Search Engine Optimization Techniques & Tutorials
1. Website / Business profile (niche) You might have the website / business profile already picked, but we would like to assume that you don’t so we can have somewhere to start with. First, ask yourself what are you selling, is it a product or a service? What can you do to get this business kicking, online? Is the business suitable for online audience? Have you targeted any goals by having an online presence and what are they? Is it going to be a local business, country specific or international?……..
2. Acquiring a domain name If you don’t already have a domain name, then is time to get one. Make a list of a few domain names that you would like to acquire, keeping the name as close as possible to your business / website profile. The best domain names are 2-3 short words that together form a single word (that describes at it’s best what the website is about), followed by the TLD (.com, .net, .ie, etc) [e.g. eire-webdesign.ie (eire = Ireland; web design)]….. Saying that, Google Webmaster Tools, has an option to specify the GEO target of your website, but it hasn’t been proved to be 100 percent accurate yet (please correct me if I am wrong).
3. Finding the best hosting provider for your website Now that you’ve found & purchased the domain name/s, it’s time to shop around for a hosting package. As mentioned previously, based on your target location, it’s best to find a hosting provider in that area. Please note that some local hosting providers do have servers outside the country your are targeting, so do not hesitate to ask, making sure that is exactly what you are looking for, or at least as close as possible. Hosting prices differ from company to company, but most of the time is not the price that matters, it’s the service you get with it. You might be tempted to select a company that gives you so much for so little, but when you run into trouble or are looking for advice it’s actually then you realise you should have thought about it more. …..
4. Website Design (DIY or by a Professional Developer) Getting a website designed is not that tricky, and most website owners take a shot at it, but the hard part is getting it right. Website development has changed so much in the last 2-3 years that even a pro could be old news if he/she doesn’t keep up with the technology. …. The power of proper html tags helps a lot. A spider visiting a website does not understand and see all that fancy style and catchy images, but pure text found inside the html tags. Examples: title tag – a piece of html code inserted in the Link tag to format a link that will take the user to a new page alt tag – similar with the above but this time it goes inside the <img src=’img path’ alt=’text here’ /> image tag These are the things that give you the short description when the mouse hovers over a link or image and helps search engines and users with screen readers to understand what it’s all about. They hold a strong position in search engine optimization and are just a few of the important things a good web developer knows.
5. Keywords Research You’ve already found some good keywords when searching for a domain name, but what use do they have when optimizing your website for search engines? Keywords, are the words or phrases a user types into the search engines search box to find relevant websites to his/her query. Two or more keywords are better know as key-phrases. Keywords, hold an important role in search engine optimization, helping you write good content related to your business/website profile. There is no point in writing about “dogs”, while your website it’s all about “cats” is there? For search engines to display your website into the SERPs, the search query must match these keywords inside your page content or having inbound links to your website with the keywords in the anchor text. …..
6. Getting the Page Title Right “Page Title” – the most important tag when optimising for search engines, is the html tag it’s found in between the <head> . . . . <title>Title Here</title> . . . </head> tag. This tag is not visible on the page itself, but in the source code of the page. It can be also seen at the top of your browser window (blue bar for Internet Explorer) and at the bottom of the screen. Why Page Title is so important? a. The Page Title is used by the search engine as the anchor text to link to your website in the SERPs. b. The Page Title describes at it’s best the page content itself. c. In the SERPs, the Page Title makes your website stand-out from the crowd (it’s like shouting “click me . . . or read me . . . “) invoking the “Call to Action” d. The Page Title it’s also used to submit your website to directories Points to take into consideration when creating the Page Title: 1. The Page Title should be unique for every page 2. The Page Title shouldn’t be any longer than 75 characters (including spaces) as it gets truncated by the search engines (Google – 64 chrs, Yahoo – 120 chrs) 3. The Page Title keywords should also be found in the page body text (best enclosed as a h[1-2] html tags and normal text below [context]) 4. The keywords used in the Page Title should also be found in the URL (converting spaces with a dash [-]) 5. Avoid common words ( the, or, and, for, etc . . . ) as much as possible and if you don’t have a choice try converting them to html characters (e.g. and = & ) as it will take less viable space. 6. Synonyms of keywords in the title tag should also be found in the page body text 7. Website URL / Company Name (if any) should be last in your page title unless they are keywords rich and part of your top keywords in your list. 8. Every Word in the page title should start with a Capital letter – (it sounds like poor grammer, but it makes your link stand out in the SERPs) 9. The first keywords (2-3) in the page title should always be the most important keywords for that particular page 10. If you think your page is targeting more than 2 key-phrases (2-3 words each phrase), look into splitting the page – this will end up creating a better content rich page thus getting a stronger position in the SERPs.
7. Meta Data (description, keywords, etc . . . ) Meta tags are part of the html source code of a page and can be found between the <head> . . . .. <meta name=”description” content=”content here” /> <meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords,here” /> . . . .. </head> tags itself. They are not as important as it used to be due to abuse in the past by many website owners, but they can still make a difference. Meta Description: Search Engines (especially Google), tends to ignore them at this time, but they are still making use of them for snippet compilation, also called “call to action”. When displaying result, search engines tend to make use of this tag to describe the website profile, and is shown below the “Page Title” (also the link to your website) as a snippet. If the meta description is not found on your page search engines will decides to show a snippet from the page content itself (a snippet of what is considered to be more relevant to the search query). The downside of this is that the snippet might not have that “call to action” that you are going for. Another use of this tag, is, when submitting your website to directories, as some of them will pick-up and use the meta description you have on that page as their directory listing description. As the page title, meta description should be also unique across the website for each page. It’s like a short description of the product or service itself that all-in-all gives the user the exact idea what the page it’s all about. ……
8. Page Content “Content is King” – You probably heard that a lot and it’s very true. The more text you have on the page the better, but please note: Don’t start adding all kind of text on the page just to be there. The content should be descriptive, and written for users not search engines and of course it should make a lot of sense. The story, article, product or service description should have a flow in the right direction. For instance take a look at an article in today’s newspaper. Would it make any sense if the last paragraph was added just before the first one? If you are looking at a particular product, would it make any sense to attach a description from another product to it? I don’t think so . . . As mentioned above, the content should be written for the user. Search Engines algorithms are so powerful, that they will be able to detect keyword stuffing, poor written content, which in turn could get your website to perform bad and even penalised. If you can’t or you are even un-sure of what to write, look into hiring a copywriter. These people do that for a living and you’ll be surprised how well your product or service could be described. Sometimes you’re thinking too hard and the words are just not coming to you. ….
9. Creating & Submitting Sitemaps to Search Engines Sitemaps play an important role when optimising your website for search engines as it helps them indexing your website (especially deep linked pages) and manage their crawl activities. A sitemap is either an HTML page, XML or TEXT file that contains a list of all the pages available on your website or at least the most important pages (for large websites). The HTML format sitemaps, are mostly used for visitors as a quick navigation point through the website, while a more advanced way is XML (Google search engines) or TEXT file (YAHOO search engine). XML sitemap An XML sitemap can be created either manually or could be an automated system using “Sitemap Generators” which are widely available on the NET….. TEXT SITEMAP A text sitemap is simply a text file with a list of URLs, one on each line, and is supported by Yahoo! Site Explorer. Unlike XML sitemaps, it does not allow for metadata about each URL. Here is some sample text sitemap code: http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/ http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/creating-and-submitting-sitemaps.html http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/search-engine-optimization-white-paper.html http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/page-content.html http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/getting-the-page-title-right.html http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/keywords-research.html Referencing & Submitting your sitemap Once verified and you are sure that the sitemap is properly formated you can either reference to it in your robots.txt file as below: User-agent: * Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml which tells the crawler how to find your sitemap or by subitting your sitemap to search engines directly through: Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters (you must have a Google account) Yahoo! Site Explorer: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com (you must have a Yahoo! account) Once you have an account with the above search engines, you will be presented with a link and a code to verify your website (either by adding a Meta tag or uploading a file on the server).
10. On-Page Search Engine Optimization Do you know what’s so great about this part? The fact that everything you need to do here is at your finger-tips as you own the website and all files that are located on your server. This includes pages, pdf files, images, videos, word documents, etc . . . The on-page elements include: 1. Page Title 2. Meta Tags 3. Headings Tags (h1 to h6) 4. Content (also known as Body Text) 5. Internal Linking 6. Outbound Links 7. Images alt tag 8. Link (href) title tag 9. Paragraphs ( text included between
. . . .
HTML tag) 10. Bold, Italic and Underlined text plus a lot more. Some of the points mentioned above, have been already covered, but for now we will look at the Body Text. Heading Tags
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11. Internal Links In this section we will be talking and concentrating more on the “Main Navigation Links” and “In-Context Links” elements. Many website owners spend a lot of time trying to acquire inbound links from other websites, but ignore or forget their own site which they have so much control over. A study carried out on how users read the content of a web page came to the conclusion that the pattern is a F shape- the reason main navigation links can always be found at the top of the page or on the left-hand side and, most important key-phrases / keywords should be located at the very beginning of the content. Main Navigation Links This is your chance to create keywords-rich navigation links, avoiding images and make use of real text. There is no excuse for using images, as the same or similar effect (background color, etc.) can be easily achieved through the use of CSS style sheets giving you the opportunity to create keywords-rich anchor text for the website internal linking structure. In-Context Links . . . are key-phrases/keywords linked to related pages, products and articles within your site and can be found in the body text of your page. Make use of them whenever possible but don’t over do it.