SEO Best Practices for 2012

There was a time when SEO’s preached the best search engine optimization practices by focusing on the SEO web copy stuffed with or filled with keywords, phrases, their variations etc, most of the time making the content meaningless for the website visitors. There were keyword Meta tags and high density of keywords it the title and description tags. Since then, when the black hatters took the advantage and the Google search results gave meaningless web search results with fake or poor sites coming up on the search engines top ranking, the search engine looked to improve the standards of indexing and optimization.

The year 2012 has been eventful so far, the Penguin update daunted the efforts of the black hatters and gave them the signals that they will be for sure penalized by the Search Engine Leader by delisting of their sites.

We have since then come off age and became more realistic when we perform SEO. In this year, we need to:

Focus more on natural ways of building one way back links

Use keywords in lesser density, than we used to do previously (not 2 to 5% but the preferred keyword density ratio is 0.5% to 1%). This forces us to build website content that flows naturally and makes sense to the humans coming across our website content.

Focus on LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing is the call of the day. The artificially intelligent search engines can make out and sense the nature of the search, hence provide the best and meaningful results through semantic search results.

Our focus on Meta Tags - we need to change the habit of embedding the hardcore keyword in the Title tag. Instead aiming on the ability of search engines to index on LSI standards must be given weight. More effective Meta Title Tags and description tags can be developed and help the users find your website through LSI search results.

Before you get into the act of optimizing your website do study and learn through the guidelines provided by the search engines. Visit the SEO guidelines pages to get a complete handle on the SEO best practices for the year 2012.