SEO DO's and DON'T's | XSite Resource Area

The end goal of SEO is to attract more Internet traffic to, and increase business generated through your website. Search engine optimization is a process that takes time and effort. Knowing some of the best SEO practices and those to avoid will empower you to make the most effective use of your time and allow you to reap the rewards for the time you've spent optimizing your website.

Customize Your Site!
Creating a site that is rich with custom, unique content is perhaps the most important aspect of a successful SEO campaign. Your webssite comes with a library of provided, professionally written content, but there's one problem: it's not unique. We’ve made it really easy to customize your content. Click here for the details.

Birds of a Feather Flock Together
When searching for websites to create links to, look for those that are from credible, authoritative sources. For instance, an appraiser in Arizona might link to the Arizona Board of Appraisal website, or to The Appraisal Foundation website, or a real estate agent with a page that focuses on local information for families searching for homes in a particular city might create a link to the local school board or newspaper websites.

Additionally, when acquiring links, add them to your site over time. Search engines might be suspicious of a website with a sudden boost in its total number of links, as that is one of the telltale signs of participation in link farms, which should be avoided (see SEO DON'Ts).

Update Your Site Regularly
Statistically, sites that are updated frequently tend to experience better search engine ranking than those that aren't. An update doesn't necessarily mean completely rewriting a page, either. Take a page from our library of pre-written content, make a few easy customizations to it and presto.

Don’t get taken by less-than-reputable advisors
While some search engine marketing companies provide extremely valuable services, there are many companies out there making false promises. Watch for impossible guarantees and spend your Internet marketing dollars wisely. For more information on this topic, click here.

Irrelevant or Excessive Keywords/META Tags
Loading a page with excessive keywords is referred to as "stuffing," and can have severe consequences for a website, as search engines view the practice as an attempt to skew their search results. Due to the complex and secretive nature of search engine ranking algorithms, and the frequency at which they're updated, knowing exactly how much is too much is an impossibility. However, trial and error observations have given the SEO community some insight into the effective use of keywords.

When selecting keywords for a web page, choose several key terms and phrases that are relevant to the content of that page. For instance, if you create a web page dealing with homes in San Francisco, your list of keywords might be San Francisco homes, real estate, homes for sale, homes in San Francisco, and San Francisco property listings. There are also many online resources to help you acquire a list of solid keywords. After selecting your keywords, use those same words and phrases throughout the page content in a way that is natural and easy to read. Search engines will recognize that the keywords are relevant to the page content, which will provide the best SEO results.

Repeated Direct Submissions to Search Engines
The rate at which search engine spiders crawl and index websites has increased substantially over the last several years, almost negating the need to directly submit websites to search engines. However, search engines still provide direct submission as an option. If you choose to submit your Xsite to a search engine, avoid doing so repeatedly. Once a search engine has indexed a website, it will continue to do so at regular intervals to check for updates. Submitting a website to a search engine repeatedly can result in that search engine banning the website from its index.

Link Farms and FFA (Free For All) Exchanges
As discussed above, links play an important role in SEO. As a result, many websites, programs, and paid services have been created for people to acquire and share links. These are known by many names – link farms, link exchanges, and FFA's to name a few. While they may seem innocuous at first, link farms and exchanges of all forms can severely impact a website's SERP ranking.

Link farms are notorious for supplying a host of non-related, irrelevant links, none of which are from industry leaders or credible information hubs. Search engine spiders consider links that point to and from a website within the context of that site. Links that are not relevant to the content of a website will provide little or no benefit, and may in fact lower the site's ranking.

Spamming and 'Black Hat' Techniques
The saying "it's better to be safe that sorry" rings especially true in the world of SEO. There are many tactics that have been employed by website owners in attempt to gain better search placement, only to be classified as "spamming" tactics by search engines. Such tricks include creating a page in which the content is nothing but irrelevant keywords, or hiding keywords within the text by setting font color to match the background. Others have created well-optimized web pages, directly submitted those pages to search engines, and then changed the page content entirely in attempt to have the new page content display on non-related searches. Search engines are wise to such tricks, and often ban offenders from their search index. Remember, search engines make money by providing accurate and relevant results. Anything that compromises the integrity of the search results will be rooted out quickly.