Good SEO starts On Site

I am always asked by our customers how to start optimizing for SEO.

In my opinion, you shouldn’t even start link building (which I consider the second phase of a good SEO strategy) until you:

1. Build Several Internal Contextual Links: Search engines care immensely how webmasters categorize and label their own content. The best way to do this is with one time occurring links within a body of content. In my opinion, 1 relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good external links. Some people recommends having at least 5 internal links to every landing page.

2. Mold Your PageRank Flow: SEO Fast Start has a great explanation of using the no-follow tag to sculpt your PageRank. Basically, the idea is to cap off the flow of PageRank using the no-follow tag to pages that are unimportant from a search point of view like Cart, Customer Center Checkout, Customer Service, Policies, etc. For example, while your Privacy policy page may be important to customers already on the site, it’s probably getting little to no action from the SERPs. By capping off PageRank to pages like this, you will increase the relative importance of your product pages and product category pages.

3. Do On Page Optimization of your Landing Pages: Title tags, H1 tags, keyword rich content, alt tags, and even Meta tags should be optimized before worrying about external links.

This is a great start, but there are details here and there. 97% of Web Development companies, dont get and dont know how to build a site with SEO in mind so its easy to work on it in the future, so you have to be very careful when choosing a vendor.