SEO best practices - a guide for beginners

When starting out in the world of Internet Marketing, you will find much info on the do's and don'ts, black hat and white hat, etc. But there are few fundamentals that one needs to grasp before entering the arena of Search Engine Marketing.

There are basically 2 major areas of importance re SEO. Onpage and Offpage. Onpage refers to the quality of your web pages and how Google sees them, and Offpage relates to website popularity around the internet. The more popular the better.

For Onpage, which counts for 20% of SEO, the title tag holds much importance and you can place keywords in this tag (preferably at the front). Google will give more importance to this compared to other page elements so it is good practice to have all web pages formatted with clean, easy to read, title tags.

H1 tags, although not as important as the title tag, is another place to put useful relevant information about a page. These can accompany H2 and H3 tags if there is a need for them, and will make pages more relevant to certain terms that are being targeted.

ALT text serve a useful purpose as those who have seeing difficulties can get to view web pages with ease as they can turn off images and get left with a text version of the main areas of the website. It is good practice to have ALT text on images where users would find it useful.

Meta tags, with the exception of the keywords meta tag, is great for informing the engines as to what are the most important terms the website should be ranked for. The keywords tag isn't used by Google or Bing anymore, but Yahoo! Still reads this and it is optional whether you would like to add this for the sake of adding.

Implementing the above will provide the basis for increasing Google crawlability and revisit rate to really help rank pages faster and higher in the engines, as this has been proven.

Nick Singh is one of the top Strategic Internet Marketers in the UK and is the Senior Search Engine Marketer at Netcallidus Ltd, that has helped Numerous Business increase their profits Online.We are a Internet Marketing Firm that can help you increase your website profile. Please visit http://www.netcallidus.com/ for further details.