I figured I would make a quick post while finishing the setup of this blog to detail some basic SEO fundamentals that everyone should follow no matter what type of site they are marketing:

• Proper page names - This is very often overlooked, especially with e-commerce sites. Dynamic pages are fine, but you want them to at the very least appear like static pages. What do I meant by this? Compare http://www.guerillainternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing/ to http://www.guerillainternetmarketing.com/?p=123. Notice the difference? The first URL has words in it and the other has the variable p set to 123. What does this all mean? First off, search engines weigh static page names higher than they do dynamic pages. Second, having keywords in the URL is a huge positive. In this case, the phrase ‘Internet Marketing’ is repeated 3 times in the URL alone! This can usually be accomplished using mod_rewrite on Linux servers. You can do something similar on Windows boxes but it’s a little more difficult.
• 301 Redirects - one of the first things you should do is make sure all traffic to yourdomain.com is redirected to www.yourdomain.com, or vice versa. The point of this is that some engines will see those as two different sites, thus dividing the PageRank or other score amongst the two rather than putting all the numbers into one basket. Obviously this is not a good thing! There are many ways to accomplish this, but the key is to verify that it was done correctly as a proper 301 by using a header checker.
• Proper titles, metas, H1s - these are the ‘bones’ of a search engine friendly page. Of course content and links are key, but we’ll dive deeply into that at a later date. Again, for dynamic sites, these key areas often get lost in the shuffle. If you pay attention as you click around smaller e-commerce sites, you will often see that not only are the page names dynamic, but the titles and metas are as well. Many times they are not unique or descriptive of that page, and are not optimized for target keywords. This blog is dynamic, but there are plugins available that let you customize the titles and metas of each and every page created to ensure that they are well optimized.
• Content - Content is King! It is so important that sites have keyword rich content, and lots of it. Many times companies will focus so much on putting products up or call to actions to sign up for a service without putting pages of text up that describe the products/services. If you want to be indexed and indexed well, you need copy on the site, not just images. Spiders love content which is why there is an entire industry out there of companies that will write content to post on web sites.
• Links - Links are King! Hey wait a minute, didn’t I just say that content is king? There is much debate over which is more important right now, content or links. My personal experience shows that they are both very important, but I have seen firsthand that the right links can do wonders for rankings for target keywords. We will get more in depth on link building at a later date.

Now I need to go follow my own advice and create more content. Once I have a few more posts I will also work on my own link building strategy, can’t stay at a PageRank of 0 if I want any success!