Search Engine Optimisation For Absolute Beginners
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I have been working, reading, researching and implementing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for close to a year now and I thought it would be a good idea to write a few basic notes (particularly for beginners).
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live and many others via natural or organic search results.
SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for and then helping match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. At its basics, SEO can be split up into two areas: on-site and off-site SEO.
On-Site SEO: Keywords and Site Structure
If content is the blood of your site, then keywords are the DNA….or something like that. To get the best keywords for your site’s content, you need to do some research. Two of the most well known sites for free keyword research are Overture and Wordtracker.
There are a few main areas on your site where you should place your keywords (please note these are NOT in any particular order of importance):
Domain name
A keyword rich domain name is not necessary for SEO purposes though it certainly helps. However, unless your primary keyword is an obscure word or a misspelling, you’ll find it difficult to find any available domain names.
Webpage name
The webpage on display should include your primary keywords in the title. For example, it’s better to have a webpage called KEYWORD1-KEYWORD2.html rather than WEBPAGE1.html. If you have dynamically produced webpages that include question marks in them, implement mod_rewrite in (or the equivalent).
Title Meta Tag
This determines the text that appears at the top left of the browser and is used by most search engines to determine the title used in their listings. Don’t use a non-specific title like “Welcome to My Website” though. It’s better to use a title like “Make Money Online – Wicked Ways To Make Money Online”.
Don’t just write your title meta tag solely for search engines but for human eyeballs too – a good title and domain name can attract a lot more clicks than a less catchy one.
Description Meta Tag
Unlike the Title Meta Tag, the Description is more slanted towards human eyeballs as this is the extracted text shown in the search results. So make sure you use clear sentences and try to include as many relevant keywords as possible.
Headings
Try to get a H1 tag with relevant text towards the top of your page. It is also good to have H2 and H3 tags further down the page if you can integrate them without spoiling your pages. Don’t overdo it though, one or two H1 tags per page should be enough.
Internal Linking
When linking between files on your website you should use the keywords you want to list well for in the anchor text. Instead of “CLICK HERE” (which isn’t very specific), use something like:
<a href=”webpage2.html” title=”descriptive text”>YOUR ANCHOR TEXT HERE</a>
Use descriptive text which is at least several words long in the link title too.
Alt Tag
When you have images on your webpages, make sure they have explanatory Alt tags with relevant keywords. Although not given as much weight as other on-page SEO techniques, Alt tags can be a good way of feeding those search engine spiders with suitable keywords.
As with all aspects of SEO, don’t go overboard. Although search engines are quite liberal with Alt tags, overstuffing them with keywords could get you penalised.
Content
You’ve heard it before a thousand times; content is king. Especially when it’s fresh and relevant content. As the text towards the top is given more relevance by the search engines, try to use your target keywords in the first or second sentence.
Sitemap
An XML sitemap, which is a file that has a list of all your site URLs, does not guarantee that your site will be “deep-crawled” by search engines. This post on Google Sitemaps should provide some more information.
Frames and Tables
Avoid them if possible. They can show up as “weird pages” on some browsers and are a pain when it comes to analytics. Use CSS based designs instead.
Flash
A lot of SEOs might tell you to forgo Flash altogether. But as long as you add text to the Flash code, you’ll be fine.
Off-Site SEO: Link building
Off-site SEO is basically all about getting and building links to your site. Link building is the process of creating inbound links to a website. This can be done with reciprocal or one-way links. Reciprocal links are usually free whilst one-way links are a harder commodity to get. According to Aaron Wall and others in the SEO industry, what’s more important is getting a link from a relevant and authoritative website; quality not quantity.
How do you get one-way links to your site? Either with good, unique content…… or monetary persuasion (i.e. buying links).
Some types of link building can be viewed as spamming by search engines if done in a random manner rather than focused on a specific subject or industry. For example, if your site is to do with mobile phones and you have loads of links from sites about every other topic other than mobile phones, that link building campaign will most likely be viewed as a spammy attempt to trick the search engines.
An easy way to get indexed by the search engines is to leave a comment on a relevant blog with your website address and anchor text of your choice. You won’t get any “link juice” due to the no follow tag being applied to comments by default on most blogs; but at least you’ll have a higher chance of being indexed (not to mention visited).
But remember…
SEO is a massive field of study that is always trying to keep up with the search engines’ algorithm changes (particularily Google). The best way to keep up to date is to join SEO forums such as seochat.com, searchguild.com and searchenginewatch.com. You can also sign up to Sphinn (which is sort of like Digg but for SEOs). But the most important thing to do is to actually apply what you read into your website(s).
SEO For Wordpress
Wordpress is one the best blogging platforms out there due to it’s simplicity and number of plugins available. The problem with it though is that it’s not very SEO friendly by default. Check out the post on the best plugins for Wordpress SEO.