Intro to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. If you have a website or a blog, you should care about SEO.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your web site or blog optimized for search engines. It means getting your site to show up when you do a search in Google, and getting your site to show up as high as possible relative to similar sites.
How is a site optimized? Several factors are taken into account by search engines: incoming links, code, keywords, content.
Let’s start with code. You want to make sure your site has a DOC type tag at the top. Look in your source code to see if it’s there. In Firefox, your source code is in the View menu under ‘Page Source.’ In general, you can check your code by validating the code. A great validator tool: http://validator.w3.org/
Keywords: What are users putting in search engines to find your website or blog post? For example, to find my post on Twitter chats, perhaps someone searched for “Twitter chats.” Make sure that keyword is in your <title> tag and, if you are using a meta description tag, in that tag, too. But search engines do not like duplication, so if you have multiple posts on say, Twitter chats, use different titles and descriptions for each post. Think of related keywords, such as Tweet Chats or Connecting on Twitter. A thesaurus might be able to help you come up with ideas, as might a search on Google.
Incoming Links: Who links to you? The term is called link popularity. It’s not just having any old page linking to your post or page, it’s posts with higher ranking than yours and relevant material linking to yours. If you want to find out who is linking to you, type: ‘link: yourdomainname’ into Google. For example: link: www.leoraw.com
Meta Tags and Title Tags: Once again, these are found in your source code. A title tag looks like this <title>. Meta tags related to SEO are description tags and keyword tags. You want to fill these with words that are unique to each page. Your site will be penalized if you have the same title or description throughout your site.
Navigation: Search engines need to be able to crawl your site. They can’t crawl Javascript or Flash menus. So some sites, although looking “professional,” are a bit of a disaster when it comes to search engines. Why bother putting up a website if no one can find it? If you do have fancy links that search engines can’t read, you might just need a side bar or footer with simple links for search engines to navigate.
Content: I put this last, but really, Content is King. If your content is rich, then people will want to read. Search engines love varied language. They can’t (yet) read Flash or imagery, but they can tell when text is varied and distinct. Remember that writing for the web is different than for print; keep it brief but keyword-rich.
Want more?
- The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog
- Search Engine Optimization for WordPress
- Google SEO Starter Guide
- 10 Factors determining SEO value of backlinks & How to find them with a Backlink Checker
- 5 SEO Posts You Need to Read
- Outbound Links – An Endangered Species? [And Why I Still Link Up]
- Natural Link Building : Create an Online Presence and Linkable Brand
- Approaches to SEO: Incoming Links, Page Optimization and Great Content
Questions? Suggestions? Experiences to relate on this topic?
Update: two commentators mentioned two more aspects of SEO: XML Sitemaps and Internal Linking.
Themocracy
Was searching for new SEO innovations when I found this one. Interesting, but do you think it has a long shelf life?
There are continually changes on the web. I can’t predict what will happen tomorrow. No crystal ball here.
im a newbie in Search Engine Optimization and i still need to study more on internal linking. Currently, what i do to optimize my website is just make as many backlinks as possible.
Marvin, one can continually study SEO and add improvements to one’s site. I plan to write more about ways to optimize a site.
Some useful advice here Leora, well done on managing to write technical details in a way that non technichal people will understand. Marvin, internal linking is an important factor also and is worth looking into.
the most important thing when doing search engine optimization is get a good amount of backlinks first. when you have a sufficient amount of backlinks, then you can start optimizing in page links, keyword density and other factors which affects your ranking.
Ken, and looks like you and others are working on your backlinks by commenting on this post! Thanks for contributing.
Oh, and I would say the most important thing is great content. If you have really great content, you will get the backlinks.
Thanks for putting up this great post Leora! Apart from all the points mentioned above, it is also beneficial to have an XML sitemap submitted to search engines via their webmaster tools account. By this I have noticed that pages start to get indexed quicker.
Thanks for mentioning XML sitemaps. I updated the tail end of the post with XML sitemaps and internal linking.
XML Sitemaps are easy to create in WordPress (or in Joomla!) and are updated automatically. For my pages that are not in WordPress, I find it a chore to update the XML. Another reason to choose a good CMS.
Some good points in this article. Encouraging to see information actually worthy of browsing. Keep up the endeavours…
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Hi again
Looking over the list I would also mention header tags. It is important to try and use the keywords in the tag. This tells the search engines the term is improtant and relevant. I would also try to vary this a bit from the title tag.
Hope this helps.
Navaro, good point. The whole category of header tags, keywords and meta tags (and also what words you use in links) is called Page Optimization. So I could expand on that more in this post (but I will leave it and let one explore more in depth posts).
“vary this a bit from the title tag” – another good point – should one vary the header tag from the title tag slightly? Hmm.
that’s a great list. and remember if you are using a wordpress blog like so many of are these days there are some great plugins to take care of this lot. my favourite seo plugin is seo platimum (just do a google search for it, it’s free!)
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Glad you like the list. I haven’t tried SEO platinum – I’ll have to check it out. I find even with the SEO plugin, if the client isn’t educated about SEO, they may not know why they need to complete any “extra” fields for SEO.
Those are all good points. Thanks for sharing them.
I would say also writing a small “bait” application might help.
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Thanks for sharing your knowledge and ideas on SEO. Its of great help.