The only people who really know what the SEO guidelines are might be some of the Google employees and only the ones who are in charge of the overall strategy for their search engine. The rest of us can only guess and learn by experience. There are many lists out there about do’s and don’ts associated with optimizing your page for SEO or search engine optimization. some make sense and some don’t and many people are trying to take advantage of this situation to obtain more traffic.

SEO Guidelines – Quality Content

We happen to think that in addition to all of these so-called rules and guidelines which are ok and not wrong at all, you must have quality content. You must have not only quality content that is well-written and informative to the reader, but it must also be popular if you are really going to do well with advertising on your site. Writing poorly written stories about something that no one cares about is just not going to be of interest to very many people, even if you optimize the page perfectly, whatever that might mean.

Focus on High-Quality Content in Popular Areas of Search

So focus on good quality content,  interesting to the reader that appeals to a lot of people. Good quality content means that the post is well written, has no spelling mistakes, has good grammar, and has structure. A post should have an introduction, a discussion of the topic, and a closing summary of some kind or action statement that takes the reader to the next stage of your website.

Always optimize every page so that it also rises in rank for the search engines. We have compiled a shortlist and will add to it from time to time. These are rules/guidelines for making sure that your page is also optimized for SEO.

If you disagree or feel we missed something, feel free to leave us a comment and we will add to it to assist our readers.

Here we go:

• Post Title
  • The title contains the keyword
  • The Title should begin with the keyword
  • The title should be at least 3 words long
  • The title should have at least 66 characters
• URL
  • permalink contains your keyword
• Metadata
  • Description meta-tag always contains the keyword
  • The Description meta tag should have at least 160 characters in it
  • The description meta tag should begin with the keyword
  • Your keyword meta tag must contain your keyword
• Heading
  • The H1 tag should also contain your keyword
  • The H1 tag should begin with the keyword
  • The H2 tag should also contain your keyword
  • The H3 tag should also contain your keyword
• Content(probably the most critical of all)
  • Must not be junk content
  • Must be informative and useful to the reader
  • Should contain at least 300 words, some say 500, and others at least 1000. We think you should vary the size of your posts, but never less than 300 words
  • Keyword density should be 2 to 5%, don’t spam your content
  • Keywords should be used in the first 50 to 100 words
  • Always use one image with your keyword in the ALT attribute
  • Bold your keyword at least once
  • Italicize your keyword at least once
  • Underline your keyword at least once
  • External link anchor text should also contain your keyword
  • Internal link anchor text should contain your keyword
  • Also, use your keyword in the last 50 words

While this is certainly not all-inclusive, it is a good start on how to optimize your posts for the best SEO ranking with the search engines and against your competition. Even if you do all of these things, it really comes back to content that people are interested in and causes them to want to spend some time on your site.

As we mentioned comments and thoughts are welcome.

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