For me, the most important aspect of SEO is simply CONTENT. I’m aware of the multitude of ways you can enhance what you have through other rules of semantic markup, linkage, and keywords, but all of these issues can be addressed by simply generating the kinds of information that draw people to you.
Generating this unique stuff is easier said than done, but it’s clear that investing time and effort into generating content always pays longer dividends than the quick “tricks” that will improve rankings in the short term. Even something as simple as a regular monthly newsletter (with full articles on your site) for a business, or mildly active participation in forums that concern your industry or topic (signature links) will help you more than plugging in hundreds of keywords into you headers.
Especially in writing for a blog, I’ve learned a valuable lesson: never underestimate the desire for people to seek communities. Sometimes it seems like it’s not worth posting something online since it seems so trivial, but you sometimes forget just how many people are swimming out in the deep waters of the online world. The more you churn out, the better chance you’ll have of people listening, and, over time, you’ll learn exactly what it is that people want to hear most from you. That interest is what will get those delicious inbound links that mean so much to your ranking. That’s why I’ll always invest more effort into getting a routine going that will reliably produce new content over sweating about how many times my keywords appear in headers and meta-tags.
On to some of the what we covered last week. Here’s a quick bullet list of some tips for following “best practices”, and some of the best links I found on the subject:
General “best practice” tips:
- Test across browsers while, you’re developing, not just after. The same goes for validating.
- Write content in a manner consistent with people’s reading and browsing habits.
- Compress those images. Did you know Google is now rewarding faster-loading sites with higher rankings?
- Provide text alternatives to images
- Have a way to locate/identify broken sections of your site. Give a simple way for users to report this.
- Don’t mix the three layers of the web – content, presentation, behavior
- Explain which major div you are closing with comments
- CSS resets: use ‘em
- Avoid the redundancy present in tagitis, divitis, and classitis: they all mean you’re being too specific/inefficient!
And now for those links:
http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/bestwebdev.html
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/top-10-best-practices-for-front-end-web-developers
