , method, process, activity, incentive or reward that is more effective at delivering a particular outcome” - en.wikipedia.org
What are SEO Best Practices? In SEO, best practices include the technical and editorial criteria that search engines look for when assessing a website relevancy to users’ search queries.
According to SEMPO Institute, there are 6 important, high-level criteria that we must consider to make our
SEO a success. We will go through them in this and subsequent post that follow.
SEO Best Practice #1: Unique HTML Title meta tags should be used for every individual web page.
Most search engines use the words in the HTML Title metatag to provide the title for the link displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). It is also believed that the Title mets tag is also important criteria for determine the relevant of keywords phrase and page ranking in SERP.
Eg. the title tag of my page
<title>JasonChew: Internet Management Consulting, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization SEO, PPC, Web Analytics</title>
If my title tag is keyword riched and have good keyword prominence, density and weight, then it is consider good title. As I written in the previous post, title tag can never be more than 120 characters. Some SEO experts even recommends dividing the title into 2 parts of 66 and 54 each and further optimizing each part. I guess is because Google only display up to 66 characters while Yahoo up to 120 characters.
SEO Best Practice #2: Anchor text within hyperlinks on a web page can identify a keyword focus.
The anchor text used in hyperlinks should contain targeted keywords followed by a brief description of the
subject matter. The anchor text should be keyword-rich text links.
Eg. for this post’s title it is hyperlinked as such:
<a href=”http://jasonchew.net/2009/03/14/search-engine-optimization-seo-best-practices-part-1“>Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices (Part 1)</a>
It is already keyword-riched and it is followed by the subject matter which is the content of this post.
SEO Best Practice #3: A primary keyword supported by related keywords will establish context in each web page.
A primary keyword should be assigned to each web page with supporting or related keywords to further explain context. This is similar to the anchor text example above.
By doing this, Search engines will understand the meaning and the context of the primary keyword. Furthermore, keywords that are closely related to the text help the search engine know what your site pages are about and deduce the relevancy of our page to users’ searches. This also help to establish a theme for the site.
P.S: To be continue… I will discuss the next 3 best practices in the next post.
Tweet, HTML Title Tags, SEO and Traffic
Tweets and HTML Title has great similarities.
Maximum tweet length for Twitter is 140 characters. Compare this with HTML Title(the text that we see on top of our window for the webpage) tag of recommended length of not more than 120 characters for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google only uses 66 characters while Yahoo uses 120 characters when displayed on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
SEO uses Keyword Prominence, Keyword Density and Keyword Proximity to achieve great ranking in SERP. I wonder whether we can applied these concepts on tweets to let people search your tweets effectively on Twitter and Search Engines. Use keywords as we would for SEO on tweets and make them keyword rich.
When tweets are used to pre-sell our content like Blog posts or event articles, we can matched the tweets with our posts. That way we might create a targeted traffic to our content.
