You'll see plenty of hype in the world of search engine optimization (SEO). The field is very susceptible to trends and fads. While it's true that the SEO game does change over time to reflect new technologies and new search engine policies, there are certain basic optimization techniques that have proven themselves to be consistently effective. Here are some durable SEO strategies that you can rely on.
It's very important that you keep a realistic idea of the resources available to you when you pick out the keywords you want to focus your optimization efforts on. Unless you have enormous amounts of time, money, and expertise to enlist in your SEO campaign, the most popular and general keywords are likely out of your reach. There's a great deal of competition for general, frequently-searched keywords. You'll find you get much better results by keeping your ambitions modest. Improving your page rank for the keyword "electronics," for instance, will be much harder than optimizing for the keyword "discount electronics in Gretna, Louisiana."
In the most general terms, SEO can be divided into on- and off-site work. Off-site work involves building backlinks to your site and increasing the overall level of traffic being sent to you. On-site work concentrates on incorporating your chosen keywords into the content of your web pages. When you commit yourself to an SEO campaign, it's all too easy to let off-site optimization monopolize your time; this is a mistake you want to avoid. Many of the off-site strategies available to you provide only a temporary boost to your search engine rankings, and the level of control you have over backlinks is minimal. In contrast, on-site optimization produces much more durable results. Make on-site SEO your priority.
Regularity goes hand-in-hand with the last point. You want to provide your website with a constant stream of new content and regular updates. Frequent updates count heavily in your favor with the search engines, and more content always means more opportunities to use your keywords. Updating regularly is also a good idea from a more general online marketing perspective: Visitors to your website will be more likely to stick around and to return in the future if they see that new updates are posted frequently.
Finally, there is one relatively new wrinkle in the SEO game that is not a passing fad: mobile marketing. The number of consumers and Internet users who use smartphones and other mobile devices to browse the web is growing truly enormous. You want to make sure that your optimization work doesn't neglect them. Build a mobile version of your site and make sure it incorporates the same keywords as your main site. If you have a physical business that you want to draw customers to, make sure that you optimize your presence on local sites (e.g. Google + Local and Yelp).
Although you'll want to make a habit of studying the latest evolutions of the search engine optimization game, bear in mind that certain strategies will always bear fruit. If you build a solid SEO foundation using proven techniques like the ones described here, you can expect to get reliable performance out of your efforts even if you experiment with newer, trendier tactics.
