What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is formatting your web site for search engines to easily read and understand your content. SEO is used to make your site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keywords. If you aren’t on the first page for your keywords, it’s likely you won’t receive that much organic search engine traffic. SEO is like poker, it takes a few minutes to learn but a few years to master.
How A Search Engine Works
Search engines use automated software that grabs information from websites all over the internet. They are called crawlers, spiders, and robots. The information is stored into the search engines databases.
When you submit a search query into a search engine, it uses a sophisticated algorithm to provide you with results. The algorithm looks at many factors to determine the order that the results will show. SEO is basically trying to optimize your site for these factors in their algorithm to bring your site to the top of the search engine results.
The Basics of SEO
1. Use keywords on your site
Using keywords on your site is one of the most important elements of any web site. Keywords should not only be used in the titles and headlines, but they shoud also be in the actual body of the text. An important aspect of SEO is to learn keyword research.
2. Optimize your meta tags
Meta tags are tags found at the top of the page within the header that describe certain elements of the site. The two most important are the keyword and description tag.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”dog training,dogs,training,collars”>
<meta name=”description” content=”Dog training the blue collar way”>
Some search engines do not use these tags
3. Optimize your HTML tags
Title tags are very important. They appear at the top of the browser. They are set with an opening and closing tag. Keywords should appear within this tag.
<title>Blue Collar Dog Training</title>
Header tags are used to assign headings to copy. Keywords should also be placed here.
<h1>Dog Training Tips</h1>
Anchor tags are used to create links to other pages.
<a href=”www.google.com”>Search Engine</a>
Your outbound links help tell the search engine what your content is about. The anchor text is the text wrapped by the anchor tags. If you use keywords within your anchor text, it should also help tell the search engines what your site is about.
4. Relevant And Working Outbound Links
Make sure that your outbound links are actually relevant to the content found on that page. In the past black hat SEO’s would create link farms. These link farms were sites full of links that were used to boost search engine rankings. Search engines caught on to this trick and were able to detect this abuse.
Make sure all your outbound links work. If a search engine detects a lot of broken links on your site, it will lower your search engine rankings. Broken links make your site seem not as useful.
5. Optimize your images
Make sure all your images have alternative tags. Search engines cannot determine what is in your images. Alt tags tell the search engines what is in the image.
Make sure your file names say what is in the picture. Seperate the words with dashes so that search engines can read your filenames. For example, if you have a picture of a dog being trained name the file dog-being-trained.jpg.
6. Hosting optimization
The quality of hosting is important for SEO. The faster your sites load, the easier it is for bots to index more pages at a time. If you are on a shared hosting you usually share an IP address with multiple websites that are not under your control. If a malicious web site is hosted on the same virtual hosting server as yours, then it is possible your search engine rankings will go down.
7. Domain Name optimization
Having keywords in your domain name is optimal but is very hard to do. The domaining market has made it very hard to get great domain names without purchasing them for a premium.
Here are a few tips when choosing a domain name
Get a .com domain whenever possible. There are multiple domain extensions but the best is .com
Keep the domain name as short as possible. The shorter the domain name, the easier it is to type
in to a browser without making mistakes. Shorter domain names are also easier to remember.
Avoid non alphanumeric characters. Using weird characters makes your site harder to remember.
8.URL Structure
Keep your URLs as short as possible, but also as descriptive as possible. Seperate your words with dashes so that search engines can read your URLs. Many ecommerce sites have URLs that use product id #’s instead of descriptive URLs. For example, http://www.ecommercesite.com/?productid=1234123 doesn’t tell you anything about the page. If you were to instead use something like http://www.ecommercesite.com/handbags/beautiful-red-purse would help you show up for the keyword beautiful red purse.
9. Optimize Your Code
Try to reduce the amount of code on the page. The less code on the page, the faster bots can load your page and the less confusing it is to read the information. Make sure all javascript is stored in external files and included into your code. Make sure all CSS styling is done externally and linked to within the code. Do not use tables unless absolutely necessary. Tables are an ancient way of building sites. Tables require a lot of code which could easily be replaced with divs and CSS. Whenever possible try to validate your HTML with http://validator.w3.org .
10. Avoid over doing anything
If you are optimizing for a keyword, use any of the methods above within reason. For example, if you are trying to optimize for dog breeding, do not register www.dogbreedingdogbreedingdogbreeding.com and put up a page called dog-breeding-dog-breeding.php with a page full of dog breeding within h1 tags. Search engines can detect when you are trying to game them. Optimize, but don’t over do it. Do not repeatedly spam your keywords.
SEO is not a quick method to increase your search engine rankings. It takes time for your site to earn the search engines trust. It’s a slow process that requires experimentation and dedication. The best thing to do is to keep a diary of the optimization that you have done and then to track it’s effectiveness on your search engine rankings. Hard work will produce results.
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