Basic SEO practices for newbies:

stephenm806 said:

I have a website that I recently built. I have one concern with how I did the keywords to get it to the 3-4% ratio margin. My website really has no purpose besides to give the company I am trying to get off the ground a site. My main focus is sales of merchandise like Target. Since all my items are on my ecommerce site search engine visibility would not recognize them. I created a txt file and hid it from mobile and threw it under the background of my website. I had all of my keywords 50-150 times written in the txt. The only words in the txt file are my keywords. I have seen that search engines are supposed to fairly good at spot something like this. I was wondering if anybody knows how bad this could be and if I should eliminate it or if I created the txt file with 1000s of words and wrote a story with the keywords in it, would that work. Any information and suggestions would be much appreciated. Also any proven free software of paid software with testing period for building backlinks and generating links would be much appreciated.

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• Make sure your website loads quickly. Test your sites speed with this tool. It will give you an overview of errors it find and suggestions to fix them. Here is a great post on making your website faster. One simple suggestion is to move your website from shared hosting onto a dedicated web host. Lastly, if the tech lingo is too much consider hiring someone to make these changes. Site load speed is a factor in search engine rankings so it is very important to have a quickly loading website.
• Make sure your website looks hot. This doesn't mean spending thousands on a new design but spend what you can afford. As previously mentioned your website is the online face of your business and making it look good creates great first impression. A poorly done site can increase your bounce rate (number of people who leave a website without visiting a second age.) A quick search for "Web Designer + City name" (without quotes) will return local web designers. If your budget is limited consider themes from websites like themeforest.net and templatemonster.com
• Make it easy to navigate. This means getting from the Homepage to any page on the website should no more than 4 clicks. Making use of categories and bread crumb navigation are vital for ease of access and good seo. Categories group pages by the subject matter. Breadcrumb navigation is narrowing broad categories to targeted sub categories. For example, if you owned a furniture store you would of course have a category on couches which would narrow down to blue couches, red couches, etc. For a more detailed explanation of breadcrumb navigation check out this great overview.
• Moving to a content management system like WordPress for a website can make your life and SEO a whole lot easier. WordPress makes editing files simple and has easy to use plug-ins that make virtually every techy task very simple. Joomla and Drupal are alternatives if you do not like WordPress
• Make sure your robots.txt file (accessed from web host files) is not blocking search engine spiders from accessing your website. This is rare but neglecting to check can result in all your efforts being wasted, since you're telling search engines to not include your website in results.
• Create a sitemap and upload it to your website. A sitemap more or less an index of all the pages/categories/posts and other information on your website. Creating and uploading one is simple is a quick win for SEO. This tool creates a sitemap.
• Sign up to Google Webmaster Tools. This is a service run by Google which will report important metrics that show the health of your website from Google's perspective. Sign up to Google Analytics to track your traffic and important demographic info as well as source and location.
• Take care of redirects and 404s. A detailed guide can be found here on SEOMOZ