Search Engine Optimization is becoming a more and more complicated area especially with the recent updates and data refresh done on the search engines’ index. However, the basic concept for good ranking does not change. The following illustrates five most important SEO techniques as summarized from the Google Webmaster Guidelines that all webmasters should follow.

The first step into SEO is to create a site that allows the bots from the search engines to crawl. A web page is as good as offline if it does not appear in the search engine’s index. It is advised to use clean and static urls for a page rather than lengthy url with complicated parameters.

It is stated clearly in the Google Webmaster Guidelines that they do not index urls with session ids. In addition, they will not index pages that require user authentication as the bots visit pages like a general user. Search engines also cannot guarantee that they will index all the dynamic urls. Therefore, in order to facilitate the search engines in crawling all the pages, static urls are always preferred.

It is true that the more incoming links a site has, the higher it will rank in terms of its relevant keywords. This is especially true for the Search Engine Giant, Google. Besides inbound links, cross-links and outbound links also help in Search Engine Optimization as these forms the crucial part of the linking strategy.

Anchor text is another critical factor when obtaining inbound links from the other sites. Anchor texts with ‘click here’ will not help much for Google in determining our page relevancy. Instead, you should always encourage incoming links to contain keywords that you are targeting. For example, a SEO site may have incoming anchor texts like ‘SEO Tools’ or ‘SEO Articles’.

Having a well-structured linking system within a site is also important as it allows Google bots to access every page of our site. These cross-links have several advantages to a site because it can distribute Page Rank and help the search engine to determine the pages’ relevancy by looking at their anchor text.