In this episode, Ilya Fainstein joins us to share his tips regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can contact Ilya on his website.
SEO is basically sending out a proper signal to the search engines so they can interpret what your website is about, make a judgment about your website, and then rank your site accordingly in search results.
Submitting your site to search engines
Sometimes you may get e-mails or see advertisements for people offering services to submit your website to search engines (making you think that you won’t be found if you don’t).
It’s not really necessary to do this because the search engines are good at finding sites. Through Google Webmaster tools, you can submit an XML sitemap to them. This may accelerate the process, but it’s nothing to worry too much about.
Back-linking
It is one of the most important thing in SEO, but it has changed. There were bad practices of paying for rubbish links to your site – this will lead to negative consequences from Google.
A good example: you write a blog post and then someone authentically links to your article from a relevant site.
Get quality links!
Meta tags
Meta tags are really important, but not to SEO rankings. There is no need for stuffing the keyword meta tags – Google ignores these for ranking purposes. You have to write your meta-tags like a good ad. They won’t help your ranking, but will help the click-through rate.
Keywords
Consistency is key.
It is half-art, half-science.
Have the keyword be consistent throughout the entire structure of the post:
- Post title
- Post url
- Throughout the body of the post
Use the keyword naturally!
Use synonyms – Google is smart enough to figure out that you may use other variations throughout.
Creating content
Just creating great content isn’t enough. It is vital, but it doesn’t stand on its own.
Write your content for people (not computers), but you have to get out there and promote your content.
Derek Halpern talks about an 80-20 rule regarding this: 20% content creation, 80% promotion.
Extras
SEO is a very confusing topic. There’s a lot of information and things change quickly, so you need to pick your sources carefully.
SEO is not dead!
As long as Google provides search results, SEO will be very much worthwhile.