Head Resist

The process of search engine optimization involves tweaking various aspects of your website and deals only with the organic search results. It has nothing to do with paid search also known as inorganic search or PPC. In order to improve your positioning in the organic search results, these guidelines will point out the tactics on how you can improve the visibility of your website.

Page Title:

Page title also referred to as the ‘title tag’ needs to be unique for each page of your website. This tag tells search engines and also the visitors what that particular webpage is all about. The title tag of each page should contain the business/website name followed with important information that relates to the webpage. One must avoid the following:

Recording a title tag that is not relevant to the information present on the webpage. Recording the same title tag across all the pages of the website. Recording long title tags.

Meta Description:

The Meta description tag gives both the search engines and also the visitors who perform a search on the search engine an idea on what the web page is all about. That’s why it’s important to precisely summarize the content of your webpage. It’s always safe to keep the meta description tag within 160 characters (including spaces), as the rest of it gets truncated. One must avoid the following:

Writing a meta description that is not relevant to the information presented on the webpage. Recording the same meta description across all the web pages of the website. Recording the meta description with only keywords.

URL Structure:

It’s important to create a URL structure that is friendly to the search engines as this will help in better indexing of your website. For this reason, it is essential to create appropriate filenames and expressive categories on your website. One must avoid the following:

Recording long URLs Recording the same URL across all the web pages. Recording deep nested subdirectories Recording irrelevant directory names.

Website Navigation:

A website that is easy to navigate can help the visitors to find the information they are looking for. It also helps the search engines in indexing the pages appropriately. It is important to ensure that all the web pages of your website are interlinked properly and also show the correct page when clicked on. The use of sitemaps both HTML and XML help the spiders to crawl the website easily and also index it. One must avoid the following:

Creating complex websites that are difficult to navigate. Creating drop-down menus. Developing a HTML sitemap in which the pages are not organized. Indexing the 404 page in the search engine.

Unique Content:

The content that is hosted on your webpage needs to be informative, such that it can elicit action. Ensure that the content is not copied and is 100% your own creativity. Keep the content focused around your primary keywords and ensure that the keyword density is around 2.75% to 3.21%. It is also good to keep changing the content on your website so that the visitors can see that the site is not static but dynamic with its content. One must avoid the following:

Using images that serve as textual content. Using long sentences. Incorrect grammar and spelling mistakes. Duplicate content on the web pages of your website. Stuffing keywords unnecessarily.

Anchor Text:

Anchor texts are links that direct visitors to the internal pages of the website or to an external page/website. Anchor text helps the users to easily navigate between pages and also helps the spiders to understand what the page is all about, that it is linked to. One must avoid the following:

Using general anchor texts. Using anchor text that is not related to the content of the webpage or is off topic. Using long sentences. Creating unnecessary links.

Heading Tags:

Heading tags are used to represent the heading of the content of the webpage. Heading tags range in 6 sizes – h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. These tags should only be used at the appropriate places. One must avoid the following:

Using one heading tag for the entire content of the webpage. Using too many heading tags throughout the content of the webpage.

Alt Tag Optimization:

Images can’t be read by a spider when they crawl on the website. Therefore, it is important to use alt tags for the images. It is best suggested to use the primary keyword as the alt tag following the contents that describe the page. One must avoid the following:

Using long filenames. Stuffing excess of keywords in the alt tags.

Robots.txt File:

A robots.txt file is used to prohibit the robots to crawl a particular page based on the nature and content of information that is available. This file must be placed in the root directory of your site and also named as robots.txt. One must avoid the following:

Search result pages to be crawled.

Website Promotion:

You can promote your website using offline promotion, online promotion, social media sites, AdWords optimization, Google’s Local Business Center, forming groups, forums etc.

Once you have implemented or taken note of all these tactics, do use the Google Webmaster Tools that will help you in solving many of the issues that are related to your website. You can also monitor the performance of your website by using Google Analytics.

Some knowledge of search engine optimization is essential if you have your own website and are serious about getting visitors to it.  While you will save a lot of time by having a good understanding of SEO techniques before you start building a website, it is perfectly possible to make changes to your site if you find that it is not designed with search engine ranking in mind.  Search engine optimization in general is an on-going process, but sometimes just a few changes to an existing site can produce quite dramatic results.

The following are some of the most important and basic requirements for ranking well in search engine results and therefore attracting more visitors to your site:

Make The Most Of Your Title Tag

This is probably the single most important factor in telling the search engines what your site is about.  The title tag is one of the meta-tags found within the ‘head’ section of every web page’s source code.  It does not appear directly on your web page itself, but is the main heading representing your site which people see in the list of search engine results when they carry out a search.

The first few words of your title tag should contain your main keyword for that page (see below for information on keywords).  If possible, repeat the keyword again at the end of the tag, but ensure that your title still makes grammatical sense.  Do not use full stops of commas in your title tag, as these are thought to sometimes stop search engines going any further, so anything after the full stop might be missed.  Use hyphens instead.

Make Sure Your Site Is Indexed By Search Engines

Search engines like Google never stop searching the web for new sites, so the chances are that your site will be found eventually, but you can speed the process up by submitting your site to the search engines directly.  This in effect tells the search engines that your site exists.  You will see many companies offering to submit your site to hundreds of search engines for you.  This is a waste of time – who uses these obscure engines compared to the market share of Google, Yahoo and MSN?  Hardly anyone, so why waste your time or money.  Just submit your site to the main three and that will be sufficient.

Find The Best Keywords For Your Site

If you want your website to attract visitors from search engines, you need to know exactly what terms people are searching for.  You can then use this information to set up each page of your site to be focussed on particular search phrases, known as keywords.  Finding good keywords makes an enormous difference to the volume of traffic your site can attract.

Whatever the main subject of your website, there will be hundreds of different possible search terms that people are using to find out about various aspects of that subject.  Only by knowing what people actually enter into search engines can you begin to attract a lot more visitors by targeting lots of different search terms.  The other important element in selecting good keywords is to know what the level of competition is for each keyword.  In other words, you need to know how many other sites are targeting that same keyword, because if the competition is too tough, you may never rank anywhere for that keyword.  A good keyword research tool will help you identify the most useful keywords for your website.

SEO basics start with the composition of the words on your pages and what intrinsic value they offer your audience. The first prerequisite of SEO is understanding the basic correlation of content composition and the impact that content has on rankings respecitively.

Relevance is the underlying criteria that search engines reward, if your content is specific, informative and manages to acquire click through traffic, then your pages have the trappings of becoming popular which is a component to acquiring a top 10 ranking.

Aside from the title tag, (the main tag you use to describe the content of the page) and the links that endorse your content through back links (links from other sites)and the copy (which is completely under your control). There are fundamental guidelines you can adhere to that will assist you in keeping your content on topic to elevate topical relevance.

What are Search Engines?

Search engines are a cataloging system that are essentially transparent in their composition. Search engines are expected to glean information and organize data from thousands of unique industries, compile that data and then, based on the fetch command you issue as a result of you entering a boolean query in the search box are then expected to retrieve the most relevant result.

Understanding the premise of how search engines function rather than struggling to adapt and muscle your way up the SERPs (search engine result pages) is far easier instead.

Through appeasing the laws of their construction (the mathematical algorithm, teamed up with it’s ability to gain contextual artificial intelligence like phrase rank algorithm, search engines have the ability interpret the context of your pages.

Your focal point is simply to provide the ideal (relevant) result according to their ranking criteria. Which falls into three categories.

These three measuring sticks search engines use to assess content in addition to semantic synonyms and related phrases are called allinanchor, allintitle and allintext.

Talk about green widgets enough on your page, they know your page is about green widgets (allintext), placing it in the title is also a great way to signal the plane (allintitle) or get enough links from other pages that say your site is about green widgets and even if it is or not, it can potentially rank for that or related phrases (allinanchor).

That in a nutshell is how SEO basics play out according the the search engine spiders (the little programs that scour the web looking for new or exciting information to report back to the index).

The next part of SEO basics will cover how to ensure that your content is spider friendly or how to invite search engine spiders to skim, index and rank your content.

In closing, the gist is (1) make your titles unique (2) keep your writing style focused and use key words (words containing the phrases you want to rank for) as well as develop as many on topic links from other sites to cement your position in the search engine result pages.

Just writing about it on your site is not enough, unless you sites has hundreds of thousands of strong links pointing at in, in which case it can rank on the title tag alone. That is called website authority and is yet another topic we will be covering in the future.

The most relevant search result is the one that makes it to the top 10. There are no secrets involved, just logical relevance, but popularity counts so don’t just write dry content.

The whole exercise of SEO is to get traffic from people. Since people pay the bills and not spiders, make sure you have something worth saying and they will take notice and pass it along.

Otherwise, you are only helping your competition by leaving your guests hungry or thirsty for more topical information about your subject. In which case, they will simply return to the search engine and click the next result in the list. So, the bottom line is user engagement aside from topical relevance and traffic.

Search engine optimization is such a huge subject it is difficult to distil it down to a few rules, but there are certainly some key factors which are simply essential, and without which none of the rest matters very much.  The following search engine optimization rules are almost a step by step guide to follow while you create your website.  It is important to have an understanding of these rules before you build your site, or you may well end up having to re-do much of it later.  Websites created without reference to these rules are likely to receive little or no visitors and websites without visitors are websites that generate no income.

Get Your Meta-Tags Right

Meta-tags are the unseen but vital pieces of text in the ‘head’ section of each of your web pages.  The title tag is by far the most important, and you have to put your primary keyword at the beginning of your title tag.  Repeat it again at the end or include a second keyword, but don’t stuff it.  The title tag is the wording which appears as the main heading in the list of search results when you do a search on Google or other search engine.  It tells the search engines and potential visitors what your site is about.

The description meta-tag is less vital than the title, but it is still important to get it right.  It is the brief description of your site that visitors will see beneath the title in search results, so repeat your keyword and write something that will encourage viewers to click on your site.

Content Is King

This means that there are no substitutes for a good quality website which offers useful information.  Search engines are looking for useful and interesting sites with original content, so rather than put your energies into trying to fiddle a shortcut to that, just give them what they want in the first place.  This is the only way to be sure you will be ranked well and continue to be ranked well in the long term.

Choose The Right Keywords

This is so important.  Your keywords will be used on your web pages and will tell the search engines what your pages are about.  If you choose keywords that no-one is searching for, you will get no visitors.  If you choose keywords that people are searching for, but which millions of other well established sites are also using, again you will get no visitors.

You can’t identify the best keywords by guessing, you need to use a tool that will tell you not just how many sites are competing for those words, but also how many searches are being done for those words.  The best tools will help generate lots of keywords that you could not have thought of yourself, and refine and organise your keywords to give you the terms likely to bring the highest volume of targeted traffic to your site.

Build Links To Your Website

One of the main criteria search engines use to judge a site’s importance is the number and quality of other sites which are linking to it.  This measure of importance is used to decide where your site will be shown in the search results.  The way Google works is to look for all the sites which are relevant to the term being searched for, and then present them to the viewer in order of importance.  So being seen as important is crucial in showing up high enough in the results to be found by potential visitors.

There are various ways to get inbound links to your site.  One of the most common ways to get links to your site is to exchange links with other websites.  Search engines seem to value more highly links from sites which have content closely related in subject to your own.  For that reason, the best sites to exchange with are those with the same kind of theme as yours.

For people in business this can sometimes throw up the problem of not wanting to deal with sites seen as direct competitors, but it should still be possible to find sites which are related to the general subject area without being in competition.  The best way to approach this is to add a link to the site you wish to exchange links with, then contact the webmaster to say you have linked and ask if they would be willing to link back.

Work at following these main search engine optimization rules and you will go a long way towards developing a site that will rank high enough in search results to be found by lots of visitors.