Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it has come to be called, is the art and science of helping a search engine recognize exactly what a web page is about (let’s say the pages “theme”) so that it may properly categorize it for easy retrieval later.
Search engines then rank each page on the web as more or less popular according to a number of factors, the main one being the number of links coming into a particular page from what we might call “trusted” sites; sites the search engine itself considers trustworthy.
A properly optimized web page simply ensures that all the “on page” information is in the right places exactly where the search engine expects to find them so the page will be properly categorized. It also ensures that all the “off page” information is also done correctly so the page achieves the right level of popularity so as to rank as highly as possible in the major search engines.
“On page” elements are all things contained on the web page itself and it’s associated server. Here are some of the items that would be considered “on page”.
Page title
Keyword meta tag
Description meta tag
Page content (text, images, multi-media)
Links from one page to another known as “internal links”
Before you start linking I strongly suggest you read my post about how to build links naturally. It will help you understand the best way to build real TRAFFIC links. Many newcomers to SEO focus a lot of their time on getting links from any web page and this is a huge mistake. Maturity will teach you that it’s not the number of links you acquire but the quality that counts. In my more than 10 years working in SEO I have seen some sites with very few links gain enormous quality traffic and enjoy very good rankings in Google. Good ranking has everything to do with link quality, not quantity. Of course if you have lousy content, all the links in the world won’t keep your audience.
I urge you to stay away from link building schemes and “automated” link building systems. Don’t lose control over who you link to by becoming a part of these. If you add a link to your site from a “bad neighborhood”, Google may lose respect for your site and it will become part of a bad web neighborhood. Use common sense when adding links to other sites. Here is a great article by Google webmasters central about outbound links that can help guide you on the matter.
Content
Some people sit at their desk and make a long list of keywords they want to rank well for in Google, then they write their content around those keywords hoping it will help them rank well in Google. In my view this is a big mistake. I was fortunate enough to have some great mentors and I spent years working in marketing before I ever learned SEO (something I think has been of immense value in my SEO work). It taught me the content you put in your web site should always be written for your readers first. Don’t even THINK about keywords when you build content – only think about the visitor’s site experience. Believe me, the keywords will flow out naturally. Build rich content to help your web site visitor have a great experience and you will be surprised how many great and varied keywords will just flow out of your mind. Write naturally and review the text later. The fact you are writing about the very product/service/subject you wish to promote will result in natural keywords being produced. Chances are these will only require only some minor adjustments to ensure they compliment the more natural interrogatory slant put on them by a searcher in Google.
Be sure that each page in your site has a realistic purpose. That purpose should not be “here is where we will capture people for this keyword” – again you would be writing a page with a specific keyword in mind and that limits the scope of your writing. It will definitely be reflected in the quality of the final product. If on the other hand you decide “here is where we will teach our readers about…” then you will gain so much more in visitor interest, visitor loyalty and natural linking. Think about why YOU visit a web site. Is it because there are great keywords…or because it has great information you need?
Lots of varied content in a site, always built with the user experience in mind, not the idea of capturing visitors for your purposes, rather with the purpose of helping them gain something for themselves during their visit, always results in a steady stream of visitors and loyal site audiences. The side benefit is: if they like your site and benefit from your knowledge and experience, why wouldn’t they buy from a trusted friend? Why wouldn’t they link to you? Why wouldn’t they recommend you?
SEO Friendly URL’s
For those who are not familiar with the term “URL”, it stands for “Uniform Resource Locator” and in this case stands for the common web addresses we use every day such as http://…whatever! An SEO friendly URL contains keywords related to the page. For example: if a page is about tours of the Louvre Museum in Paris and the web site is designed using a Content Management System, it may generate ugly URL’s similar to /page.php?IdP=3&IdL=172. A better URL might be /paris/louvre-museum-tours. Having these words in the URL are not only important for the search engine, they also help site visitors recognize they are in the right location within your web site. If someone sends the link to a friend, these keywords may make others WANT to click he link because they immediately see what the link is about. Good quality URL’s can make a positive difference in your web site traffic and ranking.
Sitemap
Each web site owner should check and make sure that Google is spidering all the most important pages of their site. You can do this by visiting the main Google site in your country and typing in the following:
The search results will be a list of all the pages Google has indexed for the site indicated. If the number of pages seems low, you may wish to submit a sitemap to Google in XML format of all the pages in your site via the Google Webmaster Tools interface. In this way you can be 100% certain all the pages in your site are being indexed.
Hosting
Many people don’t put much thought into hosting thinking it has little to do with SEO but they couldn’t be more wrong. If you obsolete a page on a Windows server you setup a temporary page with a redirect link, a meta redirect or they find a “404″ not found. With a Linux server you have the option of using the .htaccess file to set up a permanent 301 redirect to the new page. All those wonderful visitors pass directly to the new page without even realizing there was a switch! And better still, all the PageRank that Google may be giving you goes with the change. You lose nothing. This is why Linux hosting is better than Windows hosting from an SEO perspective. I will shamelessly give a hosting plug here to pair Networks. I have used them for 10 years and for our needs their service has always been excellent.
Traffic
When you are just starting out it can be frustrating because SEO can sometimes take a while to begin showing results depending on the market you are in and how competitive it is. In the short term you can always publicize your site through various means to get a little traffic on the way. I suggest you consider several of the following options to get some traffic on the way:
Twitter – get an account set up and start following people interested in what you are interested in. You can do this by conducting a keyword search on Twitter for whatever your interests are. Then follow those people who are tweeting about the same subject. Chances are they will follow you back. Then they may visit your web site.
Squidoo – Think about setting up a lens on the same subject as your web site. You already have a ton of data on the same subject so adding to a Squidoo lens isn’t too much more work. Then you can use your Twitter account to push traffic to both sites and build even more traffic.
Facebook – A Facebook page just for your business can work well if you seek out other persons with similar interests. Join interest groups in Facebook that compliment what you are involved in. You might find hundreds of potential sites visitors quickly.
Once you make a few friends on the web they will begin reviewing your web site and if you have a Blog they may even review some of the articles and add the to Digg, Sphinn or StumbleUpon to help you gain traffic.
And don’t forget traditional marketing! Running small ads in local papers, magazines and radio or even TV depending on your market, can be a great way to get a big head start on building traffic. The web isn’t the only way to get traffic to your web site. There are plenty of other ways to build up visitors from billboards to bus ads to advertising on sidewalks – it’s all been tried and you have to think about what will work for your business.
Some persons think all they have to do is get famous in Google and they will get traffic and wealth much faster. Actually it really works the other way around. Get well known on the web and Google really starts to take notice of you. So get your web site onto the mainstream using as many web avenues as you can and you stand a much better chance of getting a better ranking in Google much faster.
I hope these ideas will help you on your way to understanding the basics of SEO and how to get some traffic moving toward your web site. I’ll be adding more information about SEO as time goes on (and my work schedule allows). For example a detailed page about “alt” attributes, another about page titles – the proper way to do these and why they are important will be along as soon as possible.
Thanks for visiting my web site!
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Learn About SEO
Understanding the Basics of SEO
Search engines then rank each page on the web as more or less popular according to a number of factors, the main one being the number of links coming into a particular page from what we might call “trusted” sites; sites the search engine itself considers trustworthy.
“On page” elements are all things contained on the web page itself and it’s associated server. Here are some of the items that would be considered “on page”.
_
More Complex SEO Issues
Link building
Before you start linking I strongly suggest you read my post about how to build links naturally. It will help you understand the best way to build real TRAFFIC links. Many newcomers to SEO focus a lot of their time on getting links from any web page and this is a huge mistake. Maturity will teach you that it’s not the number of links you acquire but the quality that counts. In my more than 10 years working in SEO I have seen some sites with very few links gain enormous quality traffic and enjoy very good rankings in Google. Good ranking has everything to do with link quality, not quantity. Of course if you have lousy content, all the links in the world won’t keep your audience.
I urge you to stay away from link building schemes and “automated” link building systems. Don’t lose control over who you link to by becoming a part of these. If you add a link to your site from a “bad neighborhood”, Google may lose respect for your site and it will become part of a bad web neighborhood. Use common sense when adding links to other sites. Here is a great article by Google webmasters central about outbound links that can help guide you on the matter.
Content
Some people sit at their desk and make a long list of keywords they want to rank well for in Google, then they write their content around those keywords hoping it will help them rank well in Google. In my view this is a big mistake. I was fortunate enough to have some great mentors and I spent years working in marketing before I ever learned SEO (something I think has been of immense value in my SEO work). It taught me the content you put in your web site should always be written for your readers first. Don’t even THINK about keywords when you build content – only think about the visitor’s site experience. Believe me, the keywords will flow out naturally. Build rich content to help your web site visitor have a great experience and you will be surprised how many great and varied keywords will just flow out of your mind. Write naturally and review the text later. The fact you are writing about the very product/service/subject you wish to promote will result in natural keywords being produced. Chances are these will only require only some minor adjustments to ensure they compliment the more natural interrogatory slant put on them by a searcher in Google.
Be sure that each page in your site has a realistic purpose. That purpose should not be “here is where we will capture people for this keyword” – again you would be writing a page with a specific keyword in mind and that limits the scope of your writing. It will definitely be reflected in the quality of the final product. If on the other hand you decide “here is where we will teach our readers about…” then you will gain so much more in visitor interest, visitor loyalty and natural linking. Think about why YOU visit a web site. Is it because there are great keywords…or because it has great information you need?
Lots of varied content in a site, always built with the user experience in mind, not the idea of capturing visitors for your purposes, rather with the purpose of helping them gain something for themselves during their visit, always results in a steady stream of visitors and loyal site audiences. The side benefit is: if they like your site and benefit from your knowledge and experience, why wouldn’t they buy from a trusted friend? Why wouldn’t they link to you? Why wouldn’t they recommend you?
SEO Friendly URL’s
For those who are not familiar with the term “URL”, it stands for “Uniform Resource Locator” and in this case stands for the common web addresses we use every day such as http://…whatever! An SEO friendly URL contains keywords related to the page. For example: if a page is about tours of the Louvre Museum in Paris and the web site is designed using a Content Management System, it may generate ugly URL’s similar to /page.php?IdP=3&IdL=172. A better URL might be /paris/louvre-museum-tours. Having these words in the URL are not only important for the search engine, they also help site visitors recognize they are in the right location within your web site. If someone sends the link to a friend, these keywords may make others WANT to click he link because they immediately see what the link is about. Good quality URL’s can make a positive difference in your web site traffic and ranking.
Sitemap
Each web site owner should check and make sure that Google is spidering all the most important pages of their site. You can do this by visiting the main Google site in your country and typing in the following:
site:www.yourdomainhere.com
The search results will be a list of all the pages Google has indexed for the site indicated. If the number of pages seems low, you may wish to submit a sitemap to Google in XML format of all the pages in your site via the Google Webmaster Tools interface. In this way you can be 100% certain all the pages in your site are being indexed.
Hosting
Many people don’t put much thought into hosting thinking it has little to do with SEO but they couldn’t be more wrong. If you obsolete a page on a Windows server you setup a temporary page with a redirect link, a meta redirect or they find a “404″ not found. With a Linux server you have the option of using the .htaccess file to set up a permanent 301 redirect to the new page. All those wonderful visitors pass directly to the new page without even realizing there was a switch! And better still, all the PageRank that Google may be giving you goes with the change. You lose nothing. This is why Linux hosting is better than Windows hosting from an SEO perspective. I will shamelessly give a hosting plug here to pair Networks. I have used them for 10 years and for our needs their service has always been excellent.
Traffic
When you are just starting out it can be frustrating because SEO can sometimes take a while to begin showing results depending on the market you are in and how competitive it is. In the short term you can always publicize your site through various means to get a little traffic on the way. I suggest you consider several of the following options to get some traffic on the way:
Twitter – get an account set up and start following people interested in what you are interested in. You can do this by conducting a keyword search on Twitter for whatever your interests are. Then follow those people who are tweeting about the same subject. Chances are they will follow you back. Then they may visit your web site.
Squidoo – Think about setting up a lens on the same subject as your web site. You already have a ton of data on the same subject so adding to a Squidoo lens isn’t too much more work. Then you can use your Twitter account to push traffic to both sites and build even more traffic.
Facebook – A Facebook page just for your business can work well if you seek out other persons with similar interests. Join interest groups in Facebook that compliment what you are involved in. You might find hundreds of potential sites visitors quickly.
Once you make a few friends on the web they will begin reviewing your web site and if you have a Blog they may even review some of the articles and add the to Digg, Sphinn or StumbleUpon to help you gain traffic.
And don’t forget traditional marketing! Running small ads in local papers, magazines and radio or even TV depending on your market, can be a great way to get a big head start on building traffic. The web isn’t the only way to get traffic to your web site. There are plenty of other ways to build up visitors from billboards to bus ads to advertising on sidewalks – it’s all been tried and you have to think about what will work for your business.
Some persons think all they have to do is get famous in Google and they will get traffic and wealth much faster. Actually it really works the other way around. Get well known on the web and Google really starts to take notice of you. So get your web site onto the mainstream using as many web avenues as you can and you stand a much better chance of getting a better ranking in Google much faster.
I hope these ideas will help you on your way to understanding the basics of SEO and how to get some traffic moving toward your web site. I’ll be adding more information about SEO as time goes on (and my work schedule allows). For example a detailed page about “alt” attributes, another about page titles – the proper way to do these and why they are important will be along as soon as possible.
Thanks for visiting my web site!