The world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is largely subjective and often results provided by experts do not yield substantial results. This is partly due to the nature of search engines like Google. Although Google is seen as altruistic by many, its main purpose is making money. It makes more money if it provides highly relevant search results to the user queries and people would not use it if it provided irrelevant results.

Providing these results is one of its goals in the long run. Due to being private, its site ranking algorithm is largely a mystery with a little bit of data revealed about particular factors from time to time. Another factor why SEO is largely unpredictable is because the factors in the Search Engines algorithms change regularly and what might have worked pretty well now will probably not work at some point in the future.

However, there are several things that search engines do take into account and which can affect positively your standing in the organic search results (organic are the search results for which you have not paid and which are determined by the search engine)

SEO Books

• SEO 2015 & Beyond :: Search engine optimization will never be the same again (Webmaster Series)
• 500 SEO Tips: Essential Strategies To Bulldoze Through Google’s Rankings, Increase Traffic and Go Viral
• The Art of SEO

Pretty URLs

Read Also: How to create SEO Optimized URLs from String in PHP

A common mistake out there is to have URLs that look like that:

http://www.mySite.com/?page=15 or http://www.mySite.com/?p=15

This certainly does not help Google to understand what your site is about. Yes, the domain may speak about what the site is about but it does not say anything about the particular page you are on and it is good to provide search engines with different data in each single page. Plus, your domain name would not always specify what the site is about.

A better alternative would be

http://www.mySite.com/designers/15

and an even better option would be

http://www.mySite.com/designers/mike-ross/

The last option allows search engine spiders to deduce that they are on your site and are probably looking at some designer called Mike Ross. Thereafter, when people search in Google for something like Hire designers or Mike Ross Designer your site has a much better possibility to capture their traffic.

Meta tags

There are several meta tags which are of importance for SEO and have been historically. Meta tags are tags which would not be displayed on the page but will be machine-parsable, enabling search engines to get a better understanding of your pages.

A very important note to add is that SEO meta tags should differ on every page describing the specific page and not your site in general. If they describe the site in general, then you are not grabbing an opportunity to get traffic from searches for your content and you are not allowing spiders to understand the individual pages fully.

The keywords meta tag describes your page with keywords separated with commas.

If we have a page about a specific recipe, we can have the following keywords:

<meta name="keywords" content="cooking,recipe, dumplings, chinese cuisine">

amongst others.

The description meta tag provides a short description of your page:

The same page can have the following description:

<meta name="description" content="Traditional Chinese recipe for making dumplings with chicken, fantastic in stew">