Basic SEO Guide

By admin ⋅ January 10, 2008 ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Search Engine Optimization is a very tedious process that can consume a lot of time and money. This process, more familiarly known as “SEO”, is an internet marketing strategy that helps a website gain more search engine traffic. This means that by doing some SEO techniques, one can lure in more internet visitors to there websites via search engines such as: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask. For this article, we will be referring mostly to Google, as it IS the most popular search engine. SEO is a very powerful process that can, in time, multiply one’s internet revenues.

How does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work?

Once a website makes use of some SEO techniques, it takes time for search engines to pick up on the positive changes. Google has its own “spider” that searches the internet one website to the next, and once it lands on a page it will update its search results. For example, let’s say a site had just done some SEO techniques to target the keyword “apples”. Before the site had made any changes, it did not show up on Google when someone searches for “apples”. A week after the changes, the Google “spider” landed on the website and noticed the changes. If the SEO was successful, then the website should show up higher on the search results for “apples”.

What kind of things does Google consider when ranking websites?

PageRank: Google has its own scoring system for websites, called PageRank. The higher a PageRank of a site, the better chance it has at higher search engine results. PageRank is a scoring system from zero to ten. PageRank is calculated from a number of different aspects.

1. Incoming Links
2. On-page SEO
3. Website Age
4. Site Structure
5. The rest is only known by the Google Engineers

Incoming Links: Google loves incoming links. An incoming link means that there is some other website that is providing a link to yours. The higher the PageRank of the website linking to you, the better the results. Also, the more incoming links a site has, the better the results. The good thing about incoming links is that not only do they serve as a PageRank boost, but they can be a good source of targeted traffic. Exchange links with websites related to your topic and you will have a higher chance of people clicking on your link. We will not dig deep into this topic for this Basic SEO Guide, as it is such a broad topic - however, we will later make some more advanced posts thoroughly explaining this topic.

On-page Optimization: I’m not going to go too much in to depth on this one because it can be a very deep topic. I will list some of the simple on-page optimization techniques that can be done.

1. Make use of the page titles (in the tags). Use some of your target keywords in your title tags, but do not spam them. If you spam your keywords when doing on-page optimization Google will penalize your website.




2. Make use of the description and keywords meta tags. Again, use some keywords in these tags but do not spam them. The keyword tags, although sounding extremely relevant, don’t carry much weight in SEO.




3. Link back to yourself. One of the simplest things you can do on your pages is link back to your own site with your choice of anchor text. It may sound strange having a page with a link going to itself, but believe it or not, Google likes it.




4. Make use of special importance tags. These include bold, strong, and heading tags. This is the prime area of on-page optimization because you want to use these special importance tags on your keywords, but to a point that it isn’t overdone. It is best to only target, at most, 2 keywords on any given page.




5. The filename of a page has been thought to carry some relevance to keyword rankings. This means that if you are targeting a keyword like “baseball gloves”, then it would be best to make your page filename baseball-gloves.php or baseball-gloves.html. It is better to use the dash marks than the underscore character because dash marks are seen as spaces to Google.

Website Age: It is a common belief that upon creation, a website has a certain amount of time until it can start gaining PageRank. This is a flaky subject, and cannot be proven. I for one believe that a website can start gaining PageRank the second the domain is registered. Obviously, your site will not start gaining PageRank until you start exchanging some links, but if you start this immediately – you should see PageRank early. For instance, 3 months ago I created a health related website. I exchanged links with a bunch of related websites. Currently (3 months since creation), my site is a PR 3. This is a great accomplishment for being such a young site.

Site Structure: Spiders require a clean structure in order to accurately crawl your website. Leaving errors and broken links on your site can negatively effect the crawling. The only things that spiders can do is travel to links. They cannot pass through forms (i.e. a username-password login form). In order to guarantee that there are no crawling problems, one should make use of the “robots” meta tag. If there is a page that contains a form, duplicate content, or errors, then you should put “nofollow, noindex” inside the content of the “robots” meta tag. This tag should go at the top of the page, along with all of your other meta. Furthermore, spiders seem to travel a depth of 3 links from any given page. This means if you have a page that is 4 or more pages from the index page, then they will not be crawled. To solve this problem, one should make use of a sitemap (XML). Simply go to XML Sitemaps to generate a sitemap for your site. Upload this file to the root directory of your website. After doing so, go to your Google Webmaster Tools (sign up for a free account if you haven’t already) and add your website to your dashboard. Then click add a sitemap, choose general web sitemap, and in the text box put “sitemap.xml”. Repeat the process every time you make updates to your site to increase the rate the spider visits your site.

I hope this Basic SEO Guide gave everyone a very simple explanation of what Search Engine Optimization is, and how to make some changes to your site. Continue checking our posts, as we will talk about more advanced topics later on.