Monday 19 February 2007

Interesting Professional SEO Suggestions

I am currently doing some web development work for a client and was asked to implement some changes that he has been advised to make to his web site by a local professional SEO company. I thought their recommendations made interesting reading given some of the the topics that I have written about in this blog.

  1. Ensure there are 15 keywords in meta name/description tags [Aside: I think that must mean title and description]
  2. Use H1 tags for headings and H2 tags for subheadings
  3. Change internal hyperlinks to incorporate relevant keywords rather than using generic terms such as "order online."
Now, I'm all for putting keywords in page titles and meta descriptions but I've never come across the magical number 15 before. Have you? If so, please leave a comment!

As far as H1 and H2 tags are concerned. When it comes to accessible web sites and just plain ole good practice, I'm all for using the Hn tags for their intended purposes but, as this previous post on the role of H1 tags indicates, I'm still not convinced one way or the other whether it has any benefit for SEO purposes.

Finally, using keywords in internal hyperlinks does seem to be a generally accepted "good practice" in SEO circles. For example, SEO guru Jill Whalen recently responded to the following question in her High Rankings forum with a clear unequivocal "Yes,"
can anyone tell me if it will help my search engine rankings if I have links going back to my home page (from my own pages) with the anchor text containing my main keyword phrase
I always find it interesting to see what other SEO organizations are advising their clients to do and how adamant many of them are that their methods are all essential and valid.

Personally, I certainly think there are some "must do" SEO tactics, such as optimizing your title tags, but I also think other methods happen to be successful on some sites and not on others. Therefore, as always, the bottom line is that you just have to try all of these methods and if they work, great; if they don't, scrap them and try something else!

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1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I see your point about the H1 and H2 tags but I must say I don't agree with it. In my personal and professional experience they do wonders, in particular where the pages contain some degree of duplicate content. As an example - listings which may be duplicated in multiple categories can easily be filtered out as duplicates, however, making the category name an H1 normally lifts them back in the index.