It’s easy to get caught up in bad SEO advice or to start a website and have the best of intentions and follow some common misconceptions and before you know it you have been maintaining a website for years just to find out you are no better now than you were 4 years ago.

Here’s a quick list of what you do want to focus on:

1. Have good on-page SEO practices. It’s simple. Just follow the rules.
2. Quality inbound links. Links from spam sites, or generally low quality sites are not good. On the flip side you want to get as many quality inbound links as you can. This is not a numbers game, so more is not necessarily better but quality is indeed the key. Learn more about quality inbound links here.
3. Extend your website registration. Spam tends to set up a site and own it for a year or two and then never use it again and then do the same thing over with another domain. Ideally you want your website/domain to be registered for 3 years or more.
4. Don’t stuff keywords. Again, by following on page best practices you will avoid this, but I always get asked “how many keywords should I have on a page,” or “how often do those need to be repeated.” It’s not about the keyword density but it’s about the quality of your content. So instead of frequency and repetition of words focus on the quality of the content and the relevance to your business.
5. Register with Webmaster Tools and other free improvement tools through sites like Yahoo, Google and Bing all of whom have their own variation of a webmaster tools.
6. Sign up with local and larger directories such as Google local, better business bureau, chamber of commerce etc.
7. Provide social media links and other sharing abilities. Allowing people to share your content. Spam is less likely to be featured on a popular network for their niche and less likely to have content shared, so make sure you are giving yourself a chance.
8. Add Location and contact information. Make it clear where you are located and how people can contact you.
9. Don’t have page after page with outgoing links. No pages should have 100 or more outbound links.
10. There is value in your domain. Have a clean professional name…so don’t have it be too long and don’t buy domain after domain and redirect them to another in hopes of picking up ranking, it won’t do anything.

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