SEO Top Ten for the beginner

If you are starting out with SEO and have no clue what to do it can be a mess. There are lots of guides out there and everyone has something to say about how you should do it. The truth is that the Pareto Principle is valid in SEO as in so many other areas, 20% of the work gives 80% of the results. You deserve better than handwriting the meta keywords on all yout 1000 subpages as it gives little or no effect, you deserve to start with the stuff that gives you good results. This is the reason for the SEO Top Ten for the beginner, here are the advice that can be  implemented fast and will give you great results.

1. Titles, change the titles on important pages so that they contain the important keywords. Make sure the titles are unique on all pages, they should present the page not the site.
2. H1 headlines, make sure the keywords are present in the H1 headlines on the pages. Headlines should be unique for the page in the same way as titles.
3. Text, make sure the text on important pages are unique and contains at least 400 words. The text is the base of all SEO and you can actually spend endless of hours making your text optimal, if you don’t have a lot of time, just make sure it’s all right.
4. Navigation, the navigation needs to be simple enough for Google to follow. Check so that you don’t have Java or Flash-navigation on your site, if you do and can’t change it, add links to the pages in the sidebar or somewhere else where it fits.
5. Pages, content is king, make sure you have at least 7-8 pages on your site. It’s actually the more the merrier when it comes to pages but a minimum is around 5 and for the SEO that needs to keep a deadline, 7-8 can work (decently).
6. Sitemap, make sure there is a proper HTML Sitemap. As we aren’t spending to much time giving the site a good hierarchy a sitemap can rescue a lot of the flaws that might be there. By adding an HTML sitemap you make sure Google can find your content. Link the site from the front page (preferably all pages) and link to all subpages in the sitemap. If you have lots of pages you can choose to link to the important ones or split the sitemap in several, don’t have more than 100 links per page. Don’t care about XML-sitemap, that’s for nerds.
7. Add your site to a select few link directories. Don’t spend a week adding your site to every single directory, it doesn’t do you that much good ant it takes for ever (and can actually kill you with sheer boredom). Take the good ones and submit the link, I usually even skip DMOZ because it takes forever to get a link approved (usually it’s never approved, or reviewed for that matter, DMOZ is strictly for nerds).
8. Exchange, do a quick link exchange with bloggers on your topic. It’s easy and fast, just send them a mail and tell them how much you loved the post about Paris Hilton and that you really would like to do a link exchange. You should get at least 10 links like this.
9. Start a blog. Just set up a blog and write about what you just did, add your site in the blogroll and ping the blog in some pingomatic-like service (pingomatic for example).
10. Call your friends. give your long lost friends a call and tell them to link to your site. If they don’t I can’t see any reason to call them friends.

Hope you use this “Quick and Dirty” guide to SEO and if you do please tell me and I’ll write about you. That is in itself a sort of SEO.

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