So below is the net net on the SEO Nut, I am calling it "The Orange of SEO: blogging", you #1 SEO tool. Originally it was written for MyTypes, Inc. by our SEO Expert Mishra, Saroj Kumar. I think he may have borrowed some of the material from some where, if you are the original author of some pieces, let us know and we would like to give you credit. I have gone over the materials and rewrote most of it and added our significant changes. Either way, you deserve a reference at the least?
What is
SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the Organic results segment of Search Engine Marketing, and it does not include any pay per click advertisement. It is considered the Organic and pure search results, and is considered by many to be much more powerful in traffic than Pay Per Click results. Getting Organic results is the science and art of Search Engine Optimization, and from now on we will write about it in terms of SEO. The word
SEO is so common now days, and I think it will only grow, the key distinction between SEO and other Internet Marketing segments is that it does not involve any paid advertisements.
The science of SEO helps blogs and websites gets top results on Internet search engines under targeted keywords and phrases. It’s as important to know what to do, as well as what not to do. In this brief overview, we cannot cover all the rules and technicalities of What not to do. All we can say is, if you are trying to trick the search engines, DON’T, It will cost you way too much in the long term. We recommend only timeless strategies such as provide the best content to end-users. Make your website or blog fast, use images, videos, and build community with your site. The spectrum of SEO ranges from Black Hat, as the trickery side or White hat as the purest way. We think from a scale of 1-10 if 10 is black hat, and 5 or more would be considered black. So we recommend strategies of top 1-4. The penalties that search engines may inflict on your website is not worth the short term gain. Here are the Basics of SEO:
1. Domain Names, Titles and Keywords
1. Domain Names, Titles and Keywords One of the most basic, yet critically important, strategies is to use your best keywords in your domain address. An example would look like... http://www.seattlerealestae.com http://www.seattle-real-estae.com The reason for doing this is because search engines and directories assume the domain to be relevant to the keyword. It's something that, in practicality, can't be faked. Do not be afraid of using dashes in your domain name. The fact is that some directories and engines like domain names with dashes better than domain names without them. When researching possible URLs, if your desired URL is already taken in the dot.com variety, look to see if its available in the .net or .org category. Other possibilities include .us, or .biz. All of these are given equal billing with the engines and directories. The reason you'll find fewer listings of the secondary domains (i.e., other than dot.com) is because, comparatively speaking, there are far fewer of them registered.
2. Getting Your Web Page Titles Right It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of your web page's "title" tag content in designing your web site. The first rule to remember is: Title is the most important aspect of web page design in respects to scoring well on most search engines. Reason #1: Most SE's look first for keywords that are contained within the title tags of your web page as such... "title" Seattle Real Estate "/title"_ Reason #2: The web page title is what the search engine displays when they list your page in the results for a keyword search, Remember that you are also attempting to appeal to a "person" who is seeking your information, product or service in addition to attempting to appeal to the engines and directories. We'll address both factors but first, let's start with the various search engines themselves that your web pages must appeal to. When a "search" is requested through any search engine, the SE looks for the search word(s) contained within the "title" tags first – and usually gives preference to web pages that have that specific word(s) within the "title""/title" tags. Therefore, it's usually imperative that you insert the "search words" (also known as keywords) that your potential customers are likely to use when looking for your service between the "title" your title here "/title"
3. Keyword Selection Strategies BEFORE you design your web site or page, make a list of every possible search word (keyword) and search phrase (keyphrase) that your potential customers might use when looking for your information, product or service. Don't waste your time starting a web site until you do this. It is critical. Remember to include synonyms as well as the common misspellings of your keywords and pay particular attention to noun phrases. Next, use these keywords and keyphrases to find your competition on the top search engines. Once you find who you will be competing with for the Top Ten positions in your keyword search, scour THEIR web pages for more keywords that you may have overlooked.
4. A word about Keyword Placement It is very important that you place some of your best "keyword text" on your web page before your images as viewed in linear order from the source code. That's because search engines page content via the source code in linear order and they don't give a hoot about actual images. Instead, they look only at the text on the page as revealed by the source code. Although images may look nice at the top of your page, they do nothing to help your site's findability on the SE's. Therefore, by placing meaningful small font keyword text at the top of your page - before your image - you can still place your logo near the top of your web site while favorably appealing to the SE's that are looking for relevant keywords at the top of your page. Therefore, be sure to "Headline" your page with text that the search engines can recognize as relevant to what you are offering – AND place the text early in your page's source code prior to where the images appear whenever possible. Remember, it is these keywords and keyphrases through which people will find you on the Internet. Keyword Selection Use a keyword tool to find the most targeted keywords for your site. Develop grouped themes of keywords that reflect the different sections of
your site. Keep an eye out for keywords longer than one word (phrases). Keeping within a grouped theme, choose different keywords to target each page.
5. Meta Tags For the novice it must be explained that Meta Tags are non-displayed text written into your HTML document intended to describe your page to the SE for the purpose of cataloging the content of your page. Although there is some debate as to whether or not Meta Tags should be included in your HTML document, let's put the debate to rest. The answer is a resounding YES – the Meta description tag absolutely should be included in your document. Here's why: many engines use The Meta description tag as the summary for your site when listed in the search results. It's what tells a real person whether or not your site is relevant to their search. You should view it as a sales presentation for your link. If the Meta description tag entices the searcher they will, theoretically, click your link and visit your site. Obviously that's the purpose for being listed in the search engine in the first place. If you omit the Meta description tag then the search engine is likely to fabricate a description for your site based on arbitrary text gleaned from somewhere on your page. Here's an example of a real-life "bad" description we found when searching for Hawaii scuba diving... Link Title: Hawaii scuba diving Summary Description: Click here to go ...now, we're pretty sure that company didn't really want "click to go home" used as their site description but that's what they got because they failed to use a meta description tag. Another possibility is that the SE will omit the summary description entirely if it fails to find something useful within your page to use as a summary. In either case, a potential site visitor is less motivated to click your link if you fail to properly utilize the meta description tag. Meta Tag Character Limits Most search engines place a limit on the number of characters contains. Once the limit is reached they typically ignore In general, 250 characters – including spaces and commas thumb that falls within the guidelines of most engines. However, in case a search engine uses less than, say, wise to place the most important part of your description beginning in the event the engine truncates the tag. Meta Keywords Tag The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that specific page.
6. Turn Images From Liabilities To Assets - ALT Tag The problem with images in your web page is that the search engines do not index them at all. Therefore, your company logo may say what you are, who you are, and even state a benefit but the engines can't index your images and therefore will not reflect their message in a keyword search results. In fact, if your image loads higher on your page (when viewing the source code) than your text, then your page starts out handicapped in a BIG way! This is a mistake. Whenever possible, avoid placing images higher on your page than keyword text. Regardless, when you do put images in your page, make them work for you, not against you by including the < alt =" here"> in your
tags. The reason for doing this is because engines have been known to index the
![“Keywords”]()
tag. By placing strategic keywords within the
![“Keywords”]()
tag, you've got everything to gain and nothing to lose. When a search engine's algorithm is programmed to give credit for keywords within this tag, you win. If not, nothing lost – since none of the engines are known to penalize for using it.
7. Optimizing Your page content/copy Optimize Each Page One of the most important things to understand is that each page is its own unit and has its own ranking potential and its own relevant keywords. Usually a home page has more value than the other pages since it is typically the easiest place to build links to. Home pages should generally be optimized for the most relevant competitive keyword phrases in your market that you feel you would be able to rank for. Interior pages should be optimized for other relevant phrases that relate to the content of each page. Home Page Optimization Target your most competitive keyword phrase with the home page. Link to the major theme pages from your home page. Link to your home page from every page of your site. Include your site name and/or home page’s primary keyword phrase in the text links pointing to it.
Use your keywords in your page title. Place the most important keyword phrase close to the beginning of the page title. Do not put your site title on every page of your site unless you are really trying to brand that name. In that scenario, it still is usually best to place the site name at the end of the page titles. Shorter site titles are usually better than really long ones. Sometimes I overlap related keyword phrases in the page title. Overlapping . keyword phrases in the page title can help you pick up multiple search phrases. Meta tags are not extremely important, but they can help some. The Meta description should be a sentence to a paragraph describing the page contents. The Meta description tag can be seen in some search results, so you want to write it for human eyes. The Meta keywords tag is probably not worth the time to make, but if you do, it should contain your primary keyword and its common misspellings and synonyms. Each keyword phrase in the keywords tag should be comma separated. Use a single, keyword-rich H1 header on your page containing the same the primary keyword phrases. This helps reinforce the page title.
Use keyword-rich sub headers (H2 or H3) before every paragraph or
every few paragraphs. This improves usability and helps define what
the page is about to search engines without making the page look like it
was written for a search engine. Use bulleted lists and bolding to make content easier to read. Write your content for human consumption. If you write all your
sentences for search engines, the pages will read bad and nobody will read them.
8. Use Keywords in Headings Use keywords in headings and subheadings throughout the page—this heading should capture the person’s attention and tell them they are in the right place.
Page Heading
would be a classic straight SEO approach. You may wish to use something with a call to action as well. That would appear more like
Page Heading
. Heading tags go from H1 to H6 with the biggest tags being the smallest number (i.e., HI renders the biggest font size). You can change how the text appears using CSS. Typically, think of these headings like you would a heading in a newspaper. I usually try to get my keyword phrases and similar phrases in my page heading as well as many subheadings. The rest of the page copy is usually written with sales conversion in mind, and I do not pay too much attention to optimizing it for search
9. Site structure, Naming File Paths Usually, you want to use short file names and folder names so that the data is easy to transmit using various means such as e-mail. Long file paths may look a bit spammy to search engine editors or searchers looking through search results. Generally, you want to use one to a few keywords in each filename or folder. Use lower cased file paths because some directories & content management systems do not handle upper-case filenames. Separate words with a hyphen (-) between each word. If you leave blank spaces it will look weird in the address bar and if you use underscores (_), search engines will not be able to parse the individual words in each file name. Some people will cite your web site using the URL as the link text. If you use descriptive URLs, that should help improve your rankings. If your site is already built and well- indexed, there is probably little reason to change filenames, but if you are making a new site, it is worth the five seconds it takes to use descriptive filenames.
10. Fast, Using CSS to Minimize Page Load Time Using an external style sheet will keep many of your design elements on a single common page. This prevents pages from looking jagged due to slightly altering layout specifications from one page to the next. In addition, keeping layout code separate from content will decrease page load time. When users navigate from one page to another they will not need to reload the design elements of the page again since the style sheet will already be in their cache. Most typical web users expect pages to download within 8-10 seconds at the max. The longer a person waits for a page to download, the more likely they are to have their stream of thought interrupted.
11. Submission Strategies and Guidelines Your next step is to decide where to start. If money is less of a concern and you are looking for immediate traffic to your website, then we recommend starting with Overture. Assuming you are willing to bid your listings into the Top 3 results, you can get your site listed at the top of several major engines in 3 to 5 days. On the other hand, if "free" listings are your primary objective, then Google is the place to start. You will, however, have to wait anywhere from 30 to 60 days for your results to show up the Google's main directory. As to the rest of the engines and directories – the secondary majors – we suggest that you hold off submitting to them until after you have your Google and Overture submissions in. From there you can determine if a position boost is in order. If so, then getting listed in the secondary majors will more than likely produce the popularity and relevancy boosts needed to elevate your positions at Google. Worth noting is the effect that link popularity has on a Google listing. There is more-than-ample evidence to show that listings in Yahoo, ODP, Inktomi, AltaVista, Lycos, and Fast add to a site's link popularity and, therefore, tend to increase a site's relevancy score. Therefore, anticipate that, sooner or later, you'll want to spend some time (and money?) submitting to the secondary majors in order to improve your positioning with Google.
12. Where to Get Links Directories are the easiest source of links to your site. But, the best outside of directories is Bloggers, blog sites, and most importantly your own sites.
Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other web sites
can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit articles to other sites, you may want to create unique content just for the article submission sites or have a longer or slightly different version of the article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate content issues when others syndicate your articles.
Writing press releases can give you inbound links. You can participate in forums which provide signature links. If you participate in communities and leave relevant, useful comments then eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you.
Buy links or rent advertising space. Donate to charities for links. People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you asking. Generally, this is where SEO battles are either won or lost in competitive markets.
13. Link Popularity, Page Reputation, and Page Importance It's safe to say the secret to scoring at the top of the engines lies in understanding how to use link popularity, page reputation, and page importance (aka, PageRank to your advantage. And, you must have the right tools to measure these elements so you can reverse engineer the winning formulas of the pages you're competing against giving you the information you need to inject a calculated effort into your own ranking strategies. Link Popularity is a score based upon the number of incoming links pointed at a web page. In general, the more incoming links the better. There are exceptions to this generalization relating to the importance placed on link reputation and page importance in the final determination of the weight placed upon those incoming links. Here are some generic (and free) online tools that can help you determine link popularity. HYPERLINK "http://www.linkpopularity.com" http://www.linkpopularity.com HYPERLINK "http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/" http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ Link building is the single most important part of achieving a high-ranking web site in modern search algorithms. Create something that legit webmasters interested in your topic would be interested in linking to.
When possible, try to get your keywords in many of the links pointing to your pages.
Register with, participate in, or trade links with topical hubs and related sites.
Be in the discussion or at least be near the discussion.
Look for free links from related sites and directories.
If you have some good internal content, try to get direct links to your inner pages.
Write articles and get them syndicated at other sites. Participate in forums to learn about what your potential consumers think is important. What frequent questions do they have?
How do you solve those problems?
Issue press releases with links to your site. Leave super glowing testimonials for people and products you really like. Oftentimes when the product owner or person posts the testimonials, they will include a link back to your site.
Leave relevant comments in blogs that do not send their comments through redirects.
Sponsor charities, blogs, or web sites related to your site. Consider renting links if you are in an extremely competitive industry. Adult, gaming, credit, and pharmacy categories will likely require link rentals and/or building topical link networks.
Mix your link text up. Adding words like buy or store to the keywords in your some of your link text can make it look like more natural linkage data and help you rank well for many targeted secondary phrases.
Page Importance - This factor is also referred to as PageRank due to the fact that Google produces a "rating" of pages by the same name. Google's PageRank rating has become the industry standard.
Their tool you need is free, you can get it here: HYPERLINK "http://toolbar.google.com/" http://toolbar.google.com/ and downloading the Google Toolbar. Google is primarily driven by linkage data.
The Google Toolbar provides a 0-10 logarithmic scale to mimic the link popularity of pages. PageRank helps provide a quick glance how important Google thinks a site is. Google would like you to believe that their PageRank algorithm is the core of their search technology, but they also use many other technologies to improve their search relevancy. Many webmasters exchange links with as many people as they can, It’s not a bad idea, but a focused efforts with blogs will give you a better reward. There are algorithms for sorting good links from bad links, be smart about your choices. Many link schemes simply don’t work, the key is to get links from blogs and sites with good PR.
Six Rules to remember:
1. Be certain your top Keywords are in your title tags.
2. Link to all of your sub-pages from the home page
3. Be sure that keywords of choice are Hyperlinked to your URL
4. The more pages you have on your website, the better.
5. Use a popular web hosting service, this can be surprising powerful.
6. Best results come from getting links from well respected blogs and sites with good Link popularity, and Google PR of 1 or higher. Yes, we said 1 or higher, PR 4 is amazing, but a 1 is even much better than 0.
