Search Engine Optimization

    In Chapter 4: Search Engine Optimization, get the lowdown on the essence of SEO. Learn about the elements that constitute a site that has been optimized for search engines. From meta tags, keyword research, content creation, and more, you will find out how you can make use of each element to the benefit of your website.

  • Search Engine Optimization
    • SEO Process
    • On Page Optimization Factors

       

      Page Title, Meta Keywords and Description, Anchor Text,  Comment Tags, Headlines (H1, H2…. Sub titles etc),  Content Optimization,Keyword Research (Types of keywords, Stop words), Alt IMG Attribute, Need for Outbound Links, Internal Linking,Landing Pages, Robots.txt file

    • Off Page Optimization Factors

       

      Backlinks (Link Popularity), Link Building / Link Baiting / Link Campaign, Social Book marking, 301 and 302 redirects

    • Dynamic Page Optimization
    • Ecommerce Websites SEO
    • Local Search Engine Optimization
    • SEO for blogs
    • PDF Optimization
    • Long Term SEO

On Page Optimization Factors

    These are On Page Optimization factors or elements on your website that you can alter to make it more SEO friendly. Perhaps you already have these on your site, and they just need to be tweaked a little. Or maybe some of these elements are completely absent in your site, and you need to implement them right away.

    If you are unfamiliar with how to use HTML codes, be sure you check out the links listed in this e-book for sites that offer easy to follow tutorials.

Page Title

    It has always been stressed why the page title can make a big difference if you want your site to be SEO friendly or not. Since it is found at the top of the page, the spiders that crawl on your source code or HTML code can easily grab the keywords you have on your page title.

    Where is the page title again, you may ask? It is located on the title bar, the topmost portion of your window. Depending on your web browser, your title bar may indicate “Mozilla FireFox”, “Microsoft Internet Explorer”, or “Netscape Navigator.”

    How does the page title look like in code? They are denoted by the tags <title> and </title>. You can look at them when you click on “View” on your web browser and select “Source.”

    For example, if you go to the home page of a site that sells leather baby shoes, the title code may look a little something like this:

<title> Leather Baby Shoes – Microsoft Internet Explorer </title>

    Now, if you have been doing your homework and your keyword research well, you should be able to choose the best ones to use in your page title. For example, “leather baby shoes” may sound good, but “affordable leather baby shoes” may fare even better.

    Here is a note: be sure your page title is less than 50 characters, and should make sense. Create a page title that accurately describes what you have to offer, not only for the sake of getting keywords in. Also, be sure you change the page title for every page in your site as applicable.

Meta Keywords and Description

    Meta keywords are and Meta descriptions are types of tags that you include within your HTML code. This makes it easier for spiders and bots to grab your site. If keywords are food for spiders, then meta keywords make them tastier spider and crawler food.

    How do you use meta keywords? You can usually include this at the start of your page, which is termed as the head. The HTML tags and code for the page title are found here.

    Meta descriptions are very important in the displaying of search engine results. If you set a meta description for every page on your site, that will appear as a short summary or description on the contents of your site as seen on Yahoo or MSN results pages.

Here is an example for a site that sells leather baby shoes.

<head>
<title> Leather Baby Shoes </title>
<meta name= “description” content= “Find the best deals on the most stylish and most adorable leather baby shoes.”>
<meta name= “keywords” content= “baby leather shoes, leather baby shoes, buy baby leather shoes”>
</head>

    Again, you should already have done your keyword research beforehand. If you are to use the abovementioned keywords in your meta keywords and meta description, be sure those are also found in your content.

Anchor Text

    The anchor text can be found and can be set through your HTML code. When you see a hyperlink on a web page, the words that are used to label that link are defined as the anchor text, and they can be very helpful when you want to perform SEO.

    Here is an example of how anchor text will look like for the home page of a site that sells baby leather shoes, as in the previous example.

<a href= “http://www.babyshoesonline.com” > Baby Shoes Main </a>

    In this regard, “Baby Shoes Main” serves as your anchor text. If you are very familiar with the top keywords for your niche, or against your competition, then you should know what words or phrases to include in your anchor text.

    Also, sources explain that Google is able to determine page rank by the anchor text used in the links. In a way, a user informs Google about why a page should be made popular because of how interesting and relevant the anchor text can be.

Comment Tags

    Comment tags are not seen by the visitor on the regular web page, but can be viewed if the user invokes the “View” menu on his web browser, then selects “Source”. After which, the user will be shown a “notepad” type of window, showing the HTML codes for all the elements of the page.

    Why use them if the user can’t see the comment tags anyway? For more practical purposes, comment tags assist the web designer or web developer while he is writing out the HTML code for the site.

    Comment tags can inform the designer which parts of the code define what aspects of the page. For example, when he looks at the jumbles of codes on the HTML source, he will easily find that lines of codes that are for the left hand portion of the screen, simply by looking at the comment tags.

Here is an example of a comment tag that can be included in the HTML code:

<! - - This page is for the white and black baby shoes -- >
<title> White and Black Baby Shoes </title>

    In the above example, the keywords are “black and white baby shoes” and are included in both the comment tag and the page title. In this regard, the spider that crawls the HTML code for the page catches the keyword or key phrase more than once.

Headlines (H1, H2…. Sub titles etc)

    Headings on web pages, just like in Microsoft Word documents define important points or topics on your page. Headlines are found at the start of your HTML code, after the page title tag.

    Headlines are important for SEO because since they belong at the beginning of your HTML code, the spiders can crawl them easily, so you better know how to make these parts of your page keyword rich, according to your keyword research.

    The tags used to define headlines in code are numbered from <h1> to <h6>. Below is an example of how the code of headlines can look like for an entertainment news page:

<h1>Hottest Entertainment News Online</h1>
<h2>Pirates of the Caribbean Passes $100M Mark</h2>
<h3>The swashbuckling movie starring Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom made more than $100M in the box office on its opening weekend.</h3>

    When using <h1> to <h6> tags, keep in mind that your keywords should be included. Always remember to provide as much spider food for the bots as possible.

Content Optimization

    Most SEO efforts are set on targeting the content. Since content is made up of text, you should be able to know how to present them in such a way that spiders, crawlers, or bots, can easily find them and index your page.

    Always remember how valuable keywords are. Your niche, or whatever field you and your site represent, can have a keyword pool that is highly competitive. That means, more than one site will be using such keywords to optimize their pages.

    How you compose the sentences in your content are important in keeping your visitors happy and so they will be more than willing to stay and check out your site.

    As mentioned in chapter 3, there are many methods of integrating keywords sensibly into sentences. Keyword richness and keyword density should be observed.

    Note that Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all other search engines follow guidelines regarding keyword usage. If a site uses too many keywords, or places them in the wrong spots on the site, that site may be penalized or banned from the lists.

Keyword Research

    Research for the most popular and the most effective keywords should be done one a regular basis. Note that a hot keyword this week may not be as popular in the following week. Yahoo and Google, among many other sources, provide free tools that help you determine what keywords can be used on your site.

Types of keywords

    Sources on SEO and web hosting classified the types of keywords in three general categories: Single word keywords, multiple word keywords, and keywords based on theme.

    The first two types are already easy to define. The third type is also termed as conceptual keywords, and is useful for websites that offer informative content over a topic with many related topics. So if the site is about cancer, then the conceptual keywords may be “lung cancer”, “breast cancer”, “colon cancer”, and others.

Stop words

    These words serve as “red lights” for search engine crawlers. It means that when they encounter these in your site, they will leave and go elsewhere. In some definitions, they are not included when indexing or when displaying search results. Examples of these words are:
And, but, or, can’t, don’t, always, with, accordingly, become, from …

Alt IMG Attribute

    When you go to a website that has lots of graphics and photos, you should try doing a mouse over on one of the images. If a small line of text appears, giving a brief caption or explanation on the picture, then that is called the Alt IMG attribute.

    Alt IMG attributes are very helpful for SEO, as this presents even more room for inserting keywords into your HTML code, without sacrificing keyword density.

    Furthermore, adding Alt IMG to your photos and graphics make your site more user-friendly and your content more easily understood, especially if you don’t have time to write captions for each picture.

    Take for example the baby leather shoes site, with photos of white leather shoes and black leather shoes. The code for the Alt IMG will look something like this:

<img src= “whiteshoe1.jpg” alt= “White leather shoes with silver buckle”>
<img src= “whiteshoe2.jpg” alt= “White leather shoes with black stripes”>

    Be sure you integrate as much keywords as possible. Do the proper research as well.

Need for Outbound Links

    Outbound links, according to the list of SEO terminology as seen in previous chapters, are links that are pointed to other sites apart from your own. Spiders that crawl a page are directed to other websites through the outbound links they find on a page.

    When you do SEO, outbound links are important, not only for you, but also for your partner site who is most likely reciprocating by including your link in his site.

    The outbound links you will include in your site should have anchor text and meta tags that are keyword rich. In this way, indexing becomes more effective.

    Many SEO experts explain that having outbound links on every page may be a healthy practice for SEO. Not having any links that point elsewhere maybe indicative of pages that are dead ends, and that is a no-no if you want spiders to continuously crawl your site.

Internal Linking

    Internal links are links that you place on your site that direct the visitor to pages within that same site. Placing internal links is important in allowing a user to navigate through your website, so he can gather information, as well as complete transactions like registrations, purchases, and others.

    How important is internal linking when it comes to SEO? As you may know, whenever a spider crawls your site, it follows the links it finds on that page. The spider enters that page, crawls it, and follows and links that are found there.

    Here is one way to improve on your internal linking and make your site more SEO friendly. For example, your website talks about baby shoes. If your visitor was on another page and wants to link back to the main page, you should use “baby shoes home” or “baby shoes main” as the text for your link, instead of simply using “home” or “main”.

    Furthermore, internal linking does not necessarily mean that you must have a link that points to every page from your home page. You can minimize the problem of link crowding by creating main categories with corresponding sub-categories for your other pages

Landing Pages

    After a user types in a search query on Google, he is presented with a list of the top ranking sites that are most relevant to his keywords. When he has selected a site that seems interesting enough to click on, he becomes directed to the landing page. A landing page can be any page belonging to a website.

    The landing page, in simple terms, is defined as the first page that the user sees upon clicking on a link he found from the search engine results page. So if you want to optimize your site and leave an impression on your target visitors, be sure that the landing page makes an impact and says as much as it can about your site.

    If you’re after prospective clients through SEO, your landing page should encourage the visitors to do the following: browse around your site, sign up for important updates, send in comments or queries, or even make purchases.

    You should optimize your landing page by using the same techniques as in general website SEO. You should use relevant keywords, have an efficient navigation menu, have content that is clear and informative, as well as an overall site design that speaks well of your company.

    Along with this, you should remember to add links from your landing page, so that the visitor may be directed to the home page to learn more.

Robots.txt file

    As mentioned in chapter 2, the Robots.txt file helps guide spiders along their way as they crawl through the pages of your site. Because web search engines are strict on heavy or excessive usage of keywords, they have made their bots smarter.

    Spiders or bots will tend to ignore a site that has repetitive content, or in SEO terms, redundancy. In some cases, your site will not be indexed at all.

    If your site should show similar content on all pages, such as similar products or related products, you can still display them and avoid the redundancy penalty imposed by spiders.

    Using the robots.txt file lets the spider know that this portion of the page should not be indexed, as it already appears in other pages. The parameters for the exclusion or disallow options for the robots.txt file are all defined by the web designer through the HTML code.