SEO - Views, Tips & Rants

Today I am going to tell about the 10 immediate fixes for any website, so lets get straight to the point:

a) Your website is for your users and not for search engines. Optimize your website for your visitors and not for search engines.
b) Content is the supreme ruler. Make sure you have good quality content.
c) Each page must have a unique and relevant title tag.
d) Search Engine crawlers are robots and not humans, they cannot read your images. Label your images properly.
e) Use relevant anchor text and avoid generic texts such as Click Here, Read more, etc.
f) Improve the navigation structure of your website and make it more logical, it helps both your users and search engines to browse your website
g) Competitor Analysis: your competitors can teach you more than anybody else can
h) Do not worry too much about the rankings, if your content is genuinely serving your visitors your website will definitely rank higher.
i) Sitemap: Help search engines find all your pages and make sure all the pages of your website are properly linked.
j) Analytics: monitor your websites performance, it can really give you great insights.

Always keep one thing in mind, it is the visitors that are going to place inquiries and not crawlers.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of optimizing the website (both on-page and off-page) in such a way, that it achieves higher rankings in the search engines when searched for the related keywords.

But unfortunately most of the above definition has been lost somewhere with many SEO's. Who is responsible for this, according to me a) customers b) seo's. Customers do no understand the overall objective of SEO and want to get to the top quickly but with this they are not understanding what they are loosing. I will not blame the customer for this, but it is the lack of their knowledge of the subject. Most of the time SME's goals are 'First Page First Result on every search engine in the planet.' But how to explain them that it is not always the case that the first result gets the maximum traffic, it could be the second, third or may be the fourth one or any other result that is relevant to the search done by the user. Under such circumstances I always ask the customers, how many times have they clicked on each search result appearing on each page for each search performed. But I still believe its a never ending discussion and I can only hope that someday customers will understand us better!!

SEO's: Don't think they are not responsible, they are!! But their issues are also justified, too much work very few skilled people who can use the complete potential out of SEO. Many of them have abused the many available tags and other facilities so much that now search engines do not even consider some of them at all. I believe there is one fact that the SEO's must accept and that is the search engines are keeping a close eye on each website and yes there are some really smart boys doing really good job there.

The solution to this according to me is Awareness!!