There is a ton of advice/articles out there about SEO. Unfortunately most of it is either out-dated and/or fiction and written by so-called “experts”.
I have listed here some SEO facts and fiction to help you optimize your website or WordPress blog.
- Keyword meta tags are dead. Google ignores them.
- Text decorating(bold, italics & underline) is a complete waste of time.
- Use tags for posts, as they are the new keywords.
- Use keywords(tags) as anchor text links in posts that link to other pages within your site.
- Use alt tags on images that are descriptive and describes the image. Don’t stuff keywords(tags) into them.
- Speed up you site. Google will be penalizing sites that load slow. If you are using WordPress, then the best caching plugin, IMHO, is W3 Total Cache.
- Always reference your quotes.
- Avoid article directories to draw content to your site.
- A good SEO plugin for WordPress is WordPress SEO by Yoast.
- Use tags(h1,h2 and so on) for titles.
People need to understand that there is no magic system to SEO. SEO is a lot of hard work and needs to be handled by experts. One WordPress plugin that makes outrageous claims about SEO is seopressor, by Daniel Tan, please avoid it, at all costs.
When it comes to SEO, we need to proceed with caution. Beware also, that SEO is costly, by experts, anyway. If it seems to be good to be true, then avoid it. There are no shortcuts in SEO.
By Prince Zermic, Thursday April 21, 2011 at 11:16 PM
As long as you don’t try anything spammy with your meta tags, they won’t harm your search engine rankings. Just ensure that you are only including words that are relevant to the page content. Ideally all of those words would be included in the page text as well. Avoid repeating keywords too. If you get spammy, be prepared for penalties from the search engines in time.