Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The Basics

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is often referred to improving the amount of the traffic originated from various search engines to your website. Many site owners will engage in using SEO in an attempt to obtain qualified visitors to their site. The quality of these visitors will often be measured by what specific keywords they are using in order to reach the desired result they want, such as making a purchase, or it could just viewing or downloading a particular page on that site.

You will need to have plenty of patience, as results do not happen overnight. So if you are looking to improve the search engine position of your site, you should consider this very early on when looking at using SEO.

Following are some of the points of consideration in terms of SEO.

THE FRAMEWORK

The Content is King

Your site may be technically perfect as SEO, but you may still find less visitors, because of the lack of good contents at your site. Your site contents should be unique, fresh, specific, grammatically correct, and appealing to the user.

Page titles are bold and descriptive

Make used of h1-h6 (header tags) to make it bold, clear and descriptive all your page titles.

Search Engine friendly URLs

Most of the robots of the search engines does not recognized URLs with “?” so used search engine friendly URLs like www.google.com/trends. By using a search engine friendly URL; you are helping both your ranking and users of your site. There are so many scripts available to accomplished that.

Links

It is crucial that what sites are linking to your site, as it helps to improve your PAGE RANKING on search results. For any site on the web, incoming links are very important, especially for SEO. But many people have found that incoming links are less important, especially where you have more specific and unique content on your site.

Search Engines are not fools

Never use such methods as cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or any other dubious ways. Although they may work for a short time, you not only risk getting your site penalized, but it could actually be banned from search engines altogether.

SITE Structure

No Frames on your website

Do not used HTML Frame Tags, instead there are workaround to achieve similar results, as search engines robots do not understand that.

Meta Tags are Important

Put specific keywords in META name tags, explaining your website function, services offered etc.

HyperLinks pages

Hyperlinks pages are links with <a href=”"> attributes. It is important that you make sure that all pages link to at least one other page. Pages which do not link out are known as “dangling links”. Organize your topics, sub-topics links accordingly.

Hn Tags

H Tag <Hn>some heading words</Hn> The “n” in this tag represents a number from 1 to 6. The biggest heading is represented by 1. You will find that H tags are given more weight than ordinary text in a page, and so the bigger the H size, the more weight it will have. So it is important that you include your target search term in the H tags at least once on the page, but if possible two or three times is even better.

Images

Alt Text <img src=”url” alt=”some text which is displayed or mouse over”>

Always include the alt text to all your images, as search engines do not understand an image but looks for alt text.

THE KEYWORDS

Keywords are an important part of SEO. These are like ‘hot buttons’ of your website pages. It’s reflect what your website is all about. Do a good amount of research to come up keywords, research the competition to get ideas (go to competitor website, on browser, click on View/Source to see keywords in meta tags),

Include Keywords in Title Pages, Meta Tags

It is important to include Keywords in your title pages <title>title page, keywords…</title> and meta tags <meta …. </meta>. It is vital that, for each page of your site, you include the appropriate keywords within all the page’s tags.

Bold Keywords in Contents

use h1-h6 in your contents with Keywords, this will help the search engine to index your pages based on the keywords chosen.

GETTING TRAFFIC FROM OTHERS

In a SEO world, it is important that who knows your website. It is called ‘backlink’. A backlink is a link which directs others towards your site; they are also often referred to as inbound links (IBL’s). So, the number of backlinks that your site has is an indication of how popular or important it is according to your peers (other site owners).

There are a number of ways in which back linking can be achieved.

1. Reciprocal Linking
This is where you link to another site that provides the same service or product as you and they in turn have a link to your site on theirs.

2. Site Submissions.
Submit links for your site to directories which allow free submissions, or if you can afford it, some paid directories. There are many sites around which offer a service where you can submit your site details to numerous sites. Plus, if you want, you can always create your own directory of similar websites.

3. Articles.
This is another way of getting great backlinks. So if you have a reputable looking site that contains informative, well written reviews, then there is a good chance that your articles will receive high search engine rankings also. But it is vital that any articles you write are on the subject, informative and thorough in relation to your site. Also you could always write a few articles for submission to article sites such as EzineArticles.com or SearchWarp.com. This is another great way of getting even more backlinks to your site.

4. Blogging.
This has now become an integral part of the internet, and is one of the most effective ways of linking. You either have the choice of placing a few words of comments on to someone else’s blog, or you may want to link to them from your own blog. In fact, you will find that most blogs will be happy to link back to you. However, it is important that you try to update your blog regularly and post interesting content to ensure that people will want to link back to you.

Although everybody wants good listings, there are unfortunately many sites which appear poorly or not at all in search engine rankings. This is because they have failed to consider just exactly how a search engine works.

Later, will include some of the upcoming SEO techniques that we can used on our websites.

For now, my rule for SEO is;

Build WebSites for HUMANS and not be pleased the Search Engines…

Cheers!

Search Engine Friendly Page

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is indeed a critical and important element for your website. I will be posting series of posts regarding SEO. Here i want to clarify one thing. You need to take some basic steps to get your website ranked on first or 2nd page of search engines, and results take time. So persistent actions will help.

Following are some of the Guideline straight from Google, that will help Google to;

- Find
- Index
- and Rank

your site.

Design Considerations:

• Offer a site map to with links to important pages/parts of your website.
• The TITLE tags should be clearly descriptive showing the product/services that you offer
• You site should have clear hierarchy and text links.
• Design your website by keeping the words that user would type to find your inforamtion pages. Include those keywords.
• Google search engine does not recognized text within the images, so use text instead of images to convey important inforamtion.
• Not all search engines crawlers understand dynamic pages ( i.e. URL contains “?” characters), so avoid them. If need to used them keep short paramerts after charater “?”.
• Make sure to check broken HTML links and fix it.

Technical Considerations:

• Search engines bot do not understand session IDs or arguments, so avoid using them in your site.
• Most search engines see web sites as simple text sites. Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site to see if you can access all your important site links.
• Always used “If-Modified-Since: date” tags to help tell search engine whether your contents has changed since they last crawled your website.
• Use robot.com and put the directories, or auto-generated pages, non-important pages, members areas that you do not want search engine to crawled. use Google robot.txt analysis tool.

Quality Consideration:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Avoid “cloaking”.
• Avoid links to web spammers or “bad links”, as your own ranking will get degraded.
• Avoid creating subdomains, or domains with susnstaintially duplicate contents.
• Do not send automated quries to Google.
• Engaged affiliate programs that provide unique and relevent contents. to users. Avoid thin affiliate sites that collects pay-per-click (PPC) revenuew by sending visitors to the sites of affiliates programs, while providing no value-added contents or service to user.

I can see that todays search engines crawlers have limitations, and that sometimes might limit your creativity to enhance your website with new tools etc. However, R&D is going on to build the next-generation search engines robots, that not only find, index, rank but will be able to categorized data into database.

You never know the next search engines results may not need to be PAGE 1 dependant, perhaps they present the results in 3D format, so it might change the whole SEO game, and it will.

Cheers!