SEO Tutorial
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the activity of
optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine
friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.
This tutorial will teach you simple SEO techniques to
improve visibility of your web pages for different search engines specially for
Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Audience
This tutorial has been prepared for the beginners to help
them understand simple but effective SEO characteristics. After completing this
tutorial you will find yourself at a moderate level of expertise in using
simple but effective SEO techniques from where you can take yourself to next
levels.
Prerequisites
We assume you are aware of simple web technologies like
HTML, XHTML, Style Sheet etc. If you already have developed any website then it
is an added advantage and it will help you understand SEO concepts very easily.
Table of Contents
SEO Tutorial
Audience
Prerequisites
Copyright &
Disclaimer Notice
What is SEO?
How Search Engine
Works?
What is SEO
Copywriting?
What is Search
Engine Rank?
What is on-page
and off-page SEO?
SEO Tactics and
Methods
White Hat SEO
Black Hat or
Spamdexing
SEO Website Domain
Guru Mantra
SEO Relevant
Filename
File Naming Style
File Name Example
File Extension
URL Sub-Directory
Name
Guru Mantra
SEO Design &
Layout
SEO Optimized
Keywords
Keyword Frequency
Keyword Weight
Keyword Proximity
Keyword Prominence
Keyword Placement
Best Places to Put
Keywords
Finding Keywords
What is Word
Stemming?
SEO Optimized Meta
tags
What do the Meta
Tags Look Like?
Meta Description
Tag Tips
Meta Keywords Tag
Tips
Robots Meta Tag
SEO Title
Optimization
Best Practices for
Creating Titles
SEO Optimized
Anchors
Content Is The
King
Unique,
High-Quality Content
SEO Content
Writing ( Copy Writing )
Other advantages
of having great content
Conclusion
XHTML Verification
for Web Site
Why HTML/XHTML
Verification is Required?
What Is W3C
Compliance?
Rules for W3C
Compliance
SEO Expert Hiring
Choosing a SEO
Expert or Company
SEO Link Building
How to increase
Link Popularity?
Miscellaneous
Techniques
Don't do the
followings
Do the followings
SEO Summary
What is SEO?
SEO is the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites
in order to make them more search engine friendly, thus getting higher
positions in search results.
SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most
of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with
text.
•
SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization.
•
SEO is all about optimizing a web site for Search Engines.
•
SEO is the process of designing and developing a web site to rank well
in search engine results.
•
SEO is to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from
search engines.
•
SEO is a subset of search engine marketing.
•
SEO is the art of ranking in the search engines.
•
SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what
human visitors might search.
If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you
understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.
How Search Engine
Works?
Search engines perform several activities in order to
deliver search results
• Crawling - is the
process of fetching all the web pages linked to a web site. This task is
performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the
case with Google).
• Indexing - is the
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 - Since it is likely that more than one pages 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 engines' 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 the 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.
As well as the viewable text, SEO Copywriting usually
optimizes other on-page elements for the targeted search terms. These include
the Title, Description and Keywords tags, headings and alt 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 then 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 Search
engine is putting your web page on first position then your web page rank will
be number 1 and it will be assumed as with a high rank.
SEO is the process of designing and developing a web site to
attend a high rank in search engine results.
What is on-page
and off-page SEO?
Conceptually, there are two ways of doing SEO
• On-Page SEO- This
includes providing good content, good keywords selection,putting keywords on
correct places, giving appropriate title to every page etc.
• Off-Page SEO -
This includes link building, increasing link popularity by submitting in open
directories, search engines, link exchange etc.
SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:
1. Techniques that search engines
recommend as part of good design referred to as White Hat SEO, and
2. Techniques that search engines
do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect of referred to as Black Hat
or spamdexing.
White Hat SEO
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as White
Hat if it follows the followings
•
If it conforms to the search engine's guidelines.
•
If it does not involves 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 the good quality of the web pages
•
It ensures the useful content available on the web pages
Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and don't try to fool
your site visitors. Be honest and definitely you will get something more.
Black Hat or
Spamdexing
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as Black
Hat or Spamdexing if it follows the followings
•
Try to improve rankings that are disapproved of 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 Meta tags, and using keywords that are
unrelated to the site's content. This is called Meta tag 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 key words and
phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages
•
Mirror web sites by hosting multiple web sites all with conceptually similar
content but using different URLs.
•
Creating a rogue copy of a popular web site which shows contents similar
to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or
malicious web sites. This is called Page hijacking.
Always be away to adopt any of the above Black Hat tactic to
improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all
the above proprieties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get
anything.
SEO Website Domain
When you start thinking of doing a business through
internet, first thing which you think about is your web site domain name.
Before you choose a domain name you should consider the followings
•
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 than everything
else that is already on 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 give 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 Using your keywords in get keyword rich
descriptive inbound links.
Avoid buying long, and confusing domain names. May people
separate the words in their domain names using either dashes or hyphen. In the
past the domain name itself was a significant ranking factor but now search
engines have advanced it is not very significant factor anymore.
Keep two to three words in your domain name it will be more
memorable. Some of the most emorable websites do a great job of branding by
creating their own word. Few examples are eBay, Yahoo!, Expedia, Slashdot,
Fark, Wikipedia, Google...
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 about
what you sell.
Guru Mantra
Finally, you should be able to answer yourself for 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 you intend to sell to them?
•
List 5 - 10 websites which you thing, they are they amazing. Now think
why are they amazing?
•
Create 5 different domain names. Make at least 1 of them funny. Tell
them to a half 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 which is more catchy, memorable and relevant to
your business
SEO Relevant
Filename
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 I did 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 are
going to 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. So it simply
proves that your file name should have appropriate keyword.
File Naming Style
•
The filename should preferably be short and descriptive. It’s always
good to use same keywords in file name as well as in page title.
•
Don't use file names like service.htm or job.htm but use actual service
name in your file name like computer-repairing.htm
•
Don't use more than 3-4 words in file name and separate them with
hyphens rather than underscores. Try to use 2 keywords if possible.
File Name Example
Here are some file names which should be preferred from SEO
as well as from user point of view.
•
slazenger-brand-balls.html
•
wimbledon-brand-balls.html
•
wilson-brand-balls.html
Notice that keywords are separated by hyphens rather than
underscores. Google sees file names as follows:
seo-relevant-filename as seo relevant filename(good)
But Google sees
seo_relevant_filename as seorelevantfilename (not good)
File Extension
It should be noticed that .html, .htm and .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
visitors. In effect you are asking them to tell your webserver HOW to produce
the page, not which one?
Many Web masters think that it’s 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 try giving any keyword in any search and
you will not find any sub-directory name matching with your keywords. But from
user point of view you should keep very much abbreviated sub-directory name.
Guru Mantra
Finally, I will suggest to keep the following points in mind
before naming your files:
•
Use web page file name short, simple, descriptive and relevant to page
content.
•
Try to use maximum 3-4 keywords in your file name and these keywords
should be appeared in your web page title as well.
•
Separate all keyword with hyphen rather than with underscore.
•
Keep your sub directories name as shorter as possible.
•
Keep the file size fewer than 101K though because Google chops almost everything
above that.
SEO Design & Layout
A web site design and layout gives first impression about
your site. There are sites which are too fancy and regular net surfers will
just reach on those sites and will come out even without creating a single
click.
Search Engines are very smart but after all they are
software and not human being who will read the content of their interest. If
you make your site too complicated then Search Engine would not be able to
parse the content of your site properly and finally indexing would not be
efficient which will result 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%. 10% works for me.
Here are few guidelines which should be considered 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 uses 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.
• Nothing that does
not fit perfectly into the page topic; There should be no doubt in the search
engine's mind (or in he user's mind) what your page is about.
• 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
We are discussing everything in Web context so in web
terminology a keyword is a term that a person enters into a search engine to
find specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consists of
between two and five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword
phrases, query phrases, or just keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and
descriptive.
There are following concepts related to Keywords which helps
in optimizing keywords on a web page.
Keyword Frequency:
This is calculated as how often does a keyword appear in a
site's title or description. You don't want to go overboard with frequency,
however, since on some engines if you repeat a word too many times, you'll 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 META tags.
Keyword Weight:
This 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 when determining the rank of your Web site for a
particular keyword search.
One technique that often works well is to create some
smaller pages, generally just a paragraph long, which emphasize a particular
keyword. By keeping the overall number of words to a minimum, you will increase
the "weight" of the keyword you are emphasizing.
Keyword Proximity:
This 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:
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 contained in the URL or site address, e.g.,
http://www.keyword.com/keywordkeyword.htm.
Finding Keywords:
There are many different ways to find keywords for your
website. Some good keyword ideas are:
• Words people would
search for to find your product or service.
• Problems your
prospective customers may be trying to solve with your product or service.
• Keyword tags on
competitors websites.
• Visible page copy
on competitors websites.
• Related search
suggestions on top search engines.
• By using an online
tools like: Google Keyword Tool
• 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 word stemming. Word stemming 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
will pages that are optimized for that phrase be returned, but so will pages
that contain all variations of that phrase, for example: "house
plan", "house planning", "house planer".
Hope you have some understanding on keywords and how to
identify them and where to use them. Next chapter will explain you how to
optimize Meta tags for better results.
SEO Optimized Meta tags
There are two important Meta Tags and they are the meta
description and meta keyword tags. Some search engines may display the meta
description as part of the search results, but the meta keywords tags should
not appear in search results.
The general consensus among SEO experts is that meta tags
are dead. Even so, many of these same experts continue to use meta tags in
their own sites.
For Google adding the Description Meta Tag won't 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. So it makes sense to add one for
Yahoo and any other minor search engines that still use.
What do the Meta Tags Look Like?
You can add 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:
There are few 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 meta tag
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:
There are few important tips for good meta keywords tags.
Please refer to previous chapter on identifying good keyword.
•
Use synonyms
•
Use unique keywords
•
No need to repeat any given phrase.
•
You can repeat any word an unlimited amount of time as long as each time
it is part of a different phrase.
Robots Meta Tag:
The important Meta Tag that you may need sometime is the
Robots Meta Tag which looks like this:
<meta name="robots"
content="noindex,nofollow">
Using above meta tag you can tell to a spider or robot that
you do not want some of your pages indexed or that you do not want your links
followed.
SEO Title Optimization
Hope you understand the meaning of HTML TITLE tag which is
put inside 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 web page 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 home page. If you do
nothing else to optimize your site, remember to do this!
The title shouldn't consist of much more than about 9 words
or 60 characters, with your keywords used at the very beginning of the title.
Since Google is looking for relevant keywords in the title, this means you
should NOT include your company name in the title unless your company name is
very well known.
Improper or nonexistent use of titles in web pages will keep
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.
•
Don't overdo it - don't repeat your keywords more than 2 - 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 to find by Google.
SEO Optimized Anchors
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>
Here are following important points to notice about anchors:
•
The Anchor Title plays a very important roles and will be seen by most
of the search engines. So your anchor title should have appropriate keywords.
Anchor title will help 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 will be used not only of search engines but also for the
navigation purpose. You should try to use best keywords in your anchor text.
•
The otherpage.htm is the link to another web page. This link could be to
external site. But here care should be taken that this web page should exist
otherwise it will be called a broken link and broken links give very bad
impression to Search Engines as we as to site vistors.
Another example of 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 anchor text it should be checked that you have
put alt tag properly. An image alt tag should have appropriate keywords.
Content Is The King
Content is basically includes what you see on the site: the
text, graphics and even links to outside world. I would condemn using excessive
graphics because they are not Search Engine Friendly plus users feel irritation
when they get downloaded specially over a slow network.
Thousands of articles, books and forum entries detail how to
make your site search engine friendly, but ultimately, one rule stands above
the rest: Content is king. But I will say this rule is past now and I would
like to say 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.
A relevant, fresh, and timely content is crucial to
attracting and keeping visitors to your web pages. It will help you both draw
traffic from search engines and create audience loyalty.
Unique, High-Quality Content:
When people visit a Web site 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. Its 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. So while raking a
page against other then it matters how rich content is available on a page.
Sites with duplicated, syndicated or free content, who 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 web page content 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-catchers, compelling your visitors to read
on and want what you have to offer in your website.
•
Don't use confusing and complex language. Use small statements to make
your content more understandable.
•
Keep your web pages short and don't put all the content on a single
page.
•
Divide your web page content also into short paragraphs.
Other advantages of having great content:
It’s not only SEO you have to think about, but also many
factors will make your site popular.
•
If your site is having something really unique then people would like to
suggest it to their friends.
•
Other webmasters would like to create a link of your site on their sites
•
Your site visitors will start trusting on your site and they will look
forward for the next content and will keep coming again and again.
•
Assuming you have been listed out by any Search Engine but net surfer
will click only that page whose content snippet would look more unique and
interesting.
Conclusion:
Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content
is difficult and time consuming. But in the end Golden rule of SEO is that
Content is the King. It’s not just because of a Search Engine but it’s 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 going a serious thought. Keep
your title, keywords, link text, meta tags up-to-date and unique and
interesting. I am sure you will win.TUTORIALS POINT
XHTML Verification for Web Site
You design and develop a web site but how would you know if
you have put all the HTML syntax in correct way. Almost all browser don't
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 I will tell you various reasons why your site should be W3C Compliance.
Why HTML/XHTML Verification is Required?
There are various reasons to verify your web page before
hosting it over the internet.
•
Any web page quality depends on how well you have written your web page.
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 your 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 web page but then have been depreciated and many of
the search engines also don't support them.
•
Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always appreciated
by good Webmasters.
What Is W3C Compliance?
The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and since 1994 the
W3C has provided the guidelines by which websites and web pages should be
structured and created. Here are the links to validate your web pages:
•
Validate HTML/XHTML File against W3C Standard HTML/XHTML Validator.
•
Validate CSS File against W3C Standard CSS Validator.
While doing verification you will 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 are following rules which you should keep in your mind
while writing your web pages.
•
Use the 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 quote.
•
Tags may not 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 can not be inside another <form> tag.
•
If your code contains a &, it must be written as &.
•
Any use of CSS should use all lower case lettering.
SEO Expert Hiring
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 better choice is to hire an SEO expert.
There are following tasks which should be taken care by SEO experts
•
Code validation and clean up - Ensure that code is SE Friendly and
standards compliant.
•
Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure URL's 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 - Build optimized pages around terms discovered
through keyword research.
•
Off Page Optimization - Blogs, Press Releases, Article Submissions
If you are confident that you have the required skills then
you can take care of doing all the above activities otherwise its worth taking
help from SEO Companies or to hire any SEO Specialist.
Choosing a SEO Expert or Company:
This is most difficult part to choose a correct SEO Expert
or SEO Company. But we are giving you few guidelines which can help you for the
same.
•
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.
•
Don't go for SEO companies doing automated submission etc.
•
Don't go for SEO companies doing Balk Hat tricks.
•
Don't look for cheap SEO because of some pennies you can loss more. 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.
•
Don't go just because of their fancy site and good article available on
their site.
•
Don't go testimonials available on their sites.
I can not list out all the factors here because there may be
different situations and different views. So 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 web sites to your own to improve both direct referrals ie. people
clicking on the links and search engine ranking. Link building is all about
increasing your site link popularity.
Web site Crawler will go to a site again and again whose
ranking in 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 web site
then you have 99.99% chances that you site will be indexed with-in 24Hrs.
How to increase Link Popularity?
There are various ways of increasing your web site link
popularity. I'm listing out some important tips which are easily doable.
•
Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Don't go for
automated submission.
•
Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org,
yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories will give your site a boost in
link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
•
Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to your site
if you have what they want and no where is available.
•
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 Program. 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 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 etc. Before submitting
please go through their spam policy.
•
Write good articles in blogging sites and give few references of your
links with-in that article.
•
Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep them busy
on your site. If possible create forums, news letters, blogs etc.
There are other ways but you need to spend some dollars to
go for such alternative.
•
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 will result in your site link popularity.
Miscellaneous Techniques
There are various other tips related to SEO. I have not
categorized them into any special category so putting in misc. category. Go
through these tips one by one
Don't do the followings:
•
Don't keep hidden text on your web pages.
•
Don't create alt 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 miss spelled keyword.
•
Don't send spam emails to thousand 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.
Do the followings:
There are various other tips which can help you to optimize
your web site 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 home page link to each and every web page 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 Summary
This is the end of this tutorial and I hope now you have a
good knowledge and at least you would need any other help to optimize your web
site.
We have covered almost all major concepts related to Search
Engine Optimization. Now you are familiar with most frequently used SEO related
terminology as well.
You have learnt how to optimize keywords, title, alt, meta
tags, anchor and other text from SEO point of view. You also have learnt
importance of having good content in your web site and in Miscellaneous
Techniques chapter we have suggested you other important points which will help
you to optimize your web site
So in brief ethical strategies for achieving optimal ranking
in the search engines are:
•
All Pages Must Conform with W3C Standards
•
Keyword Density is Never Abusive
•
Always Include: Robots.txt, Sitemap.xml, & Urllist.txt
•
Keywords are Prominent in the Title, META tags, & Headings
•
ALT Tags and Title Tags are Not Forgotten
•
Nomenclature is Fundamental to Being Indexed
Source : http://www.tutorialspoint.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment