“55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love” is the article’s full title. I found it over at Sitepoint on the forums. The guy that originally posted about these, JJMcClure, got the article from www.searchenginejournal.com.

These SEO tips detail some concepts that you probably already knew, some you didn’t, and, of course, the few that some people occasionally don’t agree with. All in all though, I found these tips to be rather useful and made perfect sense in most instances. I won’t go over all 55 SEO tips personally, but I’ll detail the ones that I found to be the most interesting:

• Tip #7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
• Tip #10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name. (We students have been beaten over the head with this throughout our entire school careers in this degree, but it still stands firm as one of the most essential things for SEO and Accessibility purposes).
• Tip #17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
• Tip #25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
• Tip #37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
• Tip #45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
• Tip #51. Add viral components to your web site or blog - reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

There are also a few I disagree with. One that really annoyed me to the point of developing a rather lengthy eye twitch was:

• Tip #27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

This is one thing we’ve been taught never to do, for good reason. If the navigation is below the fold, users get confused and/or lost because they can’t immediately find the navigation and that can be a rather detrimental user experience for your page. Do NOT do this!

As I stated before, these are some pretty useful tips, but there are some that can be a little misleading. Give it a read through and see for yourself if they open your eyes to new ideas. If not, it’s never a bad thing to get the really important aspects of SEO optimization further driven into your skull

Tags: SEO, Sitepoint

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