#1) Hire a good solid team, not individuals 
Many people make the mistake of hiring people for different phases of the website.  For example, Company “A” might hire a graphic designer to developer a layout for the website, but this person has no idea of business flow or optimizing code for search engines.  Next, Company “A” may pay for a web developer to code the site and database, but that person may not understand SEO structure as well.  Finally, the company hires a professional Internet marketer who charges a ton to overhaul the entire site and make it SEO friendly. 

If company “A” had hired a team that had all of these people working together already, then there would have been less money wasted, the site would have been developed faster and the marketing and business process would have been key throughout the entire development.

At Media One Pro, we have an experience staff of professionals that specialize in both the front-end user interfce (UI) design (with an emphasis on sales flow and conversions) and coding the backend for ecommerce and SEO.  This way, you’re site is built properly from the very beginning!

#2) Research, Analyze and Target specific Keywords/Terms

Don’t go after random search terms.  In other words, let us do the research and find out what exact keywords you should be focused on.  For example, if you want to sell cars on your website, don’t bother to go after the term “cars” only.  You’ll never break into the top page of  Google!  Instead, you should be more specific and detailed with your keywords, like “1996 toyota 4runners for sale las vegas”.  With a “longtail keyword”, you’ll stand a better chance of breaking into the SE’s natural rankings.  

At Media One Pro, we help our clients with keyword strategy and provide many different services to garner keyword search results. 

#4) Don’t stuff the “Keyword” Meta Tag

A while back, the search engines used to look at keywords for relevance on the web page.  Now days, there is less emphasis on keywords in Meta Tag’s as they’ve been abused by people who practice black hat SEO. 

You can still utilize keyword meta tag’s bt make sure that you use a different keyword(s) for each page.  Don’t put up more than a few keywords.. never, ever stuff a bunch into this tag as that’ll be a red flag for spam.
 

#3) It’s all about the content
Write good, clear and concise content about your products and services using different keywords and phrases that make sense for you or your business. The more keyword-rich content the better, and the more you vary your usage of your keywords and phrases, the better. Don’t think that just because you use the word “Book” in your content a million times means Google is going to care. The more useful information you have, the more your users are going to care, and that all adds up to good search engine results and rankings. Hey – why do you think I’m taking the time to write this article?

#5) The “Description” Meta Tag
This tag is important and still used by Google in many cases. It is often the blurb that comes up under your search engine result link. Choose a short and sweet, 1-2 sentence description of your site or business for your home page. For the other pages, change it up to reflect what kind of information is on that page.

#6) The “Title” Meta Tag
While it’s not really a meta tag at all, the “Title” tag is a very important part of SEO. I’d say it’s a good idea to have 3-12 words (keyword rich of course) describing what the page is and telling users (and search engine crawlers) where they are on your website. The more it relates to the content on the page – the better.

#5) Page URLs and Naming Conventions
The naming conventions of URLs on the pages of your website are an often overlooked way to make sure your pages are found by search engines in a way that is relative to their content. Instead of a 1 word file name or url ending like “about.php” – why not call it “about-specialty-book-seller-san-francisco.php” ? Seems a little lame I know, but from our experience, it seems to help in search engine result rankings. This is even more important on products in an e-commerce store. If the url is plain and doesn’t say anything about the product (i.e. “category.php?id=1″) then it isn’t telling the search engine crawler anything. If instead, it says something like “category-name-here?product-id=detailed-product-name-here” then you’re better off. A string of useless, arbitrary numbers isn’t going to do you a bit of good. Also, dashes between words are better than words with no spaces, and even underscores.

#6) Incoming Relative Links
This is probably one of the most important things you can have that will help your ranking in search engines. I’m not suggesting you do what some SEO companies may do, and add your site to a bunch of useless link farms, but the more links you have to your site throughout the pages on the internet, the better. Why? Because it means more people are finding your site, which increases your traffic, and more importantly, more people find your site valuable enough to link to it. With a little bit of a proactive effort, and a little grass roots internet marketing, we can show you how to increase the number of incoming links to your website.

#7) Traffic, in General
The more traffic, the more relative your website is to Google. If you just sit there waiting for things to happen, chances are, nothing will. An internet business or website is only as good as the marketing efforts and work you put behind it. If you aren’t sending people there, or promoting it in some way, your rankings just won’t get much better. Pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords can be a good way to jump start this, e-newsletters are another.

#8) Keep your Content Fresh.
If you never change your site’s content, your users may not have a good reason to return, and to put it bluntly, search engines won’t care about you. Update your site on a regular basis to keep it fresh, and to increase your site’s content, and you’ll be better off. Make sure you have a webmaster that can keep it updated for you on a regular basis, or better yet, get Media One Pro CMS set up so you can add and edit content on your site all day and night if you want. Content Management Systems are a must, in my opinion, for good search engine optimization.

#9) Be Smart: Don’t Spam or try to Trick the Search Engines
If you’re an idiot about bloating your site, your keywords and trying underhanded tricks like creating hundreds of useless pages, making real small, unreadable text or making the text the same as the background color so no one can see it – you’re eventually going to fail at getting a consistent placement. You may think you’re hot when it works for a couple weeks, but in the end you’ll be knocked way down the list or out the results completely.

#10) Register Your Domain for a Long Time.
If your domain is only registered for 1 year, it doesn’t look as good to a search engine as it does if it is registered for 10 years. Why? Because search engines don’t like fly-by-night, get-rich-quick sites that aren’t reliable or worth anything. Be smart and register your domain for at least 3 years if you are serious about your business and what you are doing.