SEO - Tutorial

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website to search engines. These days for any business to be successful they should be online and to be online is not all there should be a better way for people to see your business and easily find it too. That is why SEO is very important.

The ideal time for planning SEO is before you build a Website but most of us do after building it and if you are one of them not a problem you are probably in the right place.

Today you should be in the top of the search pages of google and bing to be in competition with other competitors.Here are some tips that you need for SEO :

1. Search Engines often look for good designed websites so if you have a very unprofessional looking website then this tutorial is not for you. You need to go to some HTML & CSS Tutorial. You can compare your website to your competitors website to see if there are some changes to be made or not.

2. When optimizing a website it is important to know which search terms you wish your site to rank well for. Keywords are what search strings are matched against and what make search engine users reach your website. Keywords should describe what your website is about so when people visit your website your content should be relevant to what they are looking for.Which means that the content in your website should be full of keywords but also overuse of keywords can lead your website to completely disappear from the search engine. So before you build your website think of some keywords that relate to your product or service and prepare a excel sheet or just write it in a paper. Where to Put the Keywords? 

Well the answer to that is Everywhere possible:

1.    URL

A very important location is your URL, this should contain 1 to 3 main keywords. The URL should tell a lot what the website is about but try to make it easy to remember. Before creating a website you need to decide which domain name you want to use and which keywords you want in it, relevant to the whole website. When creating different pages further on you can chose the URL of the page containing another keyword relevant to the page. Be aware that good keyword domains are often already taken, be sure to check this when looking for the right domain.

A good example: http://www.troy-invest.com/commodity-market-investing.php. They used their name and their keyword, and used a short, simple page name that’s perfectly descriptive for the content.

A bad example: http://www.brdve.net/choosing-the-right-online-courses.php. They got the page name right, but the domain itself is totally non-descriptive.

2.    Title

Another location for keywords is the page title as it shows in almost every browser. To write strict (X)HTML it is not important to fill in the title tag but it is important for optimizing your website. The title should not only be a keyword about the page but it can be a short phrase what the website is about, it should be attractive to the visitors. You want to avoid keyword stuffing in your title tag, the keywords used in the title tag will have a lower value then if you use only a couple. Also should the page title be different for every page else the search engine will think every page has the same content.

Our title starts with the describing keyword of every page and ends with SEO Tutorial which describes the whole website. we could have chosen for a long title like “Importance of Keywords and Keyword location” but we choose for a short title which contains only our main keywords.

3.    Headers

Besides the fact that headers separate  paragraphs into related subtopics search engines pay much attention to them. Therefor you should put keywords in these headings, top keywords in the top headings. There is no limit on how many headers a page can have but as with URLs don’t make them to long. A page should have only one top header tag (<h1>) and mostly contains the keywords used in the domain name.

as H1 tag and most important tag of the website we have SEO Tutorial which is the same for every page as it is our main keyword. For h2 tags we have the describing keyword of our page:keywords. We also have “seo tutorial menu” in a h2 tag, this might seem odd as menu is not a keyword we want to rank well for but this is a way to make SEO tutorial seem more important once more.Further we divide each paragraph with h3 and h4 tags, here we repeat important keywords again.

4.    Filename

Files used in the website should have a proper name and preferably contain the main keywords used on the website and the right name for the file. When linking to the file the latter should be the text your linking to, this way you enrich your content.

5.    Bold/Italic

Keywords in your content should be highlighted by putting them in bold or italic. This is how search engines know which words are more important then others. Bold keywords are more important then italic ones, also for visitors it is more obvious which words are important.

As you have noticed we have made some words bold on this page and all of them were keywords. We emphasize these keywords to tell Google once more for which keywords we want to be found.

           3.     Linking :

Linking is very important in SEO as search engines index the pages to give the desired result to the end user. to try out how google indexes your site type index:www.yourdomain.com in the google search bar and then you will see how many pages of your site google has indexed and if there are not many then you are in a very big problem maybe there is a problem in the robot.txt file in your server which is not allowing google to index your pages.There are basically three types of Linking:

    ·         Inbound: When a website links to your page. Keywords should be used in the anchor text differentiating from meaningless words.

    ·         Outbound: When linking from your website to another.  Be sure to link to quality sites and use proper keywords which describe the website your are linking to. Search engines think webpages linking to each other have relevant content.

    ·         Internal: When linking within your website to all the pages.

When creating links to your site you want people to be linking to your site without having to link back to that same website, this is called one way linking. With one way linking you get all the points divided by the amount of links on that page. Most link building experts look very hard for these type of links.

     4. Metatags

Few years back there were only meta tags used for search engine optimization so it is also an important part of SEO. Many search engines show meta description after the title also.Some special search engines still use meta data as the only tool to rank pages. 

There are 3 main Meta tags used in search engine optimization :

    1 . Description

 The description meta tag is a useful tag to point out the primary topics of your site. A search engine can determine whether this description is relevant or not. If so your site might rank higher.

      It doesn’t take very much time to include a description, and it can turn out to be very useful! 

     2.   Keywords

       The use of the keywords tag is very simple: add coma separated keywords to your site that are relevant  to your pages. Most of the times it’s not necessary to include alternative spelling or common misspellings        of a keyword because most search engines can determine this on their own. For example most search            engines see “canine” and “dog” as the same word.

    3.    Robots

     This tag is used to specify which pages that should not be indexed. Sometimes it happens that you have          content on your site that you want to have there but you don’t want to have search engines crawling over      them. That’s when you use this tag. An alternative is creating a robots.txt file where you specify the                pages that should not be indexed.

COMMON MISTAKES:

           Targeting the wrong keywords

        1.     This is probably the mistake that is made the most, even be experienced web developers. You                   might find the right keywords that describe your web page, but the users use other keywords. You               must think like the user does, and see what keywords are used more than others. There are tools to               track down the big searches on most search engines, so it is advised that you use those!

2.     Ignoring the Title tag

The title-tag is a very important meta tag, and it’s very often left empty, or sometimes a website has the same title for all it’s pages. Remember that the text in the title tag is shown on the search results. Also it’s a good place to add some keywords. Don’t forget it!

3.   Flash website without a html alternative

Flash is very cool and it makes your website stand out for the users, but not so much for search engines. Always provide an html-alternative, so the search engines can crawl your webpage and show your website in their results.

4.     Using only Images for Headings

Images in the heading of the website looks good and gives more control to the designer but with the perspective of Search Engine Optimization it does not count as google or bing cannot read the text in the image so it will not be counted as text.

5.     Ignoring URLs

It is paramount that you have a good URL. Dynamic page names are very common, and there’s a lot of pages in there that have no keywords in there. Of course some of these pages rank very high but they could rank so much higher if their URL would at least have one keyword in it. Put keywords in the domain name, the folders and the page itself. This will boost your ranking!

Article By -  Prabjyot Singh Sudan - Admin