SEO Tutorial
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the activity of optimizing Web
pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine
friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.
This tutorial will teach you simple SEO techniques to improve
visibility of your web pages for different search engines specially
for Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Audience
This tutorial has been prepared for the beginners to help them
understand simple but effective SEO characteristics. After completing
this tutorial you will find yourself at a moderate level of expertise
in using simple but effective SEO techniques from where you can take
yourself to next levels.
Prerequisites
We assume you are aware of simple web technologies like HTML,
XHTML, Style Sheet etc. If you already have developed any website
then it is an added advantage and it will help you understand SEO
concepts very easily.
SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because
most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search
engines deal with text.
- SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization.
- SEO is all about optimizing a web site for Search Engines.
- SEO is the process of designing and developing a web site to
rank well in search engine results.
- SEO is to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a web
site from search engines.
- SEO is a subset of search engine marketing.
- SEO is the art of ranking in the search engines.
- SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work
and what human visitors might search.
If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you
understand how search engines work and which items are most important
in SEO.
How Search Engine Works ?
Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver
search results
- Crawling - is the process of fetching all the web
pages linked to a web site. This task is performed by a software,
called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the
case with Google).
- Indexing - is the process of creating index for all
the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from
where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of
indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe
the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.
- Processing - When a search request comes, the search
engine processes it . i.e. it compares the search string in the
search request with the indexed pages in the database.
- Calculating Relevancy - Since it is likely that more
than one pages contains the search string, so the search engine
starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index
to the search string.
- Retrieving Results - The last step in search engines'
activities is retrieving the best matched results. Basically, it is
nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! often update their
relevancy algorithm dozens of times per month. When you see changes
in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift or something else
outside of your control.
Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is
the same, the minor differences between their relevancy algorithm
lead to major changes in results relevancy.
What is SEO Copywriting?
SEO Copywriting is the technique of writing the viewable text on a
web page in such a way that it reads well for the surfer, and also
targets specific search terms. Its purpose is to rank highly in the
search engines for the targeted search terms.
As well as the viewable text, SEO Copywriting usually optimizes
other on-page elements for the targeted search terms. These include
the Title, Description and Keywords tags, headings and alt text.
The idea behind SEO Copywriting is that search engines want
genuine content pages and not additional pages (often called "doorway
pages") that are created for the sole purpose of achieving high
rankings.
What is Search Engine Rank?
When you search any keyword using a search engine then it displays
thousands of results found in its database. A page ranking is
measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine
results. If Search engine is putting your web page on first position
then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed as
with a high rank.
SEO is the process of designing and developing a web site to
attend a high rank in search engine results.
What is on-page and off-page SEO
Conceptually, there are two ways of doing SEO
- On-Page SEO- This includes provding good content, good
keywords selection. putting keywords on correct places, giving
appropriate title to every page etc.
- Off-Page SEO - This includes link building, increasing
link popularity by submitting in open directories, search engines,
link exchange etc.
SEO techniques are
classified into two broad categories:
- Techniques that search engines recommend as part of good
design referred to as White Hat SEO, and
- Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to
minimize the effect of referred to as Black Hat or spamdexing.
White Hat SEO:
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as White Hat if
it follows the followings
- If it conforms to the search engine's guidelines.
- If it does not involves any deception.
- It ensures that the content a search engine indexes and
subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
- It ensures that a Web Page content should have been created
for the users and not just for the search engines.
- It ensures the good quality of the web pages
- It ensures the useful content available on the web pages
Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and don't try to fool your
site visitors. Be honest and definitely you will get something more.
Next chapter onward we will put light on White Hap SEO techniques.
The WHST are very simple and can be done without investing much cost.
Black Hat or Spamdexing:
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as Black Hat or
Spamdexing if it follows the followings
- Try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search
engines and/or involve deception.
- Redirecting users from a page that is built for search
engines to one that is more human friendly.
- Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page
the search engine ranked.
- Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots
and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking
SEO tactic.
- Using Hidden or invisible text or with the page background
color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code
such as "no frame" sections.
- Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using keywords that
are unrelated to the site's content. This is called Meta tag
stuffing.
- Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the
keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called
Keyword stuffing .
- Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little
content but are instead stuffed with very similar key words and
phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages
- Mirror web sites by hosting multiple web sites all with
conceptually similar content but using different URLs.
- Creating a rogue copy of a popular web site which shows
contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web
surfers to unrelated or malicious web sites. This is called Page
hijacking.
Always be away to adopt any of the above Black Hat tactic to
improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to
identify all the above proprieties of your site and ultimately you
are not going to get anything.
When you start thinking of doing a business through
internet, first thing which you think about is your web site domain
name. Before you choose a domain name you should consider the
followings:
- Who would be your target audience?
- What you intend to sell to them. Is it a tangible item or
just text content?
- What will make your business idea unique or different than
everything else that is already on the market?
Many people think it is important to have keywords in a domain.
Keywords in the domain name are usually important, but it usually can
be done while keeping the domain name short, memorable, and free of
hyphens.
Using keywords in your domain name give you a strong competitive
advantage over your competitors. Having your keywords in your domain
name can increase click through rates on search engine listings and
paid ads as well as make it easier to Using your keywords in get
keyword rich descriptive inbound links.
Avoid buying long, and confusing domain names. May people separate
the words in their domain names using either dashes or hyphen. In the
past the domain name itself was a significant ranking factor but now
search engines have advanced it is not very significant factor
anymore.
Keep two to three words in your domain name it will be more
memorable. Some of the most memorable websites do a great job of
branding by creating their own word. Few examples are eBay, Yahoo!,
Expedia, Slashdot, Fark, Wikipedia, Google...
You should be able to say it over the telephone once and the other
person should know how to spell it and they should be able to guess
about what you sell.
Guru Mantra:
Finally, you should be able to answer yourself for the following
questions:
- Why do you want to build your website? Why should people buy
off your site and not from other Site? What makes you different from
others?
- Who are your target audience and what you intend to sell to
them?
- List 5 - 10 websites which you thing, they are they amazing.
Now think why are they amazing?
- Create 5 different domain names. Make at least 1 of them
funny. Tell them to a half dozen people and see which ones are the
most memorable. You will get more honest feedback if the people do
not know you well.
- Buy your domain name which is more catchy, memorable and
relevant to your business.
One of the simplest methods to improve your search
engine optimization is to look at the way you name your files. Before
writing this tutorial I did lot of research on file names and found
that search engines like Google give too much importance to file
names. You should think what are you going to put in your web page
and then give a relevant file name to this page.
Just try giving any keyword in Google search engine and you will
find file names highlighted with the keyword you have given. So it
simply proves that your file name should have appropriate keyword.
File Naming Style:
- The filename should preferably be short and descriptive. It's
always good to use same keywords in file name as well as in page
title.
- Don't use file names like service.htm or job.htm.
But use actual service name in your file name like
computer-repairing.htm
- Don't use more than 3-4 words in file name and separate them
with hyphens rather than underscores. Try to use 2 keywords if
possible.
File Name Example:
Here are some file names which should be preferred from SEO as
well as from user point of view.
slazenger-brand-balls.html wimbledon-brand-balls.html wilson-brand-balls.html
Notice that keywords are separated by hyphens rather than
underscores. Google sees file names as follows:
seo-relevant-filename as seo relevant filename(good)
But Google sees
seo_relevant_filename as seorelevantfilename (not good)
File Extension:
It should be noticed that .html, .htm and .php and
any other extension do NOTHING for your visitors, and they are simply
a means of offloading some of the work of configuring your webserver
properly onto your visitors. In effect you are asking your site
vistors to tell your webserver HOW to produce the page, not which
one?
Many Web masters think that its a good idea to use filename
without using extension. It may help you but not a whole lot.
URL Sub-Directory Name:
From Search Engine Optimization point of view URL sub-directory
name hardly matters. You try giving any keyword in any search and you
will not find any sub-directory name matching with your keywords. But
from user point of view you should keep very much abbreviated
sub-directory name.
Guru Mantra:
Finally, I will suggest to keep the following points in mind
before naming your files:
- Use web page file name short, simple, descriptive and
relevant to page content.
- Try to use maximum 3-4 keywords in your file name and these
keywords should be appeared in your web page title as well.
- Separate all keyword with hyphen rather than with underscore.
- Keep your sub directories name as shorter as possible.
- Keep the file size fewer than 101K though because Google
chops almost everything above that.
A web site design and layout gives first impression
about your site. There are sites which are too fancy and regular net
surfers will just reach on those sites and will come out even without
creating a single click.
Search Engines are very smart but after all they are software and
not human being who will read the content of their interest. If you
make your site too complicated then Search Engine would not be able
to parse the content of your site properly and finally indexing would
not be efficient which will result in a low rank.
The actual page content should have a keyword density of about 10%
and should weigh in at about 200 words - but there are as many
opinions about this as there are SEO experts. Some say keyword
density should be 5% and some say it should be 20%. 10% works for me.
Here are few guidelines which should be considered while designing
a web page.
- You should have more text content than HTML elements.
- No frames. They are the enemies of Search Engines and Search
Engines are Enemies of Frames.
- No ads if possible. Because most of the ads uses Java Script
which is not advised to be used.
- No JavaScript. If you need JavaScript, call it from an
external file rather than dumping the code in the HTML file.
JavaScript drop down menus prevent spiders from crawling beyond your
homepage. If you use them, be sure to include text links at the
bottom of the page.
- Nothing that does not fit perfectly into the page topic;
There should be no doubt in the search engine's mind (or in he
user's mind) what your page is about.
- No unnecessary directories. Keep your files as close to the
root as possible.
- No fancy stuff (Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers etc.)
unless absolutely necessary.
We are discussing everything in Web context so in web
terminology a keyword is a term that a person enters into a search
engine to find specific information. Most people enter search phrases
that consists of between two and five words. Such phrases may be
called search phrases, keyword phrases, query phrases, or just
keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive.
There are following concepts related to Keywords which helps in
optimizing keywords on a web page.
Keyword Frequency:
This is calculated as how often does a keyword appear in a site's
title or description. You don't want to go overboard with frequency,
however, since on some engines if you repeat a word too many times,
you'll be penalized for "spamming" or keyword stuffing.
In general though, repeat your keyword in the document as many
times as you can get away with, and up to 3-7 times in your META
tags.
Keyword Weight:
This refers to the number of keywords appearing on your Web page
compared to the total number of words appearing on that same page.
Some search engines consider this when determining the rank of your
Web site for a particular keyword search.
One technique that often works well is to create some smaller
pages, generally just a paragraph long, which emphasize a particular
keyword. By keeping the overall number of words to a minimum, you
will increase the "weight" of the keyword you are
emphasizing.
Keyword Proximity:
This refers to the placement of keywords on a Web page in relation
to each other or, in some cases, in relation to other words with a
similar meaning as the queried keyword.
For search engines that grade a keyword match by keyword
proximity, the connected phrase .home loans. will outrank a citation
that mentions .home mortgage loans. assuming that you are searching
only for the phrase "home loans".
Keyword Prominence:
A measure of how early or high up on a page the keywords are
found. Having keywords in the first heading and in the first
paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are best.
Keyword Placement:
WHERE your keywords are placed on a page is very important. For
example, in most engines, placing the keywords in the Title of the
page or in the Heading tags will give it more relevancy. On some
engines, placing keywords in the link text, the part that is
underlined on the screen in a browser, can add more relevancy to
those words.
Best Places to Put Keywords:
Here is a list of places where you should try to use your main
keywords.
- Keywords in the <title> tag(s).
- Keywords in the <meta name="description">
- Keywords in the <meta name="keyword">
- Keywords in <h1> or other headline tags.
- Keywords in the <a
href="http://yourcompany.com">keywords</a> link
tags.
- Keywords in the body copy.
- Keywords in alt tags.
- Keywords in <!-- insert comments here> comments tags.
- Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g.,
http://www.keyword.com/keywordkeyword.htm.
Finding Keywords:
There are many different ways to find keywords for your website.
Some good keyword ideas are:
- Words people would search for to find your product or
service.
- Problems your prospective customers may be trying to solve
with your product or service.
- Keyword tags on competitors websites.
- Visible page copy on competitors websites.
- Related search suggestions on top search engines.
- By using an online tools like: Google
Keyword Tool
- By analyzing your website carefully and finding out proper
keywords. This task can be done by expert SEO Copywriters.
- Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - Particularly to
what the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for
that word when optimizing pages over time.
- You can do brainstorming to identify correct keywords for
your site.
What is Word Stemming?
Google uses word stemming. Word stemming allows all forms of the
word - singular, plural, verb form as well as similar words to be
returned for a given search query.
So if someone types in "house plans", not only will
pages that are optimized for that phrase be returned, but so will
pages that contain all variations of that phrase, for example: "house
plan", "house planning", "house planer".
Hope you have some understanding on keywords and how to identify
them and where to use them. Next chapter will explain you how to
optimize Metatags for better results.
There are two important Meta Tags and they are the meta
description and meta keyword tags. Some search engines may display
the meta description as part of the search results, but the meta
keywords tags should not appear in search results.
The general consensus among SEO experts is that meta tags are
dead. Even so, many of these same experts continue to use meta tags
in their own sites.
For Google adding the Description Meta Tag won't result in a boost
in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might
be used for the description for your SERP listings in Google. Yahoo
says they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. So it makes
sense to add one for Yahoo and any other minor search engines that
still use.
What do the Meta Tags Look Like?
You can add following in the head section of the web page:
<meta name="keywords" content="KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2 KEYPHRASE1 etc. about 30 to 40 unique words"> <meta name="description" content="An accurate, keyword-rich description about 150 characters">
Meta Description Tag Tips:
There are few important tips for good meta description tags:
- Use keywords in your meta description tag.
- Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use
multiple syntaxes of your key words.
- There should not be more than 150 characters in a description
meta tag of a single web page.
- Use a different meta description tag for each page, as each
page is different and stands a better chance of being found if you
place a good title and description on it.
Meta Keywords Tag Tips:
There are few important tips for good meta keywords tags. Please
refer to previous chapter on identifying good keyword.
- Use synonyms.
- Use unique keywords.
- No need to repeat any given phrase.
- You can repeat any word an unlimited amount of time as long
as each time it is part of a different phrase.
Robots Meta Tag:
The important Meta Tag that you may need sometime is the Robots
Meta Tag which looks like this:
meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Using above meta tag you can tell to a spider or robot that you do
not want some of your pages indexed or that you do not want your
links followed.
There are two important Meta Tags and they are the meta
description and meta keyword tags. Some search engines may display
the meta description as part of the search results, but the meta
keywords tags should not appear in search results.
The general consensus among SEO experts is that meta tags are
dead. Even so, many of these same experts continue to use meta tags
in their own sites.
For Google adding the Description Meta Tag won't result in a boost
in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might
be used for the description for your SERP listings in Google. Yahoo
says they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. So it makes
sense to add one for Yahoo and any other minor search engines that
still use.
What do the Meta Tags Look Like?
You can add following in the head section of the web page:
<meta name="keywords" content="KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2 KEYPHRASE1 etc. about 30 to 40 unique words"> <meta name="description" content="An accurate, keyword-rich description about 150 characters">
Meta Description Tag Tips:
There are few important tips for good meta description tags:
- Use keywords in your meta description tag.
- Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use
multiple syntaxes of your key words.
- There should not be more than 150 characters in a description
meta tag of a single web page.
- Use a different meta description tag for each page, as each
page is different and stands a better chance of being found if you
place a good title and description on it.
Meta Keywords Tag Tips:
There are few important tips for good meta keywords tags. Please
refer to previous chapter on identifying good keyword.
- Use synonyms.
- Use unique keywords.
- No need to repeat any given phrase.
- You can repeat any word an unlimited amount of time as long
as each time it is part of a different phrase.
Robots Meta Tag:
The important Meta Tag that you may need sometime is the Robots
Meta Tag which looks like this:
meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Using above meta tag you can tell to a spider or robot that you do
not want some of your pages indexed or that you do not want your
links followed.
Hope you understand the meaning of HTML TITLE
tag which is put inside head tag. The page title (not to be confused
with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of
your browser window, and is also what is displayed when you bookmark
a page or add it to your browser Favorites.
This is the one place on a web page where your keywords MUST be
present. Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your
website is extremely important to Google - particularly for the home
page. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, remember to do
this!
The title shouldn't consist of much more than about 9 words or 60
characters, with your keywords used at the very beginning of the
title. Since Google is looking for relevant keywords in the title,
this means you should NOT include your company name in the title
unless your company name is very well known.
Improper or nonexistent use of titles in web pages will keep more
websites out of top rankings on Google than any other factor except
perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page or a lack of quality
links from other websites that point to your site.
Best Practices for Creating Titles:
Here are some best practices you should follow for creating titles
on pages:
- Each page should have a unique title.
- If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in
every title of every page.
- Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword
Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.
- Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase
on your specific product, service, or content pages.
- If you must include your company name, put it at the end of
the title.
- Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords
based on what WordTracker says is searched on more often.
- Don't overdo it - don't repeat your keywords more than 2 - 3
times in the title
- Make sure the <title> tag is the first element in the
<head> section of your page - this makes it easier to find by
Google.
Hope you understand the meaning of HTML TITLE
tag which is put inside head tag. The page title (not to be confused
with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of
your browser window, and is also what is displayed when you bookmark
a page or add it to your browser Favorites.
This is the one place on a web page where your keywords MUST be
present. Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your
website is extremely important to Google - particularly for the home
page. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, remember to do
this!
The title shouldn't consist of much more than about 9 words or 60
characters, with your keywords used at the very beginning of the
title. Since Google is looking for relevant keywords in the title,
this means you should NOT include your company name in the title
unless your company name is very well known.
Improper or nonexistent use of titles in web pages will keep more
websites out of top rankings on Google than any other factor except
perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page or a lack of quality
links from other websites that point to your site.
Best Practices for Creating Titles:
Here are some best practices you should follow for creating titles
on pages:
- Each page should have a unique title.
- If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in
every title of every page.
- Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword
Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.
- Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase
on your specific product, service, or content pages.
- If you must include your company name, put it at the end of
the title.
- Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords
based on what WordTracker says is searched on more often.
- Don't overdo it - don't repeat your keywords more than 2 - 3
times in the title
- Make sure the <title> tag is the first element in the
<head> section of your page - this makes it easier to find by
Google.
Hope you understand the meaning of HTML TITLE
tag which is put inside head tag. The page title (not to be confused
with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of
your browser window, and is also what is displayed when you bookmark
a page or add it to your browser Favorites.
This is the one place on a web page where your keywords MUST be
present. Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your
website is extremely important to Google - particularly for the home
page. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, remember to do
this!
The title shouldn't consist of much more than about 9 words or 60
characters, with your keywords used at the very beginning of the
title. Since Google is looking for relevant keywords in the title,
this means you should NOT include your company name in the title
unless your company name is very well known.
Improper or nonexistent use of titles in web pages will keep more
websites out of top rankings on Google than any other factor except
perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page or a lack of quality
links from other websites that point to your site.
Best Practices for Creating Titles:
Here are some best practices you should follow for creating titles
on pages:
- Each page should have a unique title.
- If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in
every title of every page.
- Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword
Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.
- Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase
on your specific product, service, or content pages.
- If you must include your company name, put it at the end of
the title.
- Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords
based on what WordTracker says is searched on more often.
- Don't overdo it - don't repeat your keywords more than 2 - 3
times in the title
- Make sure the <title> tag is the first element in the
<head> section of your page - this makes it easier to find by
Google.
You design and develop a web site but how would you
know if you have put all the HTML syntax in correct way. Almost all
browser don't complain against your wrong syntax but wrong is
wrong. There are many SEO experts who claim that SEO is not
dependent on site HTML/XHTML verification. But I will tell you
various reasons why your site should be W3C Compliance.
Why HTML/XHTML Verification is Required?
There are various reasons to verify your web page before hosting
it over the internet.
- Any web page quality depends on how well you have written
your web page.It should be syntactically correct and should pass all
the Quality Gates.
- When any Search Engine does indexing for your web page
content it might get confused if your HTML tags are not written
properly and much of the web page content might not be indexed
properly.
- There might be many HTML tags which you are using in your web
page but then have been depreciated and many of the search engines
also don't support them.
- Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always
appreciated by good Webmasters.
What Is W3C Compliance?
The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and since 1994 the W3C
has provided the guidelines by which websites and web pages should be
structured and created. Here are the links to validate your web
pages:
- Validate HTML/XHTML File against W3C Standard HTML/XHTML
Validator.
- Validate CSS File against W3C Standard CSS
Validator.
While doing verification you will get errors along with
appropriate reasons. All the validations will be done using XHTML DTD
which is a refined version of HTML.
Rules for W3C Compliance:
There are following rules which you should keep in your mind while
writing your web pages.
- Use the XHTML declaration statements to start every XHTML
page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
- Every tag must be closed.
- The head and body tags are now mandatory.
- Empty tags get a terminating slash. An empty tag is a tag
that doesn't require an end tag. Examples include <br> and
<hr>.
<BR> is now <br />. <HR> is now <hr />. <IMG SRC="--"> is now <img src="--" />
- All tags must be lower case. This does not apply to
attributes, only tags. For example, both of these formats are
acceptable under the XHTML DTD:
<FONT color="#ffffcc"> is invalid <font color="#ffffcc"> is valid <font color="#FFFFCC"> is also valid
- All the attribute values should be put with-in double quote.
- Tags may not nested
<b><i>Text</b></i> This is invalid <b><i>Text</i></b> This is valid
- The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big,
small, sub, or sup.
- One <form> tag can not be inside another <form>
tag.
- If your code contains a &, it must be written as &.
- Any use of CSS should use all lower case lettering.
Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality
content is difficult and time consuming. If you are really serious
about SEO and you are not getting expected result then better choice
is to hire an SEO expert. There are following tasks which should be
taken care by SEO experts
- Code validation and clean up - Ensure that code is SE
Friendly and standards compliant.
- Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and
ensure URL's are spider friendly.
- On Page optimization - Page Title, copy writing, Call to
action etc.
- Quality link building - Securing one way links from relevant
sites.
- Keyword research - Building a list of key-phrases relevant to
your business.
- Creating Quality Content - Build optimized pages around terms
discovered through keyword research.
- Off Page Optimization - Blogs, Press Releases, Article
Submissions
If you are confident that you have the required skills then you
can take care of doing all the above activities otherwise its worth
taking help from SEO Companies or to hire any SEO Specialist.
Choosing a SEO Expert or Company:
This is most difficult part to choose a correct SEO Expert or SEO
Company. But we are giving you few guidelines which can help you for
the same.
- Start searching through your friends and business partners.
- Post your queries in SEO Forums to get feedback from the
community.
- Check other sites rank which they already have optimized.
- Don't go for SEO companies doing automated submission etc.
- Don't go for SEO companies doing Balk Hat tricks.
- Don't look for cheap SEO because of some pennies you can loss
more. But take care, high price also does not guarantee high
quality.
- Take guarantee if possible for a particular rank and any
particular search engine.
- User SEO Expert or Company name in Google to find more
information about them.
- Don't go just because of their fancy site and good article
available on their site.
- Don't go testimonials available on their sites.
I can not list out all the factors here because there may be
different situations and different views. So you should be smart
enough to think what's bad and what's good.
Link building is the SEO practice of obtaining links
from external web sites to your own to improve both direct referrals
ie. people clicking on the links and search engine ranking. Link
building is all about increasing your site link popularity.
Web site Crawler will go to a site again and again whose ranking
in Search Engine is high. You can verify this fact by putting your
site on a high rank site. If your site link is available on a high
rank web site then you have 99.99% chances that you site will be
indexed with-in 24Hrs.
How to increase Link Popularity ?
There are various ways of increasing your web site link
popularity. I'm listing out some important tips which are easily
doable.
- Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Don't go
for automated submission.
- Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like
dmog.org, yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories will give
your site a boost in link popularity and improve search engine
ranking in other search engines.
- Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to
your site if you have what they want and no where is available.
- Leverage your personal relationsrelations with other
webmasters. Put your site link on their sites. One way links often
count for more than reciprocal links.
- Participate in Link Exchange Program. Find top 20 sites doing
the same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link
exchange between unrelated sites might affect the ranking of
websites in the Search Engine.
- If you are subscribed in a forum and forum does not have any
restriction to keep your site link as your signature then it can
help you to increase your site popularity.
- Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG, and Slashdot
etc. Before submitting please go through their spam policy.
- Write good articles in blogging sites and give few references
of your links with-in that article.
- Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to
keep them busy on your site. If possible create forums, news
letters, blogs etc.
There are other ways but you need to spend some dollars to go for
such alternative.
- Buy a place on high rank website where you can put your link.
- Subscribe for google's Adwords program to drive traffic
towards your site.
- You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the
number of hits on your site which will result in your site link
popularity.
There are various other tips related to SEO. I have not
categorized them into any special category so putting in misc
category. Go through these tips one by one
Don't do the followings:
- Don't keep hidden text on your web pages.
- Don't create alt image spamming by putting wrong keywords.
- Don't use meta tags stuffing.
- Don't use frames and flash on your site.
- Don't exchange your links with black listed sites.
- Don't try to fool your site visitors by using miss spelled
keyword.
- Don't send spam emails to thousand of email IDs.
- Don't use too much graphics on your site.
- Don't create too many doorway pages.
- Don't try to create duplicate content of pages.
- Don't submit your website many times in a single search
engine.
- Don't use sub-directory depth more than 1-2.
- Don't create too many dynamic pages. Try to convert them into
static pages.
- Don't bloat your pages with code.
- Don't nest your pages.
Do the followings:
There are various other tips which can help you to optimize your
web site for many Search Engines.
- Create logs of pages and each page should however contain a
minimum of about 200 visible words of text to maximize relevance
with Google.
- Create a Sitemap, Help, FAQ, About Us, Link to Us, Copyright,
Disclaimer, Privacy Policy pages on mandatory basis.
- Create a home page link to each and every web page and
provide easy navigation through all the pages.
- Pay attention to your dynamic page URLs. Google can crawl and
index dynamic pages as long as you don't have more than 2 parameters
in the URL.
- Check your complete site for broken links. Broken links will
reduce your other pages rank as well.
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