What are the best SEO practices?
What is certain is that sensible, consistent SEO practices are likely to achieve consistently good rankings
The first thing you will find out about search engine rankings is that optimizing your pages can have a dramatic effect on your positioning. These are the types of things that you really should do yourself and easily could, if only you had the time. (Caliban is a product that does most of the work for you.)The second is that search positioning changes all the time, as companies change their search engine algorithms. Just because you appear top today does not mean that you will do tomorrow.
The keys to successful long-term SEO are:
- Plenty of relevant content, with a URL and title, keyword and description tags that reflect the content.
- Clean, standards-compliant websites that load quickly, are content rich, and frequently updated.
- Websites that follow the web's simpler conventions (short and descriptive titles, easy navigation, no disabling of browser buttons, no keyword stuffing or other blatant SEO work).
- Natural-looking link building: a few links from directories, very minimal reciprocal or three-way linking, no apparent buying or selling of links, no attempted PR manipulation (buying/selling/hogging), no outward links to less reputable sites.
- No auto-generated nonsense content and no machine translated content, but original, useful material.
- No technical errors, no duplicate pages, a valid robots.txt, a sitemap, and custom error pages.