This post is intended to cover the basics of search engine optimization. I’ve tried to include every aspect of it but it’s possible that I missed something. If I have please leave a comment below and I’ll be sure to add anything I have missed.
What is SEO and why is it important?
SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimization. In a nutshell SEO is about helping search engines, like Google, know what your site is about and what keywords you should rank for.
So if your website is about poodle manicures then you want your website to show up in the search results when someone searches for poodle manicures on Google.
By making small changes to your website you can dramatically increase the likelihood that you’ll show up for the search terms you desire in Google and other search engines.
Learn HTML
If you want to optimize your website for the search engines you need to take a couple hours and familiarize yourself with HTML. You don’t need to be an expert you need to understand the basics. If I talk about title tags for image tags you should know what I’m talking about.
Just search Google for HTML tutorials and you’ll find tons of free tutorials.
Blogs make it easy
If you use a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger then much of the search engine optimization is already done for you. This saves you a lot of work and enables you to spend more time developing great content and less time writing HTML for your website.
I recommend that most everyone use a blog for their website. Without that said, it’s still a good idea to learn HTML and understand the basics.
Are You Susceptible to an SEO Scam?
Have you been tricked into forking over hundreds of dollars after being promised a top spot in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs)?
If so, you’re not alone – many online entrepreneurs, in their quest to achieve top ranking, have fallen prey to an SEO scam.
As with any industry, there are search engine optimizers who are honest, and those that aren’t.
How can you spot a fake and save your cold hard cash for other business needs?
First, get rid of your desperation.
Building your search engine optimization isn’t an overnight task and anyone promising that it’s easy is a liar – not someone who has “insider secrets.”
Aside from pie-in-the-sky speed promises, watch out for volume assurances.
If they say they’re going to submit your domain to hundreds or thousands of search engines, you’d better be asking for proof!
Submission to search engines, as any real SEO expert knows, isn’t even a part of the strategy! You have to optimize your site for ‘searchability’ and indexing, not force it on them.
Don’t let anyone guarantee you hundreds or thousands of backlinks in an instant, either!
If they do procure this many, there’s no doubt it will be from back alley virtual spots that Google and other search engines consider dirty – which can hurt your optimization!
Be willing to pay for good optimization – it’s not something a $39 monthly fee can cover.
Demand to know what your money’s paying for (specifically) and if they tout first page pledges for Google – RUN – because nobody can make that claim except Google, and good luck getting them to do that!
Search Engine Optimization and Keywords Overview
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have complex algorithms that decide what pages will come up in search results for a given keywords phrase. We can construct content pages with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind in order to rank high in searches, leading to higher levels of SE (Search Engine) traffic.
Of course several variables are involved in SEO, but let’s talk about what’s important to cover.
Keyword Basics
Your website is most likely about a particular topic (e.g. golf swings, poodle manicures, etc.) and so the first thing to do is determine which keywords best describe the content on your page. Try to think of phrases that are specific.
It’s important that Google’s crawler realizes that your website is about the keywords you have chosen. Google does a pretty good job of determining the topic of your site but there a few things you can do assist Google’s crawler to make sure it gets things right.
Let’s say I have a website called “All things Poodles”. My keyword list would be short, only having one keyword: Poodles
My website has 4 pages:
Poodles Home
Poodle Manicures
Poodle Puppies
Poodle Breeders
Once you have a list of keywords you need to do a little research to find out who you are competing with for each keyword.
For the keyword poodle manicure I would do a search on Google and record how many pages are competing. This tells me how many
pages have my keyword phrase with the words in any order.
Then I would do a phrase match search by searching on Google for “poodle manicure”. This tells me how many pages have the exact phrase.
Then I would do a title search by searching on Google for allintitle:poodle manicure. This tells me how many pages have my keyword phrase in their title.
Then I would do a url search by searching on Google for allinurl:poodle manicure. This tells me how many pages have my keyword phrase in their url.
Note: To learn more about allintitle, allinurl, and other useful operators:
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
I would do the same thing for the keyword phrases: poodle puppies and poodle breeders.
My table would look something like this:
| Keyword Basic Search | Phrase Search | Title Search | URL Search | |
| poodle manicure | 15,000 | 8 | 6 | 1 |
| poodle puppies | 145,000 | 333,000 | 24,700 | 3,790 |
| poodle breeders | 151,000 | 49,000 | 3,840 | 1,790 |
Looking at the table above it’s clear that there is little competition for poodle manicure and a lot more competition for poodle puppies.
Optimizing your Page
Once you have your list of keywords and know a little about your competition it’s time to optimize.
Put your main keywords that describe your site in the title tag on every page.
Home
<title>Poodles | Poodles Home</title>
Poodle Manicures
<title>Poodles | Poodle Manicures</title>
Poodle Puppies
<title>Poodles | Poodle Puppies</title>
Poodle Breeders
<title>Poodles | Poodle Breeders</title>
You want your most important keywords to appear in the title with as few other characters as possible.
Do not put your keyword in the title more than 2 or 3 times. Google sees this as keyword spamming and will rank your site lower.
On each page put your main keywords in an h1 tag.
On my Poodle Manicures page you would see:
<h1>Poodle Manicures </h1>
Please note I would not target the keyword dog on my Poodle Manicures page because there are 420 million pages related to the word dog and the vast majority of people searching for dog are not looking for Poodle manicure.
There are 15,000 pages competing for poodle manicures and only 8 pages competing for “poodle manicure”.
H1 tags are reserved for top level headlines on a page. You should only use 1 or 2 top level headlines (h1 tags) on your page.
Further discussion on h1 tags:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002429.html
It’s also a good idea to use h2 and h3 tags where appropriate.
Adding an alt attribute to your image tag can help as well as having your keywords be in the file name. On my Poodle manicure page I would have:
<img src=”poodle-manicures.jpg” alt=”poodle manicures” />
Read more about images and SEO
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/03/12/formatting-images-for-seo/
I also like to put one of my keywords at the bottom of my page. This way crawlers find my important keywords at the top of my page and at the very end of the page.
It helps to have your keyword phrase in your domain name and in the file name of your page. For my Poodle Manicures page the ideal url would be http://www.Poodles.com/PoodleManicures.html
Using Robots.txt
One simple thing you can do help to website crawlers crawl your site is have a robots.txt file. This is especially important if you have sections of your website you do not want indexed by search engines.
In addition your robots.txt file can store the location of your site’s sitemap, making it easy for crawlers to find and crawl every page on your site.
“The robots exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent
cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is, otherwise, publicly viewable.” – WikiPedia robots.txt files are quite simple and easy to create.
An example robots.txt file:
User-agent: *Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.gzThe first line file “User-agent: *” tells crawlers that any crawler can crawl the site.
The next 2 lines tell crawlers not to crawl anything in the tmp and private folders.
The last line tells the crawler where to find the site’s sitemap.
A robots.txt file is always found in the top level directory on your domain.
Example: http://www.example.com/robot.txt
I used to create my own robots.txt file but I recently found a site that will generate one for me for free:
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.asp
Read more about robots.txt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
SEO Checklist
Learn the basics of HTML
Choose your keywords
Find what other sites are competing for those keywords
Put keyword phrase in <title></title>, <h1></h1>, and <h2></h2> tags.
Include an image on the page with the file name & the alt attribute containing your keyword phrase
Make sure your keyword phrase is found at the very bottom of your page.
Embed your keyword phrase throughout your page at a rate of 1% to 2%.
Have your keyword phrase in domain and in the page’s file name.
Create your robots.txt file.
