SEO Basics

or 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 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 strategy around it. Simply implementing your 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> Basics I</TITLE>

<META NAME=”keywords” content=”, , serp”/>

<META NAME=”description” content=”mysemblog.com provides helpful (), 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.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 6:08 pm and is filed under 6. Search Engine Optimization, SEO Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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