Best SEO techniques

[next2devil]

At the very first. You must know that there are two part of job you will do to make the SEO task done. One is OnPage Optimization Factor and the other is OffPage Optimization Factor. Titles, Meta Tags, Description, Content, Keyword Density and keep your code apply for the W3C standard ... These are all OnPage Optimization, on the other hand, Linking, Anchor text, Landing Page, Forum Signature, article exchange, and RSS or Atom feeds or Podcast(I don't know whether is Onpage or Offpage, I just put it into OffPage for now) ... these are all OffPage Optimization.

One word for short, if you can get plenty of other webpages to link to your site ( and you don't necessary link them back ), then you will get good rank.

These two part of work, start off a very very important job first, that is CHOOSE YOUR KEYWORDS, because verything built around keywords.

For newbies, every of these optimization factors needs more detailed explanations, because right now I think these are all pretty much just buzz terms for them. So, I will see if I can find much time to start a full "Introduce To SEO" to interpret every aspect which I just said above. And I am also very welcome any of you guys can make your own post about these SEO topics. And last, I want you konw that I am no SEO professional, I just read a lot in the past two years due to the requirement of my daily job.

Oh, I want to add that, "the factor" of submissions is, perhaps the most worthless method to SEO. If you do the more important jobs very well, you even don't need to submit to anything search engine not to mention, as many those ridiculer websites say, "submit your site to 1,000,000 search engines".

Today, I want to start of the Design Principles.

Most of the ideas come from the "Make Easy Money with Google - Using the AdSense Advertising Program", by Eric Giguère ( this a very good book ). I am not just copy it, so don't worry I will add some my own pinons.

1. Add white space. The term white space refers to the empty areas surrounding blocks of text and other page elements. Leaving out white space is a common mistake. The white space makes the text much more attractive and readable. Take example of today's Web 2.0 website design, there are most, if not all, have bigger header or tag text, plenty white space, bigger gradient button, these make the web page more readable and user friendly.
2. Choose one or two standard fonts. You don't need be a professional web designer, so don't use much graphics, use text instead and keep your fonts standard to make sure every visitor have the fonts installed in their system.
3. Use a white or light background, and keep your page high-contrast to make sure your content user readable. I am very surprised that there are still so many websites out there with low-contrast web pages. And I found very often, these websites use very heavy dark color theme also,like some pc game websites. I don't say you can't use very dark color or theme, but at least personally, I aways feel more comfortable when I visit a bright website. And don't forget, low-contrast may result in "hidden text", which is a "black hat tricks" in SEO, and you may risk at get banned from search engine.
4. Don't be afraid of color too, but use it sparingly. On the other hand, you don't want your pages to be black and white only. Color can be used to highlight or emphasize text for added visual impact. Browsers already use color to distinguish visited links from unvisited links. You can use color to emphasize headings or to shade table backgrounds for easier reading. It's also common to change the background color for headers and footers and the parts of the page layout that are outside the panes.
5. Keep pages short and not too long. I don't know you, but I always get onto the pages with the content too long, such many of the websites which promote some of the virtual & info product ( often a special report, or a software ). I don't know whether they have good rank in search engine or not, I rather think maybe they get their traffic mainly from the users who subscribe their email newsletter. Anyway, these "single page" websites may have their own advantage, but I think you certainly don't want build your site with every page like this. I always don't want to read through all the testimonials, after read just two first line, I am tired, the rest is just blah blah blah...
6. Be printer-friendly. There's nothing more frustrating than printing a Web page and ending up with cut-off text. Ensure that your pages print properly, or else provide alternate "printer-friendly" versions that do.
7. Keep the interesting or important material "above the fold." In the newspaper industry, the term "above the fold" refers to the top part of a folded newspaper page, the first part that a reader sees. In Web design, the term refers to the part of a Web page that is initially visible in a normal-sized browser window. The interesting or important material always should have your keyword phrase or keyword related content.
8. Support different browsers. Some people don't use Microsoft's Internet Explorer as their Web browser, though many site designers apparently assume that everyone does. Alternative browsers like Firefox and Apple's Safari are just as important, so you should ensure that your site looks good and behaves properly with as many browsers as possible. This also involved in validate your web page with W3C. Search engine love good valid HTML code, and if your website pass the W3C validating, your website 99.99 out of 100 will well support all the major browsers.
9. Group and separate page elements. Clear boundaries between the different parts of a page make it obvious what's what. You can use white space to do this, or you can use graphic cues like lines and boxes.

Fortunately, achieve these principles is not that hard as it seems. With today's most open source CMS, such as wordpress, drupal and many many others, you can easily achieve above principles. Because most of the job, the smart content management system will automatically do by itself.

[zac439]

NIce article, definately one to bookmark and save for later. I usually to pay much attention to search engine optimization, but i know i really should. Ill keep your suggestions in mind for my current project!

[Arbitrary]

White space is definitely very important. If you write a huge paragraph with no paragraph breaks, the users will be scared off into thinking that you're writing a college essay that they can't understand.

I'd like to add a few things:

Search engines consider bold text to be more important than the same text in plain weight. They also pay attention to the alt tags of your images, but that doesn't mean you should abuse it and write alt tags to cater to your keywords--they are, after all, for descriptive purposes for the blind.

When typing your keyword, try to repeat it as many times as possible within the first one hundred words or so. Obviously, it wouldn't be good to repeat it too often, but perhaps a keyword density of 2% would do you some good.