Unless you're living under an internet rock maybe in The World of Warcraft or Skyrim then you already probably know that Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic on the World Wide Web. Really, it has been since 85, back in Daytona. That's slang for you non-saavy readers. Everyone who has a website wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search to get more traffic.

With so much SEO information, SEO Tips, SEO Tricks, SEO tool websites sometimes it is easy to get carried away with SEO basics. Its our opinion the best SEO technique is to keep it simple and apply a bit of common sense. And this common sense comes from where else? Well from Google of course. We've said it many times before, if you're new to SEO, So-so at SEO, or like us you've mastered SEO you should really take 10 minutes and read Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. 

Most SEO plugins will take care of the common architecture related stuff for you. So in this article our only objective is to focus solely on techniques that we recommend that you do yourself (or at least be aware of).

We have identified and made a list of what we feel are the 2016 Top 15 SEO Practices that most tend to forget when implementing their SEO stargegies. These simple SEO techniques, if practiced properly, should make a significant difference as to how your pages are ranked in the Search Engine universe.

1. Use proper anchor text for inter-links. Never use “here”, “there” etc for the anchor text.
2. Optimize images, always create alt tags and remember to write description in the alt tag.
3. Use search friendly permalinks. Remove any and all ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters in your URLs. This means utilizing Mod_rewrite if necessary. 
4. Use hyphens (-) )between words to improve readability.
5. Do not use underscores (_) in URLs, use hyphens (-) instead.
6. Do not use session ids in URLs. Most GOOD hosts will not allow this anyway. 
7. Never use capital letters in URLs. 
8. Use internal linking when possible and appropriate.
9. Use sticky posts if you are able to.
10. Have a category description paragraph on each page.
11. Let the visitors subscribe to category specific RSS feed. (Wordpress lovers, this ones for you!)
12. Use rel=”nofollow” tag on low value links to not pass the page rank juice.
13. Use sub-directories rather than sub-domains.
14. Research your target audience and aim your site content appropriately.
15. Keep your webpage content up to date. Updating your content frequently will help attract the Search engines spiders to index the web pages frequently.

Having knowledge of Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide and unitize these top 15 seo practices will help insure that your webpage is as search friendly as you can make it which in return should lead toward a higher page rank. 

Is SEO Hard?

Is SEO hard? Well, not really, but understand its very time consuming so sometimes its best to hire professionals to do it. We would be happy to take a look at your website and to create a seo strategy that compliments you and your business. Contact us today!

What techniques do you feel we're missing? Make your suggestions in the comments below!