SEO Basics
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a very time consuming, tedious, and an ongoing process, and it needs to be carefully planned and executed to for your website’s pages to show in the SERP.
- Search Engine friendly design should be the foundation of your SEO campaign. Your site should be easily accessible to the search engine robots and crawlers in order for them to index the site and its content.
- Make sure all your links works, so these robots can index those pages as well. Broken links mean the search engines will not index that page and hence it will not show up in the SERP.
- Flash, Images, Shockwave files all make a website look esthetically pleasing, enable the user to interact with the website, and can also help in keeping the users involved with your website. However, designing an entire site with only these will result in your site not being indexed for all the relevant content. Reason being, the search engine crawlers cannot read flash and image content yet. Hence, keep these to the minimum and focus more on text.
- Each page on your site is relevant and needs to have a carefully crafted SEO strategy around it. Simply implementing your SEO strategy on the home page will not be helpful. Each page should have its individual strategy.
- Meta Tags give you some level of control over how you influence the search engine robots. Carefully choose your keywords, title, and description for each page. For Example:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Basics I</TITLE>
<META NAME=”keywords” content=”search engine optimization, seo, serp”/>
<META NAME=”description” content=”mysemblog.com provides helpful Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), and overall Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tips and tricks.”/>
</HEAD>
- Keep these tags short and sweet. Carefully choose the keywords, and description for each page and it should be a reflection of the content on the page.
- There are plenty of books stating different figures on the number of keywords you should add to the keyword tag and the overall length of the description.
- Personally, based on the keyword research you do, I would add the top and most relevant keywords to the keywords tag - mostly 4-5 keywords and keep the description to about 150-200 characters including spaces.
- You could have a longer description, but when you see the SERP you see a lot of descriptions ending with “…”, so keeping a short, sweet & carefully written description helps not only makes it look professional, but also helps catch the users attention when they don’t have to read an incomplete statement.
- Again, this is not an exact rule, I do have some descriptions that are longer than that and end with “…” in the SERP, sometimes it is just impossible to cut down the description, but wherever you can, try to do it.
- URLs are a part of your website and shouldn’t be overlooked. They can be used to your advantage and should be used to your advantage and should be crafted meaningfully. For example:
http://www.mysemblog.com/post/987237hcecbew90/12
This URL would not make much sense to anyone, not even the Search Engines, even though it has the exact same content as the link below:
http://www.mysemblog.com/2008/11/quality-score/
The second link is more descriptive to not only the reader or someone trying to link to your site, but also for the Search Engine crawlers. Some other examples of links on this blog that are descriptive are:
http://www.mysemblog.com/2008/07/shopping-for-an-effective-ppc-bid-management-tool/
http://www.mysemblog.com/2008/12/estimating-max-cpc/
- Lastly, content is king. Have relevant content on your pages. I will go into more details later about some strategies to keep in mind when writing content for your pages.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
December 3rd, 2009 at 4:02 am
Good post mate!! Keep ‘em flowing!
December 5th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Search Engine Placement Specialist…
Great resources!…
December 11th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Beautiful and well written article i like it ! normally i wont comment her and there in auction , bidding sites but this blog i must say very good i bookmarked it and will follow for get more updates like that ! best of luck !
December 21st, 2009 at 7:07 am
Great site and very great information!
December 30th, 2009 at 3:22 am
Great post, are there any specic tools you’d recommend?
January 7th, 2010 at 4:53 am
I?ll be following your blog. =)
January 9th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
This is an awesome article, I?ll be adding you to my list.
January 11th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
Good Post.I find the whole seo thing to be a confusing problem, and PPC is just too costly.With SEO you spend days doing things to your site, you wait weeks
January 14th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
It’s quite interesting article. I’m just curious how long are in interested in this subject ? I saw many blogs but Your’s it’s really informative.
January 16th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Awesome post
January 18th, 2010 at 8:38 am
Keep on blogging! its getting through the tough times that make you stronger and then the good times will follow, keep writing about your experiences and we should all pull together.
January 20th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
I found the diary and read some of the Yahoo messages. great work! I just twittered about this blog only
January 25th, 2010 at 8:18 am
Excellent article! I enjoy your site very much.
February 15th, 2010 at 6:33 am
Here is a good article about SEO…
An Article every web designer should read…
February 20th, 2010 at 2:05 am
Do you have copy writer for so good articles? If so please give me contacts, because this really rocks!
February 23rd, 2010 at 7:24 am
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.
March 6th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Great article, I am always looking for ways to add backlinks, increase my SEO and get indexed higher in search engines so that I can report back to my readers what works best. Would you be interested in exchanging backlinks? Please let me know via e-mail. Thanks!
March 8th, 2010 at 8:24 am
I love your blog, couse I can read it from my phone
March 13th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
This is my first visit here, but I will be back soon, because I really like the way you are writing, it is so simple and honest
March 18th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Hi, Good content throughout the site. This page is probably where I got the most useful information for my research. Thanks for posting, maybe we can see more on this. I also like this layout can you tell me where to get it
March 22nd, 2010 at 3:38 am
Thank you for the advice. I’ve found your first point to be most effective.
April 16th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Great article, I’m an avid reader of this blog, keep up the good work, and I’ll be a regular for a long time.
April 21st, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Hope I will see more of your posts soon
April 24th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Wierd , your site shows up with a orangeish hue to it, what color is the main color on your site?
April 30th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
That is great information thx. Anybody know of a cheap search engine marketing company who will not rip you off? I’ve got soo much SEM work to do and no where near enough time….. Need to pay someone to help!
May 15th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Good work buddy, keep it up.
May 18th, 2010 at 8:38 am
Great website! I am loving it!! Will come back again. I am bookmarking your feeds also
May 27th, 2010 at 5:36 am
Bookmarked your site. Thank you for sharing. Definitely worth the time away from my studies.
June 3rd, 2010 at 1:55 am
Intriguing, how would I make use of this?
June 12th, 2010 at 10:55 am
I like the first point you made there, but I am not sure I could pratcially apply that in a productive way.
June 20th, 2010 at 10:43 am
Great Blog! Very informative, I appreciate all the information that you just shared with me very much and I also bookmarked this on dig too. Take care and I’ll be back to read more in the future.
June 29th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
Web design Wellington…
Great post and comments on this blog. Thanks for creating a forum for this conversation….
July 4th, 2010 at 4:48 am
Thanks for an idea, you sparked at thought from a perspective I hadn’t given thoguht to before . Now lets see if I can do something productive with it.
July 7th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Intriguing , I am curious what the statistics are on your first point there…
July 10th, 2010 at 4:38 am
I like the first point you made there, but I am not sure I could reasonably apply that in a postive way.