Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) defined as the skill to create inspiring and engaging content that is optimized for search engines

In this post, we’ll be exploring various ways to increase the ranking of your content through search engines and how to make it appeal to your readers at the same time. Like the saying goes, you should be creating content for your readers and not Google (the search engines).

Getting Started

If you’ve never thought about SEO before, now is your time to get started. The first step is to rethink abut each post you publish. More blogs are already ready for some of the topics that will be discussed as the themes that you use are using proper titles. Secondly, CSS coding is used rather than HTML to form the theme layout, so this is better for SEO.

Should you have hundreds of posts already published, it probably isn’t a good idea to go through each and perform the tasks, but from this point forward, it would be a good idea to do so.

Post Titles

A large portion of getting your site optimized for search engines is having titles that are able to draw in visitors and give you a higher ranking for the keywords found in the title or the post. Ideally, the title should tell something about the content within the post. For example, while a title might be attractive and make readers want to click on it, it probably won’t do as well within search engines because you aren’t targeting the right keywords.

If you are given access to configuring the slug URL (making it more “pretty,” not using numbers or other sequences), the ability to edit the permalink, or the meta tags/keywords for the post, you should add keywords related to the post or that may increase the flow of visitors to your site.

Meta Tags

Within the coding of your site, there will be an area to place meta tags, which are essentially the top keywords that should point to your site. For example, a blog that writes about blog tips could contain words such as blogging tips, blogging basics, writing, or any other words that relate to the content. It appears that this method is being used less and less, due to the fact that most blog platforms support the emphasis of categories and tags, however it never hurts to add these words into your header.

Heading Tags

Posts that are greater than approximately four hundred words should be divided into various sections for readability. Despite the fact that this adds time compared to using shortcuts for the bold, emphasis, and other tags, it can be extremely worthwhile in the long-term.

You should use heading tags wisely. Don’t place too much emphasis on what shouldn’t be ranked highly in search engines. For example, a common mistake is placing unnecessary content such as the post date or any other content under the H1 tag. There are some criticisms of what title the H1 and H2 tags should use. Theoretically, much like a pyramid, your site’s title should be in a H1 tag on the main page (making it easier for searchers to find your main page) and other titles on the index page should be placed within H2 tags.

On single post pages, the post title should be placed in a H1 tag (unless you prefer to keep your post title in this tag) and any additional content, such as a listing of post titles, should be contained within H2 tags. Sub-titles should use H3 (or H2 tags depending on your preference) and any further sub-content should proceed with H4 and beyond.

Furthermore, consistency is key. Having one post rank highly and others rank on much lower because you haven’t committed to a single set of rules won’t do you any good if you are trying to “outrank” other blogs with the same content.

Bold Text

When you bold a word, it is meant to stand out against other content. To search engines, this signifies text that should be given more importance than text that isn’t. It should be reserved to words within your content, rather than headings and separated words.

Italic Text

Some believe that using italic text for keywords helps, although it might start becoming obvious to your readers should you overdo this – it becomes apparent to your readers quite quickly that you are trying to write for search engines.

Page Validation

Having your site’s coding conform to W3C Standards can help increase your chance of having higher-ranking pages, as your blog will be more accessible and without errors, which search engines view negatively. This is an advanced step and doesn’t need to be done by all blogs, although it certainly should be kept in mind.

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Welcome to Krishaweb’s introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), optimizing design, and how to maximize your websites search engine positioning for the major search engines.

When it comes to running an effective website that ranks well on the search engine results pages (SERPs), there are three major factors that can influence the number of search engine referrals (incoming searches) you get. This applies to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live).

Content Is King

The most important thing is the content on your page regardless of how much time you put into Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) for your website without the content people are searching for you will find very little return on your efforts.

Involved with the preparation of your content is analyzing the keyword(s) for your given industry. Just putting Keywords in the keywords meta tag will get you no where without those Keywords existing in your content. This is known as Keyword Density, basically the more often you’re keywords the more relevant your content is for the searcher in the eyes of a search engine. Keep in mind an ideal density is around 3.5% per word in you phrase.

When writing your Search Engine Optimized content don’t forget about the end user. If you can’t get your keyword densities bang on, then don’t worry about it. I prefer to have a lower density but higher quality content for the end user, than having spammy content and a lower conversion rate. The end goal is still to convert your visitors to your products, services, or whatever your goal may be. Users, unlike search engines, are not interested in Keyword Density so beware of keyword spam.

And a final note on Content for this introduction is that it is advisable to constantly update your content. The longer your content goes without updates, the staler the content gets, and the lower your search engine positioning will drop. However with enough Link Building this can be negated.

Link Building Your Way Too Success

Link building is easily the second most important factor in SEO, and in some cases the most. Building links into your website is the only way as a webmaster that you can affect the authority of your website, and the value your existing content may have in the eyes of the search engines.

To conceptualize link building think of your website as if it was a person. The more popular a person is the more authoritative what they have to say is to their target audience. The big difference being that our target audience is Google, and the other major search engines, and having quality links on other sites equates to your websites “popularity”.

Now keep in mind when you start your link building that nearly no two links are exactly the same. When Google calculates the value of a link it looks at several important things to figure out just how much strength to give you. Here are just a few:

1. How much strength did the page with the link have
2. Number of external links on a page
3. Anchor text used for the link
4. Is a rel=nofollow tag used
5. How long has that link been there

Now keep in mind all of these factors above are irrelevant if Google hasn’t cached the page with the link, if Google hasn’t found it then it is worth nothing. The stronger the strength of the page your link is on the more strength you will get in return. The more outgoing links there are on a page the more that strength will be divided between all the linked sites.

A link with a rel=”nofollow” attribute is virtually useless to your website other then increasing your overall link count to give your competitors a scare. You will mainly find NoFollow attributes for Blog Comments, Website Advertisers / Sponsors, Paid Links, or links to competitors (I use them on my resume for past work experience).

When a link is built very few search engines will give you the full strength of that link right away. This is done to maintain the quality of the SERPs if everyone could just go out build 1000s of links then rank there would be no quality to the search engines. Instead they slowly give you more strength as these links age up until around the 6 month period.

Lastly you will constantly see something called Google Pagerank. Pagerank is an arbitrary Google measurement assigned to a website / page to denote that pages strength. Now some people consider this measurement to be the end all be all, but in truth it means very little other than an indicator of you sites health. If you have a PageRank on your homepage as well as pagerank on most of your internal pages your off to a good start. Also keep in mind that pagerank only updates every 3 – 6 months, and ultimately the proof is in the search engine results not some number in the toolbar.

* It’s important to note that when I’m referring to PageRank above I’m referring to the visual PageRank displayed in the little green bar, not the actual PageRank that Google uses internally to calculate the value of a page.

Optimize Your Website Navigation Structure & Design

I purposely left site structure to last as it can be the quickest way for you to royally mess up your website rankings. The worst case with bad structure is that no part of your website will be cached and you will see no visitors. I’ve seen a lot of sites with a lot of issues causing no search engines to crawl these sites. Some of the worst yet simple structural issues that can affect your search engine crawler visibility that I’ve seen are:

1. Automatically redirecting all visitors that come to your site to another page.
2. Using HTTPS only
3. Pure Javascript based navigation

On other sites I have seen Google only cached the index page, which may have an assigned Pagerank without spidering the rest of the website. The things to remember when mapping out the structure of your website are:

1. At all costs avoid having dynamic URLs (ie index.php?PageId=1), a dynamic URL is a URL that contains HTTP GET variables. Search engines don’t tend to spider these sites well. And to users they don’t have any relevant information to their Queries. Try to use Page keys that contain your keywords, if you need to use Dynamic scripts to build your website (i.e. through a Content Management System), use Apache Mod Rewrites to build a static in appearance website (Notice how all URLs on my personal web design & development site appear to be directories). If you have to use Dynamic URLs keep your number of variables at no more than 2.
2. If possible try to use the Keywords you are targeting for your industry in your URL or Files / Directories. This helps increase your Keyword Density, as well as providing users clicking through on Google information relevant to their query in your file names.
3. Don’t constantly change your website structure. Pagerank takes time naturally to develop, and Google holds new sites back in a Sandbox. By renaming a page you can often kiss your pre-existing search engine positioning away on renamed pages until their rank is redeveloped.
4. When designing a new site try to avoid having filenames with extensions in the URL (ie Products.asp), this can limit your options in the future if you change programming languages (ie ASP to PHP), as well as the platform your website can be hosted on (ie Windows vs Linux Hosting).
5. When implementing a new structure or new site, create a Google sitemap, and register it with Google to let Google know what to index.
6. Whenever possible attached CSS and Javascript as external files.

Once you have decided on a website structure, or you have a pre-existing structure, the best way to score higher search engine positions is to have minimalist coding in the HTML to maximize your Content to Markup Ratio. The best way to minimize the amount of HTML code required is to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets allow you to pull the design out of your HTML pages and place them into a separate file. Not only does this remove a lot of HTML if you were using Tables for layout, it makes maintenance a lot simpler as all your design changes are made in one place.

When I moved my website from table based layout to Cascading Style Sheets I managed to reduce my markup code by around 60%! If you have a very large site this can be even more beneficial as some search engines limit the amount of hard drive space they will allocate to caching your website, as well as raise the position of your content higher up in your document.

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Top 5 Ways for the Effective Backlinks Building

Backlinks building is one of the most important ways to increase the page rank of your site. The higher your page rank, the more often your site will appear on the top searches results. Link building means linking to the other sites by inbound links. The higher the page rank of the sites that you are linked to, the higher Google or any other SEO will rank your site.

It is also important that the content where you are linked to is similar to the subject of your site. If, for example your site is about the sport cars it is senseless to be linked to the site about the gardening. Also try to link to the sites with the high page rank, such links will influence more on the page rank of your own site.

1. Article submission

Article writing is the most important step for the development of your online business. Write articles on the topic of your site or your business and regularly submit them to the article submission sites. Usually these sites don’t allow links in the body of the articles, that’s why you need to write few words about you and your site/business including one or two links to your site. The best way is to add a link with the anchor text if the article directory allows HTML. The anchor text may be a keyword for your site that will appear in the resource box. You can change the keyword in the anchor text each time you submit a new article. When your article submission is approved by the directory, you will have one more link to your site and a potential for the targeted traffic coming from the readers of the article.

2. Link directories

In order to get many backinks you can start by submitting your site URL to the multiple link directories. You can type in Google ’submit link’ or ’submit URL’ and the search engine will show you thousands of the sites where you can add a link to your site for free or a small payment for the featured submission. You can do it manually or use the service for the automatic submission to the hundreds of directories. Whatever method you choose, do it. In some of the directories your link will live forever.

3. Forum posting

Google some forums on the subject of your site and post comments adding your site link in the signature. Most of the forums allow it. While editing your signature, publish your link with an anchor text, as you did in the article submission. Each post that you make will have a link to your site and can be also found by the anchor text in the search results. Note that when you post in forum try to contribute into the conversations and don’t spam. If you leave smart posts people will respect you and may wish to follow your link and visit your site. Regular posting in different forums will provide your site with a good number of backlinks and some targeted traffic.

4. Comments writing

Another proven way to get backlinks to your site is leaving the comments in the blogs. Searching the web, you can find thousands of blogs on the subject of your site. Visit them, read the reviews and articles and leave your comments with the links to your site. Notice that the blog owners are usually looking through the comments that the visitors leave and delete irrelevant ones and spam. Be sure that your comments are up to the question and compliment to the blogs, so that the blog masters would like to leave it.

5. Press releases

A press release is an announcement about something new that you want to share with the audience. You can write it about your new website or a product. Press release writing is similar to the article writing, but you must follow the different style as it is targeted for the different media. The easiest way is to rewrite one of your articles for the press release adding a link to your site in the body text. When doing it, think that it may appear on the first page of the New York Times and must fit it. It will help you make it sound like an announcement or news. Once you have completed your press release, it is time to submit it to the press release submission websites.

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