Top 12 SEO Tips for 2009 – garythescubaguy
Top 12 SEO Tips for 2009 – garythescubaguy
Your Website is looking good and has all the things you’ve been told it needed; great titles, H1-H3 tags, meta tags, good unique content and easy navigation.
So why aren’t you getting the traffic you deserve?
These tips are for beginner to advanced SEO’s. I have many other good tips in version 2007 and 2008 Top Tips, and I have struggled to come up with 12 more unique tips that are also worthy of being included in anything called “Top Tips”, but I think I have found them.
I’ve laid these tips out in a different way than in the past. Rather than spit out 12 random tips, I have arranged these tips into a step-by-step strategy that most anyone with a bit of knowledge can implement. The first part covers getting your website in shape, and the latter half will give you strategies to take advantage of the work you have done.
1. Make Sure Your Website Is Ready for SEO
- Most website owners have succumbed to the realisation that one way of another, they are going to have to start injecting content into their website to have any chance at a top 10 ranking. So many site owners set about creating or buying content to add to various sections of their website in an attempt to pacify the search engines. In most cases it lasted for a few weeks and was abandoned because it really takes a lot to create good content on a daily basis. Unfortunately the road to Google Hell (not ranking) is paved with good intentions. Unless you were smart and integrated Wordpress, Joomla or some type of content generating application early on, you may have pages all over the place and this means you may also have internal navigation issues causing problems with the robots when they try to crawl your website. If the bots cannot find your pages or get stuck in a loop as a result of poor navigation then any work could potentially be a waste of your time and money.
- Run Xenu (a free tool) on your website to be sure this isn’t the case. This will give you a detailed overview of your websites navigation and if you have any problems with your internal linking structure. It will also notify you of any redirects or errors in linking, particularly any 302 redirects or 404 pages that are being returned throughout your entire website. You want to identify any adverse navigation problems that it finds. 302 redirects for instance are frowned upon by Google but are often left in place whilst working on a site. If you are getting 404’s you’ll be able to identify and fix these.
- Since we are getting our site healthy to maximise the effects of the other 11 steps, let’s go to Webmaster Tools and check out your overview. This also does what Xenu does but it shows you what Google in particular is seeing. The image below is an overview in Webmaster Central Tools from Google. The various errors are problems and need to be fixed.
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