There are books, blogs, and even conferences devoted to SEO, however you should be thinking about SEO in the simplest of terms. Don’t get too caught up in the hype and theories and trying to figure out how to manipulate Google’s algorithm because you’ll drive yourself crazy and that’s no fun, or worse, you may end up getting your site dropped from the search results if you go too far.
For your website, focus on the following SEO best practices as a guide:
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- Keyword(s) within URLs
- External link
- Internal link
- Keyword density
- Site speed
- Sitemap
As we mentioned above, Google and Bing offer Webmaster tools. If you haven’t signed up, be sure to get an account and add your website to each. Google provides great resources within their Webmaster tools that gives you additional insight into the performance of your website. For example, you can view a list of pages that are resulting in 404 errors and you can see any external URLs that link to pages on your site that have 404 errors. This is just one example of the key features you’ll have access to within Webmaster tools. It’s a great tool and can give you a lot of insight as you’re optimizing your website, from both an SEO point of view and in terms of usability.
Remember, these are best practices and things you should keep in mind as you’re designing, developing, and writing copy for your website, but never put these ahead of a visitor’s experience. Your visitor/user should always come first when designing your website.