Do’s and Don’ts for SEO

1. Quality first, not quantity. If traffic means your reputation gets abused and vandalized

by nuisance visitors, then it’s not worth it.

2. If developing a content page or a website that was targeting “keyword” we would need to make sure we included content on these synonyms.

3. Focus on catering to the needs of human beings, not search robots.

4. Do not use SEO as a stand-alone campaign. Integrate it with your advertising and social

campaigns.

5. Don’t hesitate to link up with good, authoritative sites. The Internet is built for relationships and fostering good relations with other sites can get you quality inbound links. Targeted keywords

6. Target relevant keywords. Also: don’t experiment with popular but less relevant search

terms. 7. Try localized optimization in order to drive more relevant traffic toward your website.

8. Target highly specific and niche keywords.

9. Monitor how the volume and quality of your search terms are driving traffic by using

Google Analytics.

10. Internal link building is crucial so use highly descriptive anchor tags to emphasize to search engines how relevant your site is.

11. Page titles are a relevant on-site factor so construct title tags using target keywords.

12. Don’t rely heavily on meta-tags; search engines aren’t as impressed by them.

13. Provide alternative text to images so make it accessible to visually-impaired users.

14. Provide an XML sitemap to aid indexing and to troubleshoot indexing issues.

15. Use unique content. If you must replicate, rewrite the text and give attribution to the

original source.

16. If possible, your headlines should feature keywords and use h1 and h2 tags to improve layout and relevance to search engines.

17. Make sure your header tags are well-organized. Use only single tags to avoid penalties.

18. Every URL should be descriptive and not functional, i.e. use www.anydomain.com/here-

is-an-example and not www.anydomain.com/117665.

19. If you have a page that features interesting links, do not call the entire page “Links” as this may be mistaken for link farming.

20. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to guide your optimization.

21. Use Webmaster tools to check and fix broken links on a regular basis.

SEO DOs And DON’TS, According To Google

According to Google, these are some things you should not do in your SEO efforts:

1. Having no value proposition: Try not to assume that a site should rank #1 without knowing why it’s helpful to searchers (and better than the competition

2. Segmented approach: Be wary of setting SEO-related goals without making sure they’re aligned with your company’s overall objectives and the goals of other departments. For example, in tandem with your work optimizing product pages (and the full user experience once they come to your site), also contribute your expertise to your Marketing team’s upcoming campaign. So if Marketing is launching new videos or a more interactive site, be sure that searchers can find their content, too.

3. Time-consuming workarounds: Avoid implementing a hack rather than researching new features or best practices that could simplify development (e.g., changing the timestamp on an updated URL so it’s crawled more quickly instead of easily submitting the URL through Fetch as Googlebot).

4. Caught in SEO trends: Consider spending less time obsessing about the latest “trick” to boost your rankings and instead focus on the fundamental tasks/efforts that will bring lasting visitors.

5. Slow iteration: Aim to be agile rather than promote an environment where the infrastructure and/or processes make improving your site, or even testing possible improvements, difficult.

On the flipside, this is what Google says you should do:

1. Do something cool: Make sure your site stands out from the competition — in a good way!

2. Be smart about your tags and site architecture: Create unique title tags and meta descriptions; include Rich Snippets markup from schema.org where appropriate. Have intuitive navigation and good internal links.

3. Be smart about your tags and site architecture: Create unique title tags and meta

descriptions; include Rich Snippets markup from schema.org where appropriate. Have intuitive navigation and good internal links.

4. Sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools: Help us communicate with you,

especially when we notice something awry with your site.

5. Attract buzz: Natural links, +1s, likes, follows… In every business there’s something compelling, interesting, entertaining, or surprising that you can offer or share with your users. Provide a helpful service, tell fun stories, paint a vivid picture and users will share and reshare your content.

6. Stay fresh and relevant: Keep content up-to-date and consider options such as building

a social media presence (if that’s where a potential audience exists) or creating an ideal mobile experience if your users are often on-the-go.