SEO Tutorial
Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) is the activity of optimizing web pages or whole sites in
order to make them search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in
search results.
This tutorial explains
simple SEO techniques to improve the visibility of your web pages for different
search engines, especially for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is all about optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is a technique
for:
·
designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine
results.
·
improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from
search engines.
·
marketing by understanding how search algorithms work, and what
human visitors might search.
SEO is a subset of
search engine marketing. SEO is also referred as SEO copyrighting, because most
of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines, deal with
text.
If you plan to do some
basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work.
How Search Engine Works?
Search engines perform
several activities in order to deliver search results.
·
Crawling - Process of
fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a
software, called a crawler or a spider (or
Googlebot, in case of Google).
·
Indexing - Process of
creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant
database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of
indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page
and assigning the page to particular keywords.
·
Processing -
When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it compares
the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.
·
Calculating Relevancy -
It is likely that more than one page contains the search string, so the search
engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to
the search string.
·
Retrieving Results -
The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best matched results.
Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.
Search engines such as
Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens of times per
month. When you see changes in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift
or something else outside of your control.
Although the basic
principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences
between their relevancy algorithms lead to major changes in results relevancy.
What is SEO Copywriting?
SEO Copywriting is the
technique of writing viewable text on a web page in such a way that it reads
well for the surfer, and also targets specific search terms. Its purpose is to
rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms.
Along with viewable text,
SEO copywriting usually optimizes other on-page elements for the targeted
search terms. These include the Title, Description, Keywords tags, headings,
and alternative text.
The idea behind SEO
copywriting is that search engines want genuine content pages and not
additional pages often called "doorway pages" that are created for
the sole purpose of achieving high rankings.
What is Search Engine
Rank?
When you search any
keyword using a search engine, it displays thousands of results found in its
database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in
the search engine results. If a search engine is putting your web page on the
first position, then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed
as the page with the highest rank.
SEO is the process of
designing and developing a website to attain a high rank in search engine
results.
What is On-Page and
Off-page SEO?
Conceptually, there are
two ways of optimization:
·
On-Page SEO -
It includes providing good content, good keywords selection, putting keywords
on correct places, giving appropriate title to every page, etc.
·
Off-Page SEO -
It includes link building, increasing link popularity by submitting open
directories, search engines, link exchange, etc.
SEO techniques are classified
into two broad categories:
·
White Hat SEO -
Techniques that search engines recommend as part of a good design.
·
Black Hat SEO -
Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the
effect of. These techniques are also known as spamdexing.
White Hat SEO
An SEO tactic is
considered as White Hat if it has the following features:
·
It conforms to the search engine's guidelines.
·
It does not involve in any deception.
·
It ensures that the content a search engine indexes, and
subsequently ranks, is the same content a user will see.
·
It ensures that a web page content should have been created for
the users and not just for the search engines.
·
It ensures good quality of the web pages.
·
It ensures availability of useful content on the web pages.
Always follow a White
Hat SEO tactic and do not try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and you
will definitely get something more.
Black Hat or Spamdexing
An SEO tactic, is
considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it has the following features:
·
Attempting ranking improvements that are disapproved by the search
engines and/or involve deception.
·
Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to
one that is more human friendly.
·
Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the
search engine ranked.
·
Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and
another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO
tactic.
·
Using hidden or invisible text or with the page background color,
using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no
frame" sections.
·
Repeating keywords in the metatags, and using keywords that are
unrelated to the website content. This is called metatag stuffing.
·
Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword
count, variety, and density of the page. This is called keyword
stuffing.
·
Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content
but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. These pages are
called Doorway or Gateway Pages.
·
Mirror websites by hosting multiple websites - all with
conceptually similar content but using different URLs.
·
Creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents
similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to
unrelated or malicious websites. This is called page hijacking.
Always stay away from
any of the above Black Hat tactics to improve the rank of your site. Search
engines are smart enough to identify all the above properties of your site and
ultimately you are not going to get anything.
When you start thinking
of doing a business through internet, the first thing that you think about is
your website domain name. Before you choose a domain name, you should consider
the following:
·
Who would be your target audience?
·
What you intend to sell to them. Is it a tangible item or just
text content?
·
What will make your business idea unique or different from
everything else that is already avilable in the market?
Many people think it is
important to have keywords in a domain. Keywords in the domain name are usually
important, but it usually can be done while keeping the domain name short,
memorable, and free of hyphens.
Using keywords in your
domain name gives you a strong competitive advantage over your competitors.
Having your keywords in your domain name can increase click-through-rates on
search engine listings and paid ads as well as make it easier to use your
keywords in get keyword rich descriptive inbound links.
Avoid buying long and
confusing domain names. Many people separate the words in their domain names
using either dashes or hyphens. In the past, the domain name itself was a
significant ranking factor but now search engines have advanced features and it
is not a very significant factor anymore.
Keep two to three words
in your domain name that will be easy to memorize. Some of the most notable
websites do a great job of branding by creating their own word. Few examples
are eBay, Yahoo!, Expedia, Slashdot, Fark, Wikipedia, Google, etc.
You should be able to
say it over the telephone once, and the other person should know how to spell
it, and they should be able to guess what you sell.
Guru Mantra
Finally, you should be
able to answer the following questions:
·
Why do you want to build your website?
·
Why should people buy off your site and not from other site?
·
What makes you different from others?
·
Who are your target audience and what do you intend to sell?
·
List 5 to 10 websites that you think are amazing. Now think why
they are amazing.
·
Create 5 different domain names. Make at least 1 of them funny.
Tell them to half a dozen people and see which ones are the most memorable. You
will get more honest feedback if the people do not know you well.
·
Buy your domain name that is catchy, memorable, and relevant to
your business.
One of the simplest
methods to improve your search engine optimization is to look at the way you
name your files. Before writing this tutorial, we did a lot of research on
file-names and found that search engines like Google give too much importance
to file names. You should think what you want put in your web page and then
give a relevant file name to this page.
Just try giving any
keyword in Google search engine and you will find file names highlighted with
the keyword you have given. It proves that your file name should have
appropriate keywords.
File Naming Style
·
The filename should preferably be short and descriptive.
·
It is always good to use same keywords in a filename as well as in
page title.
·
Do not use filenames such as service.htm or job.htm as
they are generic. Use actual service name in your file name such as computer-repairing.htm.
·
Do not use more than 3-4 words in file names.
·
Separate the keywords with hyphens rather than underscores.
·
Try to use 2 keywords if possible.
File Name Example
Listed below are some
filenames which would be ideal from the users' point of view as well as SEO.
slazenger-brand-balls.html
wimbledon-brand-balls.html
wilson-brand-balls.html
Notice that the keywords
are separated by hyphens rather than underscores. Google sees good filenames as
follows:
seo-relevant-filename as seo relevant filename(good)
Filenames with
underscores are not a good option.
seo_relevant_filename as seorelevantfilename (not good)
File Extension
You should notice
that .html, .htm, .php and any other extension do NOTHING for
your visitors, and they are simply a means of offloading some of the work of
configuring your webserver properly onto your visitor's. In effect, you are
asking your site visitors to tell your webserver HOW to produce the page, not
which one?
Many Web masters think
that it is a good idea to use filename without using extension. It may help
you, but not a whole lot.
URL Sub-Directory Name
From Search Engine
Optimization point of view, URL sub-directory name hardly matters. You can try
giving any keyword in any search, and you will not find any sub-directory name
matching with your keywords. But from the user's point of view, you should keep
an abbreviated sub-directory name.
Guru Mantra
Keep the following
points in mind before naming your files:
·
Keep the web page filename short, simple, descriptive, and
relevant to the page content.
·
Try to use a maximum of 3-4 keywords in your filename, and these
keywords should appear on your web page title as well.
·
Separate all keywords with hyphen rather than with underscore.
·
Keep your sub-directories name as short as possible.
·
Restrict the file size to less than 101K because Google chops
almost everything above that.
The website design and
layout gives the first impression about your site. There are sites which are
too fancy and regular net surfers just reach those sites and come out even
without creating a single click.
Search engines are very
smart but after all, they are software and not human being, who can read the
content of their interest. If you make your site too complicated, then the
search engine would not be able to parse the content of your site properly, and
finally indexing would not be efficient, which results in a low rank.
The actual page content
should have a keyword density of about 10% and should weigh in at about 200
words - but there are as many opinions about this as there are SEO experts.
Some say, keyword density should be 5% and some say it should be 20%. You can
go with 10% which is good enough.
Here are a few guidelines
that you should keep in mind while designing a web page.
·
You should have more text content than HTML elements.
·
No frames. They are the enemies of search engines, and search
engines are enemies of frames.
·
No ads if possible. Because most of the ads use Java-Script which
is not advised to be used.
·
No JavaScript. If you need JavaScript, call it from an external
file rather than dumping the code in the HTML file. JavaScript drop-down menus
prevent spiders from crawling beyond your homepage. If you use them, be sure to
include text links at the bottom of the page.
·
Do not put anything in the page topic that does not fit perfectly.
·
No unnecessary directories. Keep your files as close to the root
as possible.
·
No fancy stuff (Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers, etc.)
unless absolutely necessary.
SEO
- Optimized Keywords
A keyword is a term that
is used to match with the query a person enters into a search engine to find
specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consist of two to
five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query
phrases, or just keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive.
The following concepts
related to keywords, help in optimizing the keywords on a web page.
Keyword Frequency
This is calculated as
how often does a keyword appear in a website title or description. You do not
want to go overboard with frequency, however, since on some engines if you
repeat a word too many times, you are be penalized for "spamming" or keyword
stuffing.
In general though,
repeat your keyword in the document as many times as you can get away with, and
up to 3-7 times in your list of metatags.
Keyword Weight
It refers to the number
of keywords appearing on your web page compared to the total number of words
appearing on that same page. Some search engines consider this while
determining the rank of your website for a particular keyword search.
One technique that often
works well is to create some smaller pages, generally just a paragraph long
that emphasizes a particular keyword. By keeping the overall number of words to
a minimum, you can increase the "weight" of the keyword you are
emphasizing.
Keyword Proximity
It refers to the
placement of keywords on a web page in relation to each other or, in some
cases, in relation to other words with a similar meaning as the queried
keyword.
For search engines, that
grade a keyword match by keyword proximity, the connected phrase home loans
will outrank a citation that mentions home mortgage loans assuming that you are
searching only for the phrase "home loans".
Keyword Prominence
It is a measure of how
early or high up on a page, the keywords are found. Having keywords in the
first heading and in the first paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are
best.
Keyword Placement
Where your keywords are
placed on a page is very important. For example, in most engines, placing the
keywords in the Title of the page, or in the Heading tags will give it more
relevancy. On some engines, placing keywords in the link text, the part that is
underlined on the screen in a browser, can add more relevancy to those words.
Best Places to Put
Keywords
Here is a list of places
where you should try to use your main keywords.
- Keywords
in the <title> tag(s).
- Keywords
in the <meta name="description">.
- Keywords
in the <meta name="keyword">.
- Keywords
in <h1> or other headline tags.
- Keywords
in the <a href="http://yourcompany.com">keywords</a>
link tags.
- Keywords
in the body copy.
- Keywords
in alt tags.
- Keywords
in <!-- insert comments here> comments tags.
- Keywords
in the URL or website address.
Finding Keywords
There are many different
ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are:
·
The potential words, people would use to find your product or
service.
·
The problems that your prospective customers may try to solve with
your product or service.
·
Keyword tags on competitor's websites.
·
Visible page copy on competitor's websites.
·
Related search suggestions on top search engines.
·
By analyzing your website carefully and finding out proper
keywords. This task can be done by expert SEO copywriters.
·
Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - particularly to what
the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for that word, when
optimizing pages over time.
·
You can do brainstorming to identify correct keywords for your
site.
What is Word Stemming?
Google uses a feature
called word stemming that allows all forms of the word -
singular, plural, verb form as well as similar words to be returned for a given
search query.
So if someone types in
"house plans", not only the pages that are optimized for that phrase
but the pages that contain all variations of that phrase are returned. For
example, "house plan", "house planning", "house
planner".
Hope you have some
understanding on keywords and you also know how to identify them and where to
use them. The next chapter explains how to optimize metatags for better
results.
There are two important
meta tags:
- Meta
description tags
- Meta
keyword tags
Some search engines may
display the meta description as a part of the search results, but the meta
keyword tags should not appear in search results.
The general consensus
among SEO experts is that metatags are dead. Even so, many of these same
experts continue to use metatags in their own sites.
For Google, adding the
description meta tag does not result in a boost in the Search Engine Results
Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for your
SERP listings in Google.
Yahoo! says, they use
the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. Hence it makes sense to add one for
Yahoo! and any other minor search engines that still use.
What Do the Metatags
Look Like?
You can add the
following in the head section of the web page:
<meta name="keywords"
content="KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2 KEYPHRASE1 etc.
about 30 to 40 unique words">
<meta name="description"
content="An accurate, keyword-rich description
about 150 characters">
Meta Description Tag
Tips
Important tips for good
Meta description tags:
·
Use keywords in your meta description tag.
·
Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use multiple
syntaxes of your key words.
·
There should not be more than 150 characters in a description
metatag of a single web page.
·
Use a different meta description tag for each page, as each page
is different and stands a better chance of being found if you place a good
title and description on it.
Meta Keywords Tag Tips
Please refer to the
previous chapter for identifying good keywords. Use the following tips for
preparing good meta keywords tags.
- Use
synonyms.
- Use
unique keywords.
- No
need to repeat any given phrase.
- You
can repeat a word any number of time, as long as each time it is part of a
different phrase.
Robots Meta Tag
The important metatag
that you may need sometime is the Robots Metatag which looks like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Using the above metatag,
you can tell a spider or a robot that you do not want some of your pages
indexed, or that you do not want your links followed.
SEO
- Title Optimization
An HTML TITLE tag
is put inside the head tag. The page title (not to be confused with the heading
for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window, and
is also what is displayed when you bookmark a page or add it to your browser
Favorites.
This is the one place on
a webpage where your keywords MUST be present. Correct use of keywords in the
title of every page of your website is extremely important to Google -
particularly for the homepage. If you do nothing else to optimize your site,
remember to do this!
Here are some
considerations while designing the title of a webpage:
·
The title shouldn't consist of more than about 9 words or 60
characters.
·
Use keywords at the very beginning of the title.
·
Do not include your company name in the title unless your company
name is very well known.
Improper or nonexistent
use of titles in webpages keeps more websites out of top rankings on Google
than any other factor except perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page
or a lack of quality links from other websites that point to your site.
Best Practices for
Creating Titles
Here are some best
practices you should follow for creating titles on pages:
·
Each page should have a unique title.
·
If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in every
title of every page.
·
Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword
Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.
·
Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase on
your specific product, service, or content pages.
·
If you must include your company name, put it at the end of the
title.
·
Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords based on
what WordTracker says is searched on more often.
·
Do not overdo it - do not repeat your keywords more than 2 to 3
times in the title.
·
Make sure the <title> tag is the first element in the
<head> section of your page - this makes it easier for Google to find the
page.
SEO
- Optimized Anchor
Use descriptive anchor
text for all your text links. Most search engines consider anchor text of
incoming links when ranking pages. Here is an example of anchor:
<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">Anchor Text</a>
Listed below are some of
the important points to note about anchors:
·
The Anchor Title plays a very important role and
is seen by most of the search engines. The anchor title should have appropriate
keywords. Anchor title helps the site visitors using a balloon, and displaying
written text.
·
The Anchor Text is another important part, which
should be selected very carefully because this text is used not only for search
engines but also for navigation purpose. You should try to use the best keywords
in your anchor text.
·
The otherpage.htm is the link to another webpage.
This link could be to an external site. Here, you need to ensure that the
linked page does exist; otherwise it is called a broken link, which gives a bad
impression to search engines as well as to site visitors.
Another example of an
anchor could be as follows:
<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">
<img src="image.gif" alt="keywords" />
</a>
In this case, Anchor
Text has been replaced by an image. So, while using an image in place
of an anchor text, it should be checked that you have put alttag
properly. An image alt tag should have appropriate keywords.
SEO
- Content is the King
Content basically
includes what you see on the site: the text, graphics, and even links to other
websites. You should not use excessive graphics because they are not Search
Engine Friendly plus heavy graphics normally put the users out when they get
downloaded, especially over a slow network.
Thousands of articles,
books, and forum entries are available on how to make your website search
engine friendly, but ultimately, one rule stands above the rest: Unique,
high-quality, unduplicated content is the king.
Superior the quality of
your content, the higher the ranking you achieve, larger the traffic you gain
and greater the popularity of your website. Search engines prefer good quality
sites in their index and search results.
Relevant, fresh, and
timely content is crucial in attracting visitors to your website. It helps you
both draw traffic from search engines and create audience loyalty.
Unique, High-Quality
Content
When people visit a
website for information, they want your unique spin on a topic. How is your
material or content unique? Is that uniqueness obvious, and easy to find and to
understand? Visitors want unique, high-quality site content. It is not only
your home page content, but also all the linked pages should have useful and
easy-to-understand content.
Now-a-days, search
engines have become very smart and they are able to understand complete grammar
and complete phrase. Hence while ranking a page against other, the content
available on a page matters.
Sites with duplicated,
syndicated, or free content are get given red flags by the search engines.
SEO Content Writing
(Copy Writing)
SEO Content Writing
(also referred as SEO Copy writing), involves the process of integrating
keywords and informative phrases which make up the actual content of your
website.
While writing your
webpage content, the following tips may help you in keeping it better than
others.
·
The content should be directed for the specified target audience.
·
Keyword density is strictly adhered as per search engine
guidelines.
·
Titles should always be eye-catching, compelling your visitors to
read on and want to know what you offer in your website.
·
Do not use confusing, ambiguous, and complex language. Use small
statements to make your content more understandable.
·
Keep your web pages short.
·
Organize and distribute the content on the webpages.
·
Divide your web page content also into short paragraphs.
Other Advantages of
Having Great Content
It is not only SEO you
need to think about. Many factors contribute to make your site popular.
·
If your site is having something really unique, then people like
to suggest it to their friends.
·
Other webmasters like to create a link of your site on their
sites.
·
Your site visitors start trusting on your site and they look
forward for the next content update and keep coming again and again.
·
Although you are listed out by search engine, a but net surfer
will click only that page whose content snippet looks more unique and
interesting.
Conclusion
Creating, editing, and
promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. But in
the end, the golden rule of SEO is that Content is the King. It is
not because of a search engine, but it is for your site visitors. A page that
is read by people is better than a page that is read by bots.
So, write your content
after a serious thought. Keep your title, keywords, link text, metatags up-to-date,
unique, and interesting.
SEO
- Verifying Web Site
You design and develop a
website but how would you know if you have put all the HTML syntax in a correct
way. Most browsers do not complain against your wrong syntax, but wrong
is wrong.
There are many SEO
experts who claim that SEO is not dependent on site HTML/XHTML verification.
But we will discuss various reasons why your site should be W3C Compliance.
Why HTML/XHTML
Verification is Required?
There are various
reasons to verify your website before hosting it over the internet.
·
Any webpage quality depends on how well you have written your
webpage.It should be syntactically correct and should pass all the Quality
Gates.
·
When any search engine does indexing for your web page content, it
might get confused if the HTML tags are not written properly, and much of the
web page content might not be indexed properly.
·
There might be many HTML tags, which you are using in your webpage
but then have been depreciated and many of the search engines do not support
them.
·
Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always
appreciated by good webmasters.
What is W3C Compliance?
W3C is the World Wide
Web Consortium and since 1994, the W3C has provided the guidelines by which,
websites and webpages should be structured and created. Here are the links to
validate your web pages:
While verification, you
may get errors along with appropriate reasons. All the validations will be done
using XHTML DTD, which is a refined version of HTML.
Rules for W3C Compliance
There following rules,
are to be following while developing a webpage.
·
Use XHTML declaration statements to start every XHTML page:
· <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
·
Every tag must be closed.
·
The head and body tags are now mandatory.
·
Empty tags get a terminating slash. An empty tag is a tag that
doesn't require an end tag. Examples include <br> and <hr>.
· <BR> is now <br />.
· <HR> is now <hr />.
<IMG SRC="--"> is now <img src="--" />
·
All tags must be lower-case. This does not apply to attributes,
only tags. For example, both of these formats are acceptable under the XHTML
DTD:
· <FONT color="#ffffcc"> is invalid
· <font color="#ffffcc"> is valid
<font color="#FFFFCC"> is also valid
·
All the attribute values should be put with in double quotes.
·
Tags may not be nested.
· <b><i>Text</b></i> This is invalid
<b><i>Text</i></b> This is valid
·
The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big, small,
sub, or sup.
·
One <form> tag cannot be inside another <form> tag.
·
If your code contains a &, it must be written as &.
·
Any use of CSS should use all lower-case letter.
SEO
- Hiring an Expert
Creating, editing, and
promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. If you
are really serious about SEO and you are not getting expected result, then it
would be better to hire an SEO expert.
SEO experts perform the
are following tasks:
·
Code validation and clean up - Ensure that the code is search
engine friendly and standards compliant.
·
Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure
URLs are spider friendly.
·
On-Page optimization - Page Title, copy writing, Call-to-action,
etc.
·
Quality link building - Securing one way links from relevant
sites.
·
Keyword research - Building a list of key phrases relevant to your
business.
·
Creating Quality Content - Building optimized pages around terms
discovered through keyword research.
·
Off-Page Optimization - Managing Blogs, Press Releases, Article
Submissions.
If you are confident
that you have the required skills, then you can take care of all the above
activities; otherwise it is worth taking help from SEO Companies or to hire any
SEO specialist.
Choosing an SEO Expert
or Company
It is very difficult to
choose a correct SEO expert or SEO company. However the following guidelines
can help you in this activity:
·
Start searching through your friends and business partners.
·
Post your queries in SEO Forums to get feedback from the
community.
·
Check other sites rank which they already have optimized.
·
Do not go for SEO companies doing automated submission.
·
Do not go for SEO companies doing Black Hat tricks.
·
Do not look for cheap SEO. But take care, high price also does not
guarantee high quality.
·
Take guarantee if possible for a particular rank and any
particular search engine.
·
User SEO Expert or Company name in Google to find more information
about them.
·
Do not go just because of their fancy site and availability of
good articles on their site.
·
Do not get fascinated by the testimonials available on their
sites.
We can not list out all
the factors here because there may be different situations and different views.
You should be smart enough to think what's bad and what's good.
SEO
- Link Building
Link building is the SEO
practice of obtaining links from external websites to your own to improve both
direct referrals (i.e., people clicking on the links), and search engine
ranking. Link building is all about increasing your site link popularity.
Website Crawler goes to
a site again and again whose ranking in a search engine is high. You can verify
this fact by putting your site on a high-rank site. If your site link is
available on a high-rank website, then you have 99.99% chances that your site
is indexed within 24Hrs.
How to Increase Link
Popularity?
There are various ways
of increasing your website link popularity. You can follow the tips given
below, which are easily doable.
·
Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Do not go for
automated submission.
·
Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org,
yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories gives a boost in link popularity
and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
·
Provide high quality content so that anyone would naturally link
to your site if you are featuring what they want, and that is not available
anywhere else.
·
Leverage your personal relations with other webmasters. Put your
site link on their sites. One-way links often count for more than reciprocal
links.
·
Participate in Link Exchange Programs. Find top 20 sites doing the
same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between
unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the search engine.
·
If you are subscribed in a forum and the forum does not have any
restriction to keep your site link as your signature, then it can help you to
increase your site popularity.
·
Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG and Slashdot. Before submitting,
please go through their spam policy.
·
Write good articles in blogging sites and give a few references of
your links within that article.
·
Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep
them busy on your site. If possible create forums, newsletters, blogs, etc.
There are other ways,
but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternatives.
·
Buy a place on high-rank website where you can put your link.
·
Subscribe for Google's AdWords program to drive traffic towards
your site.
·
You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the
number of hits on your site, which can result in your site link popularity.
Mobile
SEO Techniques
Millions of users these
days access the web using smartphones running on Android, iOS, or Windows.
Hence, it has become imperative that websites adapt themselves to this changing
environment and make suitable changes in their website design to attract more
viewership.
The desktop version of a
site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. The version that is
not mobile-friendly requires the user to pinch or zoom in order to read the
content. Users find this a frustrating experience and are likely to abandon the
site. In contrast, a mobile-friendly version is readable and immediately usable.
A recent Google update
makes it mandatory that a website should be mobile-friendly to be effective on
Mobile Search Engines. Note that a website that is not mobile-friendly will not
have any impact on regular search engines either.
In this chapter, we will
see how to make a website mobile-friendly in order to ensure the visitors who
access the website from mobile devices have an optimized experience.
What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile Search Engine
Optimization is the process of designing a website to make it suitable for
viewing on mobile devices of different screen sizes having low bandwidth. Apart
from following all the SEO rules which are applicable to a desktop website, we
need to take additional care while designing a website for mobile devices. A
website is mobile friendly if it has the following attributes −
·
A good mobile website has a responsive design which performs well
on desktops as well as mobile devices. It not only reduces the maintenance of
the website but also makes the content consistent for the search engines.
·
The contents of a good mobile website are easy to read on a mobile
device without having to zoom the screen. It has appropriate fonts, colors, and
layouts.
·
It is easy to navigate through a good mobile website on a small
screen. It provides links and buttons that can be easily maneuvered using a
finger.
·
A good mobile website is lightweight such that it takes less
bandwidth and time to load on mobile networks.
·
The Home Page of a mobile website plays the most important role in
connecting users to the content they are looking for. Therefore, good mobile
websites make sure the most important links are displayed on the Home Page so
that they get enough visibility.
The ranking of a website
depends heavily on how user friendly it is. You can follow the guidelines given
below to design a great mobile-friendly website.
Optimize Your Site for
Mobile
If your site is already
optimized for search engines, then it should not be too difficult to optimize
it for mobile devices. First, let us understand what it takes to go mobile. We
can categorize the steps into three broad categories −
Step 1 − Select a Mobile
Configuration
Step 2 − Inform Search
Engines
Step 3 − Avoid Common
Mistakes
Select a Mobile
Configuration
There are three
different mobile configurations that you can choose from −
Step 1 − Responsive Web
Design
Step 2 − Dynamic Serving
Step 3 − Separate URLs
Each has its own
advantages and disadvantages. Google recommends responsive design, however it
supports all three configurations. The following table shows how the mobile
configuration affects your URL and HTML code −
Mobile
Configuration
|
URL
|
HTML
|
Responsive
Web Design
|
Stays
the same
|
Stays
the same
|
Dynamic
Serving
|
Stays
the same
|
Different
HTMLs
|
Separate
URLs
|
Different
URLs
|
Different
HTMLs
|
Responsive Web Design
Google recommends
responsive web design become it is the simplest mobile configuration and very
easy to implement. It serves the same HTML code on the same URL, however it
adjusts the display based on the screen size of the mobile device.
Dynamic Serving
Dynamic serving is a
type of mobile configuration where the URL of your website remains unchanged,
but it serves different HTML content when accessed from a mobile device.
When your content is
dynamically served from the server, make sure you inform Google that the
content it is crawling may look different on mobile devices. A major drawback
of this approach is that you will have to do additional processing on your
content at the server level before severing it to the user. This approach puts
unnecessary load on your server and makes it slow.
Separate URLs
When you maintain two
different URLs — one for mobile users and another for desktop users – make sure
you inform Google explicitly when to serve which version. Google does not
recommend separate URLs because it can detect automatically that your mobile
pages are different from your desktop pages.
This approach is not
practical when you have a big website because maintaining two versions of the
same website will require double the effort and money. At the same time, you
cannot avoid various discrepancies in your content while maintaining two
versions.
From the viewpoint of
SEO, each URL performs separately. Hence your desktop ranking will never be
added to the mobile ranking and they will always be assumed as separate
websites. We don’t recommend maintaining different URLs for mobile and desktop
versions if you want to draw the benefits of SEO.
Inform Search Engines
Make sure Google and
other search engines understand your mobile configuration. Most important of
all, Google must understand your page so that it can rank your website
properly. How you inform Google depends on which mobile configuration —
responsive web design, dynamic serving, or separate URLs — you have opted for.
In case your site has
a responsive design, Google’s algorithms can understand it
automatically without you having to inform Google. When you have a responsive
design, just make sure you have the following meta-tag in your webpage header −
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
The viewport decides how
your webpage will be displayed on a device. A site with responsive design
varies its size based on the size of the device screen. Declare a viewport so
that your webpage displays correctly on any device.
If your website is dynamically
served, make sure you allow Google detect your configuration using the
Vary HTTP header −
Vary: User-Agent
The Vary header
is important to tell the search engines that different content will be served
on desktops and mobile devices. This header is really important when your
content is served by any cache system like a Content Delivery Network and
those systems will make use of this header while serving content on different
devices.
In case you
maintain separate URLs, e.g., example.com and m.example.com, then
you can inform Google by adding a special link rel=alternate tag
in your desktop version and vice versa as follows.
Desktop page should have following in its header:
<link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)"
href="http://m.example.com" >
Mobile page should have following in its header:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" >
Avoid Common Mistakes
In order to optimize
your website for mobile devices, make sure you avoid committing the following
mistakes −
·
Slow Mobile Pages −
Mobile networks are slower as compared to wired Internet networks, so it is
important to pay attention to how fast your mobile pages load. It is a critical
Google ranking factor. Use a mobile SEO tool to find out your mobile page
speed. Google provides a number of good tools that you can use. Browse the
following link −https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
·
Don't Block CSS and JavaScript −
Google recommends to use inline CSS and Javascripts for mobile friendly
websites so that they can be downloaded along with the content. So if you don’t
have much CSS, then try to adjust it within the tag itself; but if you are
using a lot of CSS in separate files, then try to include it at the bottom
which will stop blocking the other content being downloaded. The same rule
applies to Javascript, which can be kept inside the page itself or included at
the bottom of the page. If you can avoid including the file at the top of the
page, then make use of async attribute while including them.
<script async type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>
·
Mobile Redirects −
Since mobile networks are normally slow, too many redirects can hurt your page
speed. If you are maintaining multiple URLs, make sure all your links point to
the relevant pages. In case you maintain multiple URLs and you recognize a user
is visiting a desktop page from a mobile device and you have an equivalent
mobile page at a different URL, then redirect the user to that URL instead of
displaying a 404 error.
·
Heavy Images −
Heavy images increase the load time, however we cannot completely get rid of
them since they are useful and effective. Therefore you should maintain a good
balance between text and heavy images. Use a good tool to optimize your images
and save them at low resolution to avoid heavy downloads.
·
Avoid plug-ins and pop-ups −
Plug-ins like Flash and Java may not be available on user’s mobile device.
Always ensure you don’t have any unplayable content on your mobile page. Avoid
using pop-ups on mobile pages because it becomes quite clumsy to close these
pop-ups on a mobile device.
While creating a mobile
page, always keep in mind that the user has limited space to work on. So, you
need to be as concise as possible while creating titles, URLs, and
meta-descriptions – of course without compromising the essence or quality of
information.
Useful Tools
Here is a list of some
useful tools that you can use to find out how mobile friendly your site is −
·
Google Webmaster Tools −
Use the available Google tools and techniques to understand what should be used
and what should be avoided while designing desktop as well as mobile websites.
·
Mobile Emulator −
It lets you see how your site appears on a wide variety of mobile devices.
·
Moz Local − Use this tool to
ensure that your local SEO is in order.
·
Responsive Web Design Testing Tool −
Use this tool to see how your responsive site looks like on a variety of mobile
devices with different standard screen sizes.
·
Screaming Frog −
This is a useful tool that allows you to analyze your site and double-check all
the redirects.
·
User Agent Switcher −
This is a Firefox add-on that you can use to find out how your site looks like
when accessed from a different user agent.
SEO
- Miscellaneous Techniques
There are various other
tips related to SEO. We have not categorized them into any special category and
hence, putting these in miscellaneous category. Go through these tips one by
one.
To-Don't List
- Don't
keep hidden text on your webpages.
- Don't
create alternate image spamming by putting wrong keywords.
- Don't
use meta tags stuffing.
- Don't
use frames and flash on your site.
- Don't
exchange your links with black listed sites.
- Don't
try to fool your site visitors by using misspelled keyword.
- Don't
send spam emails to thousands of email IDs.
- Don't
use too much graphics on your site.
- Don't
create too many doorway pages.
- Don't
try to create duplicate content of pages.
- Don't
submit your website many times in a single search engine.
- Don't
use sub-directory depth more than 1-2.
- Don't
create too many dynamic pages. Try to convert them into static pages.
- Don't
bloat your pages with code.
- Don't
nest your pages.
To-Do List
There are various other
tips which can help you to optimize your website for many search engines.
·
Create logs of pages and each page should however contain a
minimum of about 200 visible words of text to maximize relevance with Google.
·
Create a Sitemap, Help, FAQ, About Us, Link to Us, Copyright,
Disclaimer, Privacy Policy pages on mandatory basis.
·
Create a homepage link to each and every webpage and provide easy
navigation through all the pages.
·
Pay attention to your dynamic page URLs. Google can crawl and
index dynamic pages as long as you don't have more than 2 parameters in the
URL.
·
Check your complete site for broken links. Broken links will
reduce your other pages rank as well.
SEO
Techniques Summary
We have covered almost all major concepts related to Search Engine
Optimization. Now you are familiar with most frequently used SEO related
terminologies as well.
You have learnt how to optimize keywords, title, alt, metatags,
anchor, and other text from the viewpoint of SEO. You also have learnt the
importance of having good content in your website. In the Miscellaneous
Techniques chapter, we have suggested you other important points which will
help you optimize your website.
In a nutshell, we can have the following points as the ethical
strategies for achieving optimal ranking in the search engines:
- All
pages must conform to W3C standards.
- Keyword
density is never abusive.
- Always
include: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and urllist.txt.
- Keywords
are prominent in the Title, Metatags, and Headings.
- ALT
tags and Title tags are not forgotten.
- Nomenclature
is fundamental to being indexed.
SEO
- Quick Guide
SEO
- What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is all about optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is a technique
for:
·
designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine
results.
·
improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from
search engines.
·
marketing by understanding how search algorithms work, and what
human visitors might search.
SEO is a subset of
search engine marketing. SEO is also referred as SEO copyrighting, because most
of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines, deal with
text.
If you plan to do some
basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work.
How Search Engine Works?
Search engines perform
several activities in order to deliver search results.
·
Crawling - Process of
fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a
software, called a crawler or a spider (or
Googlebot, in case of Google).
·
Indexing - Process of
creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant
database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of
indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page
and assigning the page to particular keywords.
·
Processing -
When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it compares
the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.
·
Calculating Relevancy -
It is likely that more than one page contains the search string, so the search
engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to
the search string.
·
Retrieving Results -
The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best matched
results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the
browser.
Search engines such as
Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens of times per
month. When you see changes in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift
or something else outside of your control.
Although the basic
principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences
between their relevancy algorithms lead to major changes in results relevancy.
What is SEO Copywriting?
SEO Copywriting is the
technique of writing viewable text on a web page in such a way that it reads
well for the surfer, and also targets specific search terms. Its purpose is to
rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms.
Along with viewable
text, SEO copywriting usually optimizes other on-page elements for the targeted
search terms. These include the Title, Description, Keywords tags, headings,
and alternative text.
The idea behind SEO
copywriting is that search engines want genuine content pages and not
additional pages often called "doorway pages" that are created for
the sole purpose of achieving high rankings.
What is Search Engine
Rank?
When you search any
keyword using a search engine, it displays thousands of results found in its
database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in
the search engine results. If a search engine is putting your web page on the
first position, then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed
as the page with the highest rank.
SEO is the process of
designing and developing a website to attain a high rank in search engine
results.
What is On-Page and
Off-page SEO?
Conceptually, there are
two ways of optimization:
·
On-Page SEO -
It includes providing good content, good keywords selection, putting keywords
on correct places, giving appropriate title to every page, etc.
·
Off-Page SEO -
It includes link building, increasing link popularity by submitting open
directories, search engines, link exchange, etc.
SEO
- Tactics & Methods
SEO techniques are
classified into two broad categories:
·
White Hat SEO -
Techniques that search engines recommend as part of a good design.
·
Black Hat SEO -
Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the
effect of. These techniques are also known as spamdexing.
White Hat SEO
An SEO tactic is
considered as White Hat if it has the following features:
·
It conforms to the search engine's guidelines.
·
It does not involve in any deception.
·
It ensures that the content a search engine indexes, and
subsequently ranks, is the same content a user will see.
·
It ensures that a web page content should have been created for
the users and not just for the search engines.
·
It ensures good quality of the web pages.
·
It ensures availability of useful content on the web pages.
Always follow a White
Hat SEO tactic and do not try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and you
will definitely get something more.
Black Hat or Spamdexing
An SEO tactic, is
considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it has the following features:
·
Attempting ranking improvements that are disapproved by the search
engines and/or involve deception.
·
Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to
one that is more human friendly.
·
Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the
search engine ranked.
·
Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and
another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO
tactic.
·
Using hidden or invisible text or with the page background color,
using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no
frame" sections.
·
Repeating keywords in the metatags, and using keywords that are
unrelated to the website content. This is called metatag stuffing.
·
Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the
keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called keyword
stuffing.
·
Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content
but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. These pages are
called Doorway or Gateway Pages.
·
Mirror websites by hosting multiple websites - all with
conceptually similar content but using different URLs.
·
Creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents
similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to
unrelated or malicious websites. This is called page hijacking.
Always stay away from
any of the above Black Hat tactics to improve the rank of your site. Search
engines are smart enough to identify all the above properties of your site and
ultimately you are not going to get anything.
SEO
- Web Site Domain
When you start thinking
of doing a business through internet, the first thing that you think about is
your website domain name. Before you choose a domain name, you should consider
the following:
·
Who would be your target audience?
·
What you intend to sell to them. Is it a tangible item or just
text content?
·
What will make your business idea unique or different from
everything else that is already avilable in the market?
Many people think it is
important to have keywords in a domain. Keywords in the domain name are usually
important, but it usually can be done while keeping the domain name short,
memorable, and free of hyphens.
Using keywords in your
domain name gives you a strong competitive advantage over your competitors.
Having your keywords in your domain name can increase click-through-rates on
search engine listings and paid ads as well as make it easier to use your
keywords in get keyword rich descriptive inbound links.
Avoid buying long and
confusing domain names. Many people separate the words in their domain names
using either dashes or hyphens. In the past, the domain name itself was a
significant ranking factor but now search engines have advanced features and it
is not a very significant factor anymore.
Keep two to three words
in your domain name that will be easy to memorize. Some of the most notable
websites do a great job of branding by creating their own word. Few examples
are eBay, Yahoo!, Expedia, Slashdot, Fark, Wikipedia, Google, etc.
You should be able to
say it over the telephone once, and the other person should know how to spell
it, and they should be able to guess what you sell.
Guru Mantra
Finally, you should be
able to answer the following questions:
·
Why do you want to build your website?
·
Why should people buy off your site and not from other site?
·
What makes you different from others?
·
Who are your target audience and what do you intend to sell?
·
List 5 to 10 websites that you think are amazing. Now think why
they are amazing.
·
Create 5 different domain names. Make at least 1 of them funny.
Tell them to half a dozen people and see which ones are the most memorable. You
will get more honest feedback if the people do not know you well.
·
Buy your domain name that is catchy, memorable, and relevant to
your business.
SEO
- Relevant Filenames
One of the simplest
methods to improve your search engine optimization is to look at the way you
name your files. Before writing this tutorial, we did a lot of research on
file-names and found that search engines like Google give too much importance
to file names. You should think what you want put in your web page and then
give a relevant file name to this page.
Just try giving any
keyword in Google search engine and you will find file names highlighted with
the keyword you have given. It proves that your file name should have
appropriate keywords.
File Naming Style
·
The filename should preferably be short and descriptive.
·
It is always good to use same keywords in a filename as well as in
page title.
·
Do not use filenames such as service.htm or job.htm as
they are generic. Use actual service name in your file name such as computer-repairing.htm.
·
Do not use more than 3-4 words in file names.
·
Separate the keywords with hyphens rather than underscores.
·
Try to use 2 keywords if possible.
File Name Example
Listed below are some
filenames which would be ideal from the users' point of view as well as SEO.
slazenger-brand-balls.html
wimbledon-brand-balls.html
wilson-brand-balls.html
Notice that the keywords
are separated by hyphens rather than underscores. Google sees good filenames as
follows:
seo-relevant-filename as seo relevant filename(good)
Filenames with
underscores are not a good option.
seo_relevant_filename as seorelevantfilename (not good)
File Extension
You should notice
that .html, .htm, .php and any other extension do NOTHING for
your visitors, and they are simply a means of offloading some of the work of
configuring your webserver properly onto your visitor's. In effect, you are
asking your site visitors to tell your webserver HOW to produce the page, not
which one?
Many Web masters think
that it is a good idea to use filename without using extension. It may help
you, but not a whole lot.
URL Sub-Directory Name
From Search Engine
Optimization point of view, URL sub-directory name hardly matters. You can try
giving any keyword in any search, and you will not find any sub-directory name
matching with your keywords. But from the user's point of view, you should keep
an abbreviated sub-directory name.
Guru Mantra
Keep the following
points in mind before naming your files:
·
Keep the web page filename short, simple, descriptive, and
relevant to the page content.
·
Try to use a maximum of 3-4 keywords in your filename, and these
keywords should appear on your web page title as well.
·
Separate all keywords with hyphen rather than with underscore.
·
Keep your sub-directories name as short as possible.
·
Restrict the file size to less than 101K because Google chops
almost everything above that.
SEO
- Design & Layout
The website design and
layout gives the first impression about your site. There are sites which are
too fancy and regular net surfers just reach those sites and come out even
without creating a single click.
Search engines are very
smart but after all, they are software and not human being, who can read the
content of their interest. If you make your site too complicated, then the
search engine would not be able to parse the content of your site properly, and
finally indexing would not be efficient, which results in a low rank.
The actual page content
should have a keyword density of about 10% and should weigh in at about 200
words - but there are as many opinions about this as there are SEO experts.
Some say, keyword density should be 5% and some say it should be 20%. You can
go with 10% which is good enough.
Here are a few
guidelines that you should keep in mind while designing a web page.
·
You should have more text content than HTML elements.
·
No frames. They are the enemies of search engines, and search
engines are enemies of frames.
·
No ads if possible. Because most of the ads use Java-Script which
is not advised to be used.
·
No JavaScript. If you need JavaScript, call it from an external
file rather than dumping the code in the HTML file. JavaScript drop-down menus
prevent spiders from crawling beyond your homepage. If you use them, be sure to
include text links at the bottom of the page.
·
Do not put anything in the page topic that does not fit perfectly.
·
No unnecessary directories. Keep your files as close to the root
as possible.
·
No fancy stuff (Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers, etc.)
unless absolutely necessary.
SEO
- Optimized Keywords
A keyword is a term that
is used to match with the query a person enters into a search engine to find
specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consist of two to
five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query
phrases, or just keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive.
The following concepts
related to keywords, help in optimizing the keywords on a web page.
Keyword Frequency
This is calculated as
how often does a keyword appear in a website title or description. You do not
want to go overboard with frequency, however, since on some engines if you
repeat a word too many times, you are be penalized for "spamming" or
keyword stuffing.
In general though,
repeat your keyword in the document as many times as you can get away with, and
up to 3-7 times in your list of metatags.
Keyword Weight
It refers to the number
of keywords appearing on your web page compared to the total number of words
appearing on that same page. Some search engines consider this while
determining the rank of your website for a particular keyword search.
One technique that often
works well is to create some smaller pages, generally just a paragraph long
that emphasizes a particular keyword. By keeping the overall number of words to
a minimum, you can increase the "weight" of the keyword you are
emphasizing.
Keyword Proximity
It refers to the
placement of keywords on a web page in relation to each other or, in some
cases, in relation to other words with a similar meaning as the queried
keyword.
For search engines, that
grade a keyword match by keyword proximity, the connected phrase home loans
will outrank a citation that mentions home mortgage loans assuming that you are
searching only for the phrase "home loans".
Keyword Prominence
It is a measure of how
early or high up on a page, the keywords are found. Having keywords in the
first heading and in the first paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are
best.
Keyword Placement
Where your keywords are
placed on a page is very important. For example, in most engines, placing the
keywords in the Title of the page, or in the Heading tags will give it more
relevancy. On some engines, placing keywords in the link text, the part that is
underlined on the screen in a browser, can add more relevancy to those words.
Best Places to Put
Keywords
Here is a list of places
where you should try to use your main keywords.
- Keywords
in the <title> tag(s).
- Keywords
in the <meta name="description">.
- Keywords
in the <meta name="keyword">.
- Keywords
in <h1> or other headline tags.
- Keywords
in the <a href="http://yourcompany.com">keywords</a>
link tags.
- Keywords
in the body copy.
- Keywords
in alt tags.
- Keywords
in <!-- insert comments here> comments tags.
- Keywords
in the URL or website address.
Finding Keywords
There are many different
ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are:
·
The potential words, people would use to find your product or
service.
·
The problems that your prospective customers may try to solve with
your product or service.
·
Keyword tags on competitor's websites.
·
Visible page copy on competitor's websites.
·
Related search suggestions on top search engines.
·
By analyzing your website carefully and finding out proper
keywords. This task can be done by expert SEO copywriters.
·
Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - particularly to what
the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for that word, when
optimizing pages over time.
·
You can do brainstorming to identify correct keywords for your
site.
What is Word Stemming?
Google uses a feature
called word stemming that allows all forms of the word -
singular, plural, verb form as well as similar words to be returned for a given
search query.
So if someone types in
"house plans", not only the pages that are optimized for that phrase
but the pages that contain all variations of that phrase are returned. For
example, "house plan", "house planning", "house
planner".
Hope you have some
understanding on keywords and you also know how to identify them and where to
use them. The next chapter explains how to optimize metatags for better
results.
SEO
- Optimized Metatags
There are two important
meta tags:
- Meta
description tags
- Meta
keyword tags
Some search engines may
display the meta description as a part of the search results, but the meta keyword
tags should not appear in search results.
The general consensus
among SEO experts is that metatags are dead. Even so, many of these same
experts continue to use metatags in their own sites.
For Google, adding the
description meta tag does not result in a boost in the Search Engine Results
Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for your
SERP listings in Google.
Yahoo! says, they use
the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. Hence it makes sense to add one for
Yahoo! and any other minor search engines that still use.
What Do the Metatags
Look Like?
You can add the
following in the head section of the web page:
<meta name="keywords"
content="KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2 KEYPHRASE1 etc.
about 30 to 40 unique words">
<meta name="description"
content="An accurate, keyword-rich description
about 150 characters">
Meta Description Tag
Tips
Important tips for good
Meta description tags:
·
Use keywords in your meta description tag.
·
Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use multiple
syntaxes of your key words.
·
There should not be more than 150 characters in a description
metatag of a single web page.
·
Use a different meta description tag for each page, as each page
is different and stands a better chance of being found if you place a good
title and description on it.
Meta Keywords Tag Tips
Please refer to the
previous chapter for identifying good keywords. Use the following tips for
preparing good meta keywords tags.
- Use
synonyms.
- Use
unique keywords.
- No
need to repeat any given phrase.
- You
can repeat a word any number of time, as long as each time it is part of a
different phrase.
Robots Meta Tag
The important metatag
that you may need sometime is the Robots Metatag which looks like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Using the above metatag,
you can tell a spider or a robot that you do not want some of your pages
indexed, or that you do not want your links followed.
SEO
- Title Optimization
An HTML TITLE tag
is put inside the head tag. The page title (not to be confused with the heading
for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window, and
is also what is displayed when you bookmark a page or add it to your browser
Favorites.
This is the one place on
a webpage where your keywords MUST be present. Correct use of keywords in the
title of every page of your website is extremely important to Google -
particularly for the homepage. If you do nothing else to optimize your site,
remember to do this!
Here are some
considerations while designing the title of a webpage:
·
The title shouldn't consist of more than about 9 words or 60
characters.
·
Use keywords at the very beginning of the title.
·
Do not include your company name in the title unless your company
name is very well known.
Improper or nonexistent
use of titles in webpages keeps more websites out of top rankings on Google
than any other factor except perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page
or a lack of quality links from other websites that point to your site.
Best Practices for
Creating Titles
Here are some best
practices you should follow for creating titles on pages:
·
Each page should have a unique title.
·
If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in every
title of every page.
·
Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword
Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.
·
Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase on
your specific product, service, or content pages.
·
If you must include your company name, put it at the end of the
title.
·
Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords based on
what WordTracker says is searched on more often.
·
Do not overdo it - do not repeat your keywords more than 2 to 3
times in the title.
·
Make sure the <title> tag is the first element in the
<head> section of your page - this makes it easier for Google to find the
page.
SEO
- Optimized Anchor
Use descriptive anchor
text for all your text links. Most search engines consider anchor text of
incoming links when ranking pages. Here is an example of anchor:
<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">Anchor Text</a>
Listed below are some of
the important points to note about anchors:
·
The Anchor Title plays a very important role and
is seen by most of the search engines. The anchor title should have appropriate
keywords. Anchor title helps the site visitors using a balloon, and displaying
written text.
·
The Anchor Text is another important part, which
should be selected very carefully because this text is used not only for search
engines but also for navigation purpose. You should try to use the best
keywords in your anchor text.
·
The otherpage.htm is the link to another webpage.
This link could be to an external site. Here, you need to ensure that the
linked page does exist; otherwise it is called a broken link, which gives a bad
impression to search engines as well as to site visitors.
Another example of an
anchor could be as follows:
<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">
<img src="image.gif" alt="keywords" />
</a>
In this case, Anchor
Text has been replaced by an image. So, while using an image in place
of an anchor text, it should be checked that you have put alttag
properly. An image alt tag should have appropriate keywords.
SEO
- Content is the King
Content basically
includes what you see on the site: the text, graphics, and even links to other
websites. You should not use excessive graphics because they are not Search
Engine Friendly plus heavy graphics normally put the users out when they get
downloaded, especially over a slow network.
Thousands of articles,
books, and forum entries are available on how to make your website search
engine friendly, but ultimately, one rule stands above the rest: Unique,
high-quality, unduplicated content is the king.
Superior the quality of
your content, the higher the ranking you achieve, larger the traffic you gain
and greater the popularity of your website. Search engines prefer good quality
sites in their index and search results.
Relevant, fresh, and
timely content is crucial in attracting visitors to your website. It helps you
both draw traffic from search engines and create audience loyalty.
Unique, High-Quality
Content
When people visit a
website for information, they want your unique spin on a topic. How is your
material or content unique? Is that uniqueness obvious, and easy to find and to
understand? Visitors want unique, high-quality site content. It is not only
your home page content, but also all the linked pages should have useful and
easy-to-understand content.
Now-a-days, search
engines have become very smart and they are able to understand complete grammar
and complete phrase. Hence while ranking a page against other, the content
available on a page matters.
Sites with duplicated,
syndicated, or free content are get given red flags by the search engines.
SEO Content Writing
(Copy Writing)
SEO Content Writing
(also referred as SEO Copy writing), involves the process of integrating
keywords and informative phrases which make up the actual content of your
website.
While writing your
webpage content, the following tips may help you in keeping it better than
others.
·
The content should be directed for the specified target audience.
·
Keyword density is strictly adhered as per search engine
guidelines.
·
Titles should always be eye-catching, compelling your visitors to
read on and want to know what you offer in your website.
·
Do not use confusing, ambiguous, and complex language. Use small
statements to make your content more understandable.
·
Keep your web pages short.
·
Organize and distribute the content on the webpages.
·
Divide your web page content also into short paragraphs.
Other Advantages of
Having Great Content
It is not only SEO you
need to think about. Many factors contribute to make your site popular.
·
If your site is having something really unique, then people like
to suggest it to their friends.
·
Other webmasters like to create a link of your site on their
sites.
·
Your site visitors start trusting on your site and they look
forward for the next content update and keep coming again and again.
·
Although you are listed out by search engine, a but net surfer
will click only that page whose content snippet looks more unique and interesting.
Conclusion
Creating, editing, and
promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. But in
the end, the golden rule of SEO is that Content is the King. It is
not because of a search engine, but it is for your site visitors. A page that
is read by people is better than a page that is read by bots.
So, write your content
after a serious thought. Keep your title, keywords, link text, metatags
up-to-date, unique, and interesting.
SEO
- Verifying Web Site
You design and develop a
website but how would you know if you have put all the HTML syntax in a correct
way. Most browsers do not complain against your wrong syntax, but wrong
is wrong.
There are many SEO
experts who claim that SEO is not dependent on site HTML/XHTML verification.
But we will discuss various reasons why your site should be W3C Compliance.
Why HTML/XHTML
Verification is Required?
There are various
reasons to verify your website before hosting it over the internet.
·
Any webpage quality depends on how well you have written your
webpage.It should be syntactically correct and should pass all the Quality
Gates.
·
When any search engine does indexing for your web page content, it
might get confused if the HTML tags are not written properly, and much of the
web page content might not be indexed properly.
·
There might be many HTML tags, which you are using in your webpage
but then have been depreciated and many of the search engines do not support
them.
·
Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always
appreciated by good webmasters.
What is W3C Compliance?
W3C is the World Wide
Web Consortium and since 1994, the W3C has provided the guidelines by which,
websites and webpages should be structured and created. Here are the links to
validate your web pages:
While verification, you
may get errors along with appropriate reasons. All the validations will be done
using XHTML DTD, which is a refined version of HTML.
Rules for W3C Compliance
There following rules,
are to be following while developing a webpage.
·
Use XHTML declaration statements to start every XHTML page:
· <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
·
Every tag must be closed.
·
The head and body tags are now mandatory.
·
Empty tags get a terminating slash. An empty tag is a tag that
doesn't require an end tag. Examples include <br> and <hr>.
· <BR> is now <br />.
· <HR> is now <hr />.
<IMG SRC="--"> is now <img src="--" />
·
All tags must be lower-case. This does not apply to attributes,
only tags. For example, both of these formats are acceptable under the XHTML
DTD:
· <FONT color="#ffffcc"> is invalid
· <font color="#ffffcc"> is valid
<font color="#FFFFCC"> is also valid
·
All the attribute values should be put with in double quotes.
·
Tags may not be nested.
· <b><i>Text</b></i> This is invalid
<b><i>Text</i></b> This is valid
·
The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big, small,
sub, or sup.
·
One <form> tag cannot be inside another <form> tag.
·
If your code contains a &, it must be written as &.
·
Any use of CSS should use all lower-case letter.
SEO
- Hiring an Expert
Creating, editing, and
promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. If you
are really serious about SEO and you are not getting expected result, then it
would be better to hire an SEO expert.
SEO experts perform the
are following tasks:
·
Code validation and clean up - Ensure that the code is search
engine friendly and standards compliant.
·
Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure
URLs are spider friendly.
·
On-Page optimization - Page Title, copy writing, Call-to-action,
etc.
·
Quality link building - Securing one way links from relevant
sites.
·
Keyword research - Building a list of key phrases relevant to your
business.
·
Creating Quality Content - Building optimized pages around terms
discovered through keyword research.
·
Off-Page Optimization - Managing Blogs, Press Releases, Article
Submissions.
If you are confident
that you have the required skills, then you can take care of all the above
activities; otherwise it is worth taking help from SEO Companies or to hire any
SEO specialist.
Choosing an SEO Expert
or Company
It is very difficult to
choose a correct SEO expert or SEO company. However the following guidelines
can help you in this activity:
·
Start searching through your friends and business partners.
·
Post your queries in SEO Forums to get feedback from the
community.
·
Check other sites rank which they already have optimized.
·
Do not go for SEO companies doing automated submission.
·
Do not go for SEO companies doing Black Hat tricks.
·
Do not look for cheap SEO. But take care, high price also does not
guarantee high quality.
·
Take guarantee if possible for a particular rank and any
particular search engine.
·
User SEO Expert or Company name in Google to find more information
about them.
·
Do not go just because of their fancy site and availability of
good articles on their site.
·
Do not get fascinated by the testimonials available on their
sites.
We can not list out all
the factors here because there may be different situations and different views.
You should be smart enough to think what's bad and what's good.
SEO
- Link Building
Link building is the SEO
practice of obtaining links from external websites to your own to improve both
direct referrals (i.e., people clicking on the links), and search engine
ranking. Link building is all about increasing your site link popularity.
Website Crawler goes to
a site again and again whose ranking in a search engine is high. You can verify
this fact by putting your site on a high-rank site. If your site link is
available on a high-rank website, then you have 99.99% chances that your site
is indexed within 24Hrs.
How to Increase Link
Popularity?
There are various ways
of increasing your website link popularity. You can follow the tips given
below, which are easily doable.
·
Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Do not go for
automated submission.
·
Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org,
yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories gives a boost in link popularity
and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
·
Provide high quality content so that anyone would naturally link
to your site if you are featuring what they want, and that is not available
anywhere else.
·
Leverage your personal relations with other webmasters. Put your
site link on their sites. One-way links often count for more than reciprocal
links.
·
Participate in Link Exchange Programs. Find top 20 sites doing the
same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between
unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the search engine.
·
If you are subscribed in a forum and the forum does not have any
restriction to keep your site link as your signature, then it can help you to
increase your site popularity.
·
Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG and Slashdot. Before
submitting, please go through their spam policy.
·
Write good articles in blogging sites and give a few references of
your links within that article.
·
Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep
them busy on your site. If possible create forums, newsletters, blogs, etc.
There are other ways,
but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternatives.
·
Buy a place on high-rank website where you can put your link.
·
Subscribe for Google's AdWords program to drive traffic towards
your site.
·
You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the
number of hits on your site, which can result in your site link popularity.
SEO
- Mobile
Millions of users these
days access the web using smartphones running on Android, iOS, or Windows.
Hence, it has become imperative that websites adapt themselves to this changing
environment and make suitable changes in their website design to attract more
viewership.
The desktop version of a
site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. The version that is
not mobile-friendly requires the user to pinch or zoom in order to read the
content. Users find this a frustrating experience and are likely to abandon the
site. In contrast, a mobile-friendly version is readable and immediately
usable.
A recent Google update
makes it mandatory that a website should be mobile-friendly to be effective on
Mobile Search Engines. Note that a website that is not mobile-friendly will not
have any impact on regular search engines either.
In this chapter, we will
see how to make a website mobile-friendly in order to ensure the visitors who
access the website from mobile devices have an optimized experience.
What is Mobile SEO?
Mobile Search Engine
Optimization is the process of designing a website to make it suitable for
viewing on mobile devices of different screen sizes having low bandwidth. Apart
from following all the SEO rules which are applicable to a desktop website, we
need to take additional care while designing a website for mobile devices. A
website is mobile friendly if it has the following attributes −
·
A good mobile website has a responsive design which performs well
on desktops as well as mobile devices. It not only reduces the maintenance of
the website but also makes the content consistent for the search engines.
·
The contents of a good mobile website are easy to read on a mobile
device without having to zoom the screen. It has appropriate fonts, colors, and
layouts.
·
It is easy to navigate through a good mobile website on a small
screen. It provides links and buttons that can be easily maneuvered using a
finger.
·
A good mobile website is lightweight such that it takes less
bandwidth and time to load on mobile networks.
·
The Home Page of a mobile website plays the most important role in
connecting users to the content they are looking for. Therefore, good mobile
websites make sure the most important links are displayed on the Home Page so
that they get enough visibility.
The ranking of a website
depends heavily on how user friendly it is. You can follow the guidelines given
below to design a great mobile-friendly website.
Optimize Your Site for
Mobile
If your site is already
optimized for search engines, then it should not be too difficult to optimize
it for mobile devices. First, let us understand what it takes to go mobile. We
can categorize the steps into three broad categories −
Step 1 − Select a Mobile
Configuration
Step 2 − Inform Search
Engines
Step 3 − Avoid Common
Mistakes
Select a Mobile
Configuration
There are three
different mobile configurations that you can choose from −
Step 1 − Responsive Web
Design
Step 2 − Dynamic Serving
Step 3 − Separate URLs
Each has its own
advantages and disadvantages. Google recommends responsive design, however it
supports all three configurations. The following table shows how the mobile
configuration affects your URL and HTML code −
Mobile
Configuration
|
URL
|
HTML
|
Responsive
Web Design
|
Stays
the same
|
Stays
the same
|
Dynamic
Serving
|
Stays
the same
|
Different
HTMLs
|
Separate
URLs
|
Different
URLs
|
Different
HTMLs
|
Responsive Web Design
Google recommends
responsive web design become it is the simplest mobile configuration and very
easy to implement. It serves the same HTML code on the same URL, however it
adjusts the display based on the screen size of the mobile device.
Dynamic Serving
Dynamic serving is a
type of mobile configuration where the URL of your website remains unchanged,
but it serves different HTML content when accessed from a mobile device.
When your content is
dynamically served from the server, make sure you inform Google that the
content it is crawling may look different on mobile devices. A major drawback
of this approach is that you will have to do additional processing on your
content at the server level before severing it to the user. This approach puts
unnecessary load on your server and makes it slow.
Separate URLs
When you maintain two
different URLs — one for mobile users and another for desktop users – make sure
you inform Google explicitly when to serve which version. Google does not
recommend separate URLs because it can detect automatically that your mobile
pages are different from your desktop pages.
This approach is not
practical when you have a big website because maintaining two versions of the
same website will require double the effort and money. At the same time, you
cannot avoid various discrepancies in your content while maintaining two
versions.
From the viewpoint of
SEO, each URL performs separately. Hence your desktop ranking will never be
added to the mobile ranking and they will always be assumed as separate
websites. We don’t recommend maintaining different URLs for mobile and desktop
versions if you want to draw the benefits of SEO.
Inform Search Engines
Make sure Google and
other search engines understand your mobile configuration. Most important of
all, Google must understand your page so that it can rank your website
properly. How you inform Google depends on which mobile configuration —
responsive web design, dynamic serving, or separate URLs — you have opted for.
In case your site has
a responsive design, Google’s algorithms can understand it
automatically without you having to inform Google. When you have a responsive
design, just make sure you have the following meta-tag in your webpage header −
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
The viewport decides how
your webpage will be displayed on a device. A site with responsive design
varies its size based on the size of the device screen. Declare a viewport so
that your webpage displays correctly on any device.
If your website is dynamically
served, make sure you allow Google detect your configuration using the
Vary HTTP header −
Vary: User-Agent
The Vary header
is important to tell the search engines that different content will be served
on desktops and mobile devices. This header is really important when your
content is served by any cache system like a Content Delivery Network and
those systems will make use of this header while serving content on different
devices.
In case you
maintain separate URLs, e.g., example.com and m.example.com, then
you can inform Google by adding a special link rel=alternate tag
in your desktop version and vice versa as follows.
Desktop page should have following in its header:
<link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)"
href="http://m.example.com" >
Mobile page should have following in its header:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" >
Avoid Common Mistakes
In order to optimize
your website for mobile devices, make sure you avoid committing the following
mistakes −
·
Slow Mobile Pages −
Mobile networks are slower as compared to wired Internet networks, so it is
important to pay attention to how fast your mobile pages load. It is a critical
Google ranking factor. Use a mobile SEO tool to find out your mobile page
speed. Google provides a number of good tools that you can use. Browse the
following link −https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
·
Don't Block CSS and JavaScript −
Google recommends to use inline CSS and Javascripts for mobile friendly
websites so that they can be downloaded along with the content. So if you don’t
have much CSS, then try to adjust it within the tag itself; but if you are
using a lot of CSS in separate files, then try to include it at the bottom
which will stop blocking the other content being downloaded. The same rule
applies to Javascript, which can be kept inside the page itself or included at
the bottom of the page. If you can avoid including the file at the top of the
page, then make use of async attribute while including them.
<script async type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>
·
Mobile Redirects −
Since mobile networks are normally slow, too many redirects can hurt your page
speed. If you are maintaining multiple URLs, make sure all your links point to
the relevant pages. In case you maintain multiple URLs and you recognize a user
is visiting a desktop page from a mobile device and you have an equivalent
mobile page at a different URL, then redirect the user to that URL instead of
displaying a 404 error.
·
Heavy Images −
Heavy images increase the load time, however we cannot completely get rid of
them since they are useful and effective. Therefore you should maintain a good
balance between text and heavy images. Use a good tool to optimize your images
and save them at low resolution to avoid heavy downloads.
·
Avoid plug-ins and pop-ups −
Plug-ins like Flash and Java may not be available on user’s mobile device.
Always ensure you don’t have any unplayable content on your mobile page. Avoid
using pop-ups on mobile pages because it becomes quite clumsy to close these
pop-ups on a mobile device.
While creating a mobile
page, always keep in mind that the user has limited space to work on. So, you
need to be as concise as possible while creating titles, URLs, and
meta-descriptions – of course without compromising the essence or quality of
information.
Useful Tools
Here is a list of some
useful tools that you can use to find out how mobile friendly your site is −
·
Google Webmaster Tools −
Use the available Google tools and techniques to understand what should be used
and what should be avoided while designing desktop as well as mobile websites.
·
Mobile Emulator −
It lets you see how your site appears on a wide variety of mobile devices.
·
Moz Local − Use this tool to
ensure that your local SEO is in order.
·
Responsive Web Design Testing Tool −
Use this tool to see how your responsive site looks like on a variety of mobile
devices with different standard screen sizes.
·
Screaming Frog −
This is a useful tool that allows you to analyze your site and double-check all
the redirects.
·
User Agent Switcher −
This is a Firefox add-on that you can use to find out how your site looks like
when accessed from a different user agent.
SEO
- Miscellaneous Techniques
There are various other
tips related to SEO. We have not categorized them into any special category and
hence, putting these in miscellaneous category. Go through these tips one by
one.
To-Don't List
- Don't
keep hidden text on your webpages.
- Don't
create alternate image spamming by putting wrong keywords.
- Don't
use meta tags stuffing.
- Don't
use frames and flash on your site.
- Don't
exchange your links with black listed sites.
- Don't
try to fool your site visitors by using misspelled keyword.
- Don't
send spam emails to thousands of email IDs.
- Don't
use too much graphics on your site.
- Don't
create too many doorway pages.
- Don't
try to create duplicate content of pages.
- Don't
submit your website many times in a single search engine.
- Don't
use sub-directory depth more than 1-2.
- Don't
create too many dynamic pages. Try to convert them into static pages.
- Don't
bloat your pages with code.
- Don't
nest your pages.
To-Do List
There are various other
tips which can help you to optimize your website for many search engines.
·
Create logs of pages and each page should however contain a
minimum of about 200 visible words of text to maximize relevance with Google.
·
Create a Sitemap, Help, FAQ, About Us, Link to Us, Copyright,
Disclaimer, Privacy Policy pages on mandatory basis.
·
Create a homepage link to each and every webpage and provide easy
navigation through all the pages.
·
Pay attention to your dynamic page URLs. Google can crawl and
index dynamic pages as long as you don't have more than 2 parameters in the
URL.
·
Check your complete site for broken links. Broken links will
reduce your other pages rank as well.
SEO
Techniques Summary
We have covered almost
all major concepts related to Search Engine Optimization. Now you are familiar
with most frequently used SEO related terminologies as well.
You have learnt how to
optimize keywords, title, alt, metatags, anchor, and other text from the
viewpoint of SEO. You also have learnt the importance of having good content in
your website. In the Miscellaneous Techniques chapter, we have suggested you
other important points which will help you optimize your website.
In a nutshell, we can
have the following points as the ethical strategies for achieving optimal
ranking in the search engines:
- All
pages must conform to W3C standards.
- Keyword
density is never abusive.
- Always
include: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and urllist.txt.
- Keywords
are prominent in the Title, Metatags, and Headings.
- ALT
tags and Title tags are not forgotten.
- Nomenclature
is fundamental to being indexed.
SEO
- Useful Resources
The following resources
contain additional information on SEO. Please use them to get more in-depth
knowledge on this topic.
Useful Links on SEO
·
Google Webmaster Guidelines - A list of
guidelines which will help you to optimize your site for googlebot.
·
SEO
Article from Wikipedia - A nice article on SEO from
Wikipedia. It has other useful links as well.
·
SEO
Professionals - This is is non-profit organization of search engine
marketers founded in April, 2001.
Useful Tools for SEO
·
Search Engine Spider Simulator - Check how your
site will be crawled by a search engine web crawler.
·
Keyword
Density Checker - Check your keyowrds density on your web page using this
outstanding tool.
·
Keyword
Suggestion Tool - A tool from google which suggest you various keywords when
you type a word.
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