by Daniela Araujo

In the Search Marketing world, some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics are believed to be spamming as SEOs manipulate web pages to gain boosts in the organic search rankings. Some black hat SEO techniques (e.g. doorway pages, hidden text on pages, link purchasing) are definitely “spammy” and should be avoided. However, tactics that follow search engine webmaster’s guidelines are recommended.

Search Engine Optimization strategies help a site’s links to be easily accessed and found by people and search engines. No matter what stage you are in the website life cycle — building a site from scratch, redesigning, or maintaining — SEO is required. Here is an SEO list to help you evaluate your site needs, For the most effective SEO, you should answer “yes” to the following questions:

• Does your site use validated XHTML and CSS rather than table-based layouts?
• Does each page of the site have unique, relevant, keyword-rich page titles and meta tags?
• Do any external domains link back to your site? How does that compare to your competitors?
• Do images on the site have proper alt tags?
• Is navigation indexable text rather than images? Does it list the most important pages on the top?
• Has an XML site map been created and submitted to search engines?
• Is the HTML site map is accessible to users?
• Are 404 error pages human friendly? Do they direct users to the page they were looking for?
• Does the site have analytics tags to track visitors’ activity on all pages? Have you set goals to test against how you want them to navigate the site? Have you done any A/B testing on conversion landing pages?
• Does the site content have a mix of descriptive, long-tail keywords and generic, high-volume popular keywords?
• Does your company have a blog? What about an editorial calendar to ensure a varied schedule of posts that include keywords? Remember that search engines like fresh and original content. A blog not only opens an opportunity to content creation, but also acts as a link-building tool. Both original content and relevant links have high weight in search engine’s ranking algorithms.

Finally, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, thinks SEO can do amazing things that indexing algorithms CANNOT.  Watch his video interview , “Does Google Consider SEO to be Spam?” posted on Search Engine Journal

Share your SEO thoughts, concerns and ideas and happy SEO!