The whole world of SEO is difficult and time consuming. But there are things that you can do to your web sites to make them more friendly for the search engines. Many detailed reports or available but this is designed as just an outline to become familiar with the process…
The best type of traffic is FREE traffic. The kind that pop up on page one when some one does a search in their search engine of choice. Here we will cover the basics. Though even in it’s most basic form, it is still a lot to digest but at least needs to be covered so you can see what awaits you.
First and foremost, you have to master keyword research. There are dozens of different tools both free and paid to assist with this.
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
(Also see my Keyword page)
Now then, SEO techniques can be divided into two categories:
* On-page techniques
* Off-page techniques
Considering that you have done your proper keyword research, lets see how to used them to make your website more SEO friendly:
1. Include a keyword-rich title between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your website.
2. Include and use META tags in the HEAD element of your page:
<meta name=“keyword“ content=“fly fishing, poles, lures“>
3. Ensure spidering with a robots.txt file or with a ROBOTS META tag
<meta name=“robots“ content=“all“>.
4. Move Javascript elements to an external file. Place your Javascript functions in a file called “myfuncs.js” and then reference these inside your HEAD element using this:
<script type=“text/javascript“ language=“javascript“ src=“myfuncs.js“></script>
5. Put your body content first if possible. Many templates are designed with tables. When search engines (spiders) come to index your pages they will start in the upper left and move right - back and forth. Therefore, in order for the content to be seen first you need to have a blank table entry in the upper left so spiders will see your content instead of a bunch of links taking them to other pages in your site. Or even worse - other peoples pages.
6. Validate Your HTML and make sure that there are no errors or bad links.
The best way to find and fix any HTML problems is to use the online (and free) W3C HTML validator at http://validator.w3.org/ . Just type in your URL, click the “Check” button, and the validator will point out all the HTML problems it finds.
That concludes the basic steps of having your page ready for the search engine spiders. As far as the content of your site goes, we can get more milage out of our key words by using them correctly. There was a time not long ago when search engines looked for “keyword density” where it was advised to have the keyword you were wanting to get found by, to be used once every 100 words or so. It is still advisable to put keywords in your title, first paragraph and last paragraph, then add synonyms through the rest of the article. Now a days search engines are more interested in LSI (latent semantic indexing) which is more like synonyms. A good example of a LSI tool, and to get an idea of what it entails is to visit http://quintura.com/
.Highlighting, using bold and italics on the keywords not only grabs the readers attention but also the search engines.
Search engines can not see images but you are allowed to use ‘ALT Tags” on your images. Here again you want to fill it with keywords. The whole trick is to let Google and others know what the page is about without overdoing it. At some point it starts to look spammy and you will loose your credibility in the search engines eyes.
So far we have covered what TO DO if you want your site to rank well. Now lets look at things that will penalize you or get you banned… actually not being listed anywhere by Google or other search engines.
As listed above, you do not want to over do your keywords (stuffing) for fear of getting penalized. Another thing that search engines wised up to is when people would use the same color for there text as the back ground making it invisible to the reader, but spiders can see the HTML code of th font color compared to back ground - so that is a red flag for them.
We also discussed the fact that java scripts will confuse the spiders and that even though graphics are pleasing to the readers, it does nothing for page rank. Along the same lines Flash headers and other animation can do more damage then good.
Another thing that does nothing for lifting your pages popularity is using frames on your site. Spiders can’t see inside frames.
The links you use in your site can confuse the spiders as well. URLs like:
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?action=go&item=12 are useless. There are ways around this though… A good introduction can be found here:
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html
You can even use the terrific tool here:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/url-rewriting/
Now for the bad news. All of the online SEO methods above only counts for 2 - 5% of the SEO battle. While it needs to be done before we continue, there is a long way to go. The real meat and potatoes come from other peoples site and back links.
A backlinking strategy for your website will be most effective when the backlinks have the following properties:
Backlinks come from a large number of websites
Backlinks are from websites and pages with content that is relevant to the content of your website
Backlinks are one way links, not reciprocal links
Backlinks use some of your site’s most relevant keywords as their anchor text
Backlinks come from websites with good pagerank
Backlinks come from websites on a variety of IP addresses
Backlinks come from pages with a small number of outbound links.
Getting Backlinks The Traditional (Hard) Way
Connect With Top Related Websites and Exchanging Links
Keep in mind that one way back links are better the reciprocal
Directory Submissions:
Usually you can find someone offering to do the directory submissions for you to 1000 directories for anywhere between $40-$100.
directories often require reciprocal links
directories often require you to pay for inclusion
directories can take forever to evaluate your website
directories will place your link on some obscure page buried deep in their site where spiders may not go.
Article Marketing
Should be part of any web site owners promotions whether you write on your own or outsouce, (Ref my Article Marketing page)
Press Releases
Sites like PRWeb or PRLeap charge a small fee but many (thousands) of search engines large and small find new websites here - a cheaper, quicker way of getting listed in the various directory sites.
Blog and Forum Commenting
Web 2.0 Websites like Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Delicious, Digg allow relevant content to be rewarded by allowing back links to your site. But if you spam, you loose and get banned.
Don’t Give Up Just Yet - It Will Be OK
By now you may be asking yourself “How am I a suppose to accomplish all that?!?!” Well, I won’t lie - most people just don’t bother. It takes a LOT of time. Personal time and sitting around waiting on the search engines.
Even then, the search engines are constantly changing the way they rank pages. Frankly it is a loosing battle. Yes you can get the page SEO friendly but that is just a drop in the bucket. That’s why you need a tool to do the research and work for you in timely fashion that keeps up with the search engines. Introducing SEO Elite. It performs the tasks in minutes that would take you weeks and months. It understands what Google wants.
* Google ranks websites by those that are deemed to have the most authority on the given topic/keyword.
* Google pays much less attention to what is actually on your web page itself than what most people think. Yes, you heard me right. You don’t actually even need to mention your keyword anywhere on your website to rank highly for the keyword!
* Google looks at who’s “voting” for a website, to determine how highly it ranks. If important sites are “voting” for your website, you will rank highly.
You must know EXACTLY why the top 10 ranked sites in Google are currently ranked where they are. You can’t guess by simply looking at their web page itself.
As I said above, what is on the web page itself has VERY little to do with the reason they’re ranked where they are. It has as little as 2% to do with their ranking…
So if you have, or plan to build a site for the long term - SEO Elite is the best for the job hands down. It costs less then you would think also. Get more details here.
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