SEO 101 Rules to Follow NOW!

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, February 8, 2010 Comments (13)

If you are one of those people that feel like you need to go at lightning speed when you start anything you will want to try to slow things down when you start your search engine optimization efforts. You want to make sure you have the basics down right before you do anything else. The basics will follow you through your entire search engine optimization campaign or career so it is always important to get these steps right.

Here are some SEO 101 rules you should always follow:

1. Keywords – Identifying keywords is most likely going to be the first step with anything you do. I always hear from people that they already know their keywords and then generate a list for me that have 10 or so relevant keywords. I then take that list and generate a few hundred or so. Don’t assume you know your keywords because there are always different variations that people are using and if you miss out on those words you could end up missing out on a lot of valuable traffic. And ALWAYS make sure the keywords you select to target on each page of your website are 100% RELATED to the great content you have written for that page.

2. Patience – If you are looking for results tomorrow I wouldn’t even try to attempt search engine optimization for your business. SEO is something that requires a great deal of time and effort. Results are carefully monitored over a certain period of time. Generally it takes 6 months of aggressive search engine marketing efforts to start seeing some sort of positive results. Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying or trying to pull a fast over you.

3. Rankings are Not Everything – Sure the end game for your SEO is to get your website ranking for your popular industry search terms but don’t be discouraged when your website is not number 1 in the search results. Rankings are not the only byproduct from search engine optimization. There are many other positive things that occur from conducting search engine marketing efforts. You want people to bump into your articles and press releases and not just your website.

4. Don’t Cut Corners – If you think that an effort you might be doing might raise an eyebrow with Google or any of the other major search engines avoid doing it at all costs. General rule of thumb is that if you think it might jeopardize your website’s rankings it could very well affect you down the road so you are better off just avoiding the situation.

5. Content, content and more content – Content is probably one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO. Good content will always go a long way. Whether it is content in an article, press release or even a profile it is always important to put 100% into any content you are writing.

These are just the basic SEO 101 rules to really always keep in the back of your mind. As your business grows you will learn other basics that you will end up carrying throughout the lifespan of your search engine marketing campaign. And remember there is NO crystal ball out there to solve all of your SEO challenges!

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13 Comments

Comment by Sachin Khobragade

Made Monday, 8 of February , 2010 at 10:38 am

Nice article nick.

Comment by Gonzo the Great

Made Monday, 8 of February , 2010 at 12:29 pm

Hi Nick,

good article, a clean overview of some ’safe’ SEO-Rules! These rules will unlikely change with the next ‘algorith-update’, so that’s what I mean by safe.

A great advice and tip is always to keep these rules in mind, so thanks for sharing that! Cheers & Ciao …

Comment by Henri

Made Monday, 8 of February , 2010 at 2:58 pm

I love the piece about not “cutting corners.” Very good advice.

Comment by y.lewis

Made Monday, 8 of February , 2010 at 4:34 pm

I must say that while I agree with you 100%. I have read papers from Jerri Lafford on the subject of SEO. I also do it for my own site exactly like you say. I have to say after a year my results are okay but not great. You do have to be exact in your keywords & meta tags & alt tags. I must say though it does take a lot of time to do it. I still have not come up with any exact method on it.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Monday, 8 of February , 2010 at 8:05 pm

Hi Y.Lewis,
Thanks for reading and sharing information about your website. SEO does take a significant amount of diligence (hard work!), patience and time to work well…

Comment by Lynn Patterson

Made Monday, 8 of February , 2010 at 8:40 pm

Nick, lots of valuable “Golden Nuggets” in your article for those who are trying to improve their organic ranking! I especially like your comments on content. Flooding the internet with relative content through Press Releases, Blogging, Social Media profile updates are all very effective practices and will further help to improve ranking but this still takes time.

Time is still an intangible factor and is often hard to come by or ask for. It’s the single most difficult factor to communicate to my clients when trying to set performance expectations. A crystal ball sure would help but for now, I’ll continue to stress patience and provide ranking analysis reporting. At least with reporting clients can see what’s happening.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Monday, 8 of February , 2010 at 10:45 pm

Hi Lynn,
Thanks for reading and your comment! That is my goal to provide helpful “golden nuggets” of information

Yes, time is always the toughest factor!

Thanks again for reading!
Nick

Comment by SEO Text Links

Made Tuesday, 9 of February , 2010 at 9:10 am

AMEN on number 1! It still amazes me the amount of people I see who don’t realize what a serious step this is. Tons of people continue to setup sites based on keywords they ‘guessed’ about or just ‘think’ are what people will search for. Keywords are the crux of your success, the right ones can take you far; the wrong ones can highly disappoint.

Agree with the other tips too. Cutting corners isn’t worth it, it’s essentially time wasted that you could have spent doing things the right way. Thanks for sharing!

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Tuesday, 9 of February , 2010 at 12:39 pm

Hi SEO Text Links,
Thanks for reading and your comment. It is always amazing to me how many people that I encounter still have a tough time grasping that concept!

Comment by Ken

Made Sunday, 21 of February , 2010 at 11:15 pm

Hi Nick!
These are certainly solid SEO concepts that will help any website.
Really good point to look at variations in Meta Keywords.
Wouldn’t you also recommend working the site’s Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions, too?
Thank you for sharing.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Monday, 22 of February , 2010 at 6:24 pm

Hi Ken,

Absolutely! This is part of the on site optimization process and is extremely important part as well. Since this is an SEO 101 type article, I did not want to get too detailed in this post

Comment by Charlotte Prescott

Made Sunday, 28 of February , 2010 at 9:39 pm

Thanks for the overview; I’ll look for more information on your blog. Am I correct that this information applies for contributors to a larger website (asked the Associated Content newbie)?

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Monday, 1 of March , 2010 at 10:54 am

Hi Charlotte,
Thanks for reading and stopping by, this should apply to every type of website owner, marketer or writer producing content…thanks!