When I started my career in SEO and Internet marketing there were many nights I would leave the office overwhelmed with the amount of information that I needed to know. I come from a marketing background, which means I understand the need to cater advertising to a specific audience, but all the talk of HTML code, robots, and indexed pages had my head spinning. After all, that stuff is for nerds. I am not a nerd.
As the weeks wore on and the nerd talk started to make sense, I discovered that good SEO comes down to a few simple rules. So simple in fact that they can be taught by applying them to the things we first learned in kindergarten.
Share Everything
Link building is a vital component of SEO. Share links wherever it makes sense. It is best to link with sites that will provide valuable and reputable links pertaining to the information on your site. Those links will build up your page rank, which you can in turn share with the rest of your site.
Play Fair
Be smart about your SEO strategies and don’t do something that will be seen as spam in the eyes of the search engines. Keyword stuffing and cloaking are both tactics that will keep you from earning that gold star. You might get away with black hat SEO strategies for a little while, but it won’t last. In the end, not playing fair will only come back to hurt you.
Don’t Take Things That Aren’t Yours
Create your own unique content and don’t take content from others. You don’t need to be an SEO veteran to know that plagiarizing is wrong.
Clean Up Your Own Mess
To avoid being punished by Google and the other search engines, keep things cleaned up. Avoid using multiple websites and URLs to promote your business. There are times when this might make sense but to prevent using duplicate content it is best to stay away from this practice. Most importantly make sure you have a 301 redirect in place to direct users to the proper website.
Watch Out For Traffic
Getting traffic to your site and increasing your business revenue is usually the main goal of any SEO marketing plan. Know how to get traffic to your site. Know where your traffic is coming from. Know where your competitors’ traffic is coming from. And know how to get more traffic.
Warm Cookies and Milk Are Good For You
This has nothing to do with SEO but is still the absolute truth.
When you start to look at things one simple rule at a time, diving headfirst into SEO won’t be so overwhelming. The basics are a good place to start and once you have those down everything else will start to make more sense.
P.S. No nerds were offended in the writing of this blog. I hope.
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