SEO Tutorials

I. Introduction – What Is SEO?

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a rundown of the web comes about that contain that inquiry term. Clients ordinarily tend to visit sites that are at the highest priority on this rundown as they see those to be more important to the question. On the off chance that you have ever asked why some of these sites rank superior to anything the others then you should realize that it is a direct result of an effective web advertising procedure called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Website design enhancement is a system which helps web crawlers find and rank your webpage higher than a great many different destinations because of a pursuit question. Website design enhancement hence causes you get activity from web indexes.

This SEO instructional exercise covers all the fundamental data you have to think about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how can it work and contrasts in the positioning criteria of significant web indexes.

II. Keywords – the Most Important Terms in SEO

Watchwords are the most imperative SEO component for each web crawler, they are what seek strings are coordinated against. Picking the correct watchwords to enhance for is in this way the first and most pivotal advance to a fruitful SEO crusade. On the off chance that you flop on this initial step, the street ahead is extremely rough and probably you will just waste your chance and cash. There are numerous approaches to figure out which watchwords to streamline for and normally the last rundown of them is made after a cautious investigation of what the online populace is hunting down, which catchphrases have your rivals picked or more all - which are the catchphrases that you feel depict your website best. 

1. Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize

It seems that the time when you could easily top the results for a one-word search string is centuries ago. Now, when the Web is so densely populated with sites, it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search string. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more realistic goal. 

For instance, If you have a site about dogs, do NOT try and optimize for the keyword "dog" or "dogs". Instead, you could try and focus on keywords like "dog obedience training", "small dog breeds", "homemade dog food", "dog food recipes" etc. Success for very popular one-two word keywords is very difficult and often not worth the trouble, it's best to focus on less competitive highly specific keywords. 

The first thing you need to do is come up with keywords that describe the content of your website. Ideally, you know your users well and can correctly guess what search strings they are likely to use to search for you. You can also try the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool below to come up with an initial list of keywords. Run your initial list of keywords by the Google Keyword Suggestion tool, you'll get a related list of keywords, shortlist a couple of keywords that seem relevant and have a decent global search volume.

When choosing the keywords to optimize for, you need to consider not only the expected monthly number of searches but also the relevance of these keywords to your website. Although narrow keywords get fewer searches they are a lot more valuable than generic keywords because the users would be more interested in your offerings. Lets say you have a section on your website where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a dog. You might discover that the "adopt german shepherd" keyphrase gives you better results than a keyword like "german shepherd dogs". This page is not of interest to current German shepherd owners but to potential German shepherd owners only. So, when you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site.

2. Keyword Density

After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density although no longer a very important factor in SEO is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try the Keyword Density Checker below to determine the keyword density of your website. Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords – 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.

3. Keywords in Special Places

Keywords are very important not only as quantity but as quality as well – i.e. if you have more keywords in the page title, the headings, the first paragraphs – this counts more than if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page. The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the page title, the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo!.

a. Keywords in URLs and File Names

The domain name and the whole URL of a site tell a lot about it. The presumption is that if your site is about dogs, you will have “dog”, “dogs”, or “puppy” as part of your domain name. For instance, if your site is mainly about adopting dogs, it is much better to name your dog site “dog-adopt.net” than “animal-care.org”, for example, because in the first case you have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword. 

When hunting for keyword rich domain names, don't get greedy. While from an SEO point of view it is better to have 5 keywords in the URL, just imagine how long and difficult to memorize the URL will be. So you need to strike a balance between the keywords in the URL and site usability, which says that more than 3 words in the URL is a way too much. 

Probably you will not be able to come on your own with tons of good suggestions. Additionally, even if you manage to think of a couple of good domain names, they might be already taken. In such cases, tools like the Tool below can come very handy. 

III. Backlinks – Another Important SEO Item

What are Backlinks?

In layman's terms, there are two types of links: inbound and outbound. Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site, while inbound links or backlinks, come from an external site to yours. e.g. if cnn.com links to yourdomain.com, the link from cnn.com is a backlink (inbound) for yourdomain.com, however, the link is an outbound link from cnn.com's perspective. Backlinks are among the main building blocks to good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned dogs, and received a backlink from another website about dogs, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. Therefore, higher the relevance of the site linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink. Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to modify your web pages to make them more SEO friendly it is a lot harder for you to influence other websites and get them to link to your website. This is the reason search engines regard backlinks as a very important factor. Further, search engine's criteria for quality backlinks has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these backlinks by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide backlinks to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

a. Anchor Text

When a link incorporates a keyword into the text of the hyperlink, we call this anchor text. A link's anchor text may be one of the most powerful resources a webmaster has. Backlinks from multiple websites with the anchor text "orphaned dogs" would help your website rank higher for the keyword "orphaned dogs". Using your keyword is a superior way to utilize a hyperlink as against having links with words like "click here" which do not relate to your website. The 'Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool' is a tool which will assist you to find your backlinks and the text which is being used to link to your website. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the anchor text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the anchor text to something which incorporates relevant keywords. This will also help boost your rankings. 

Ways to Build Backlinks 

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome.

The Backlink Builder Tool

When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of relevant sites from where you might get some backlinks.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ, Yahoo and Jasmin directory is a must, not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally, inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally, search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases, the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

RSS Feeds

You can offer RSS feeds to interesting sites for free, when the other site publishes your RSS feed you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally, the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites that publish news announcements and press releases for free or for a small fee. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks. 

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided.

IV. Meta tags

What are Meta tags?

Meta tags are used to summarize information of a page for search engine crawlers. This information is not directly visible to humans visiting your website. The most popular are the meta keywords and description tag. These meta tags to be inserted into the area of your page.A couple of years ago meta tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization and there was a direct correlation between keywords in the meta tags and your ranking in the search results. However, algorithms have got better and today the importance of metadata is decreasing day by day.

Meta Description

The Meta Description tag is are one more way for you to write a description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes and topics your Web site is relevant to. Some search engines (including Google) use these meta description display a summary of the listings on the search results page. So if your meta descriptions are well written you might be able to attract more traffic to your website. For instance, for the dog adoption site, the Meta Description tag could be something like this: 

<Meta Name=“Description“ Content=“Adopting a dog saves a life and brings joy to your house. All you need to know when you consider adopting a dog.“>

Meta Keywords A potential use of the Meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in the Meta Keywords tag. It might be a very small boost to your search engine rankings but why miss the chance? 

eg.<Meta name=“Keywords“ Content=“adopt, adoption, dog, dogs, puppy, canine, save a life, homeless animals“>

Meta Robots

In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don't want it indexed. Listing this pages in the Meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed. 

eg.<META NAME=“ROBOTS“ CONTENT=“NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW“> 

V. Content Is King

If you were writing SEO text solely for machines, optimization would be simple. Sprinkle in some keywords, rearrange them at random and watch the hit counter skyrocket. Sometimes SEO copywriters forget that this isn't the case. Real people read your text and they expect something in return for the time and attention they give you. They expect good content, and their expectations have shaped how search engines rank your site.

What Is Good Content?

Good SEO content has three primary characteristics:

• Offers useful information presented in an engaging format to human readers

• Boosts search engine rankings

• Attracts plenty of links from other sites

Note that human readers come first on the list. Your site must deliver value to its visitors and do it in an engaging way. Few sites specialize in a subject so narrow that they have an information niche all to themselves. You'll have competition. Set yourself apart from it with expert interviews, meaningful lists and well-researched resources. Write well or invest in someone who does; your investment will pay off in increased traffic.

VI. Visual Extras and SEO

As already mentioned, search engines have no means to index directly extras like images, sounds, flash movies, javascript. Instead, they rely on your to provide a meaningful textual description and based on it they can index these files. In a sense, the situation is similar to that with text 10 or so years ago – you provide a description in the meta tag and search engines uses this description to index and process your page. If technology advances further, one day it might be possible for search engines to index images, movies, etc. but for the time being this is just a dream.

1. Images

Images are an essential part of any Web page and from a designer point of view, they are not an extra but a most mandatory item for every site. However, here designers and search engines are on two poles because for search engines every piece of information that is buried in an image is lost. When working with designers, sometimes it takes a while to explain to them that having textual links (with proper anchor text) instead of shining images is not a whim and that clear text navigation is really mandatory. Yes, it can be hard to find the right balance between artistic performance and SEO-friendliness but since even the finest site is lost in cyberspace if it cannot be found by search engines, a compromise to its visual appearance cannot be avoided. 

With all that said, the idea is not to skip images at all. Sure, nowadays this is impossible because the result would be the ugliest site. Rather the idea is that images should be used for illustration and decoration, not for navigation or even worse – for displaying text (in a fancy font, for example). And the most important – in the <alt> attribute of the <img> tag, always provide a meaningful textual description of the image. The HTML specification does not require this but search engines do. Also, it does not hurt to give meaningful names to the image files themselves rather than name them image1.jpg, image2.jpg, imageN.jpg. For instance, in the next example, the image file has an informative name and the alt provides enough additional information: <img src=“one_month_Jim.jpg” alt=“A picture of Jim when he was a one-month puppy”>. Well, don't go to extremes like writing 20-word <alt> tags for 1-pixel images because this also looks suspicious and starts to smell like keyword-stuffing. 

2. Animation and Movies

The situation with animation and movies is similar to that with images – they are valuable from a designer's point of view but are not loved by search engines. For instance, it is still pretty common to have an impressive Flash introduction on the home page. You just cannot imagine what a disadvantage with search engines this is – it is a number one rankings killer! And it gets even worse, if you use Flash to tell a story that can be written in plain text, hence crawled and indexed by search engines. One workaround is to provide search engines with a HTML version of the Flash movie but in this case make sure that you have excluded the original Flash movie from indexing (this is done in the robots.txt file but the explanation of this file is not a beginners topic and that is why it is excluded from this tutorial), otherwise you can be penalized for duplicate content. There are rumors that Google is building a new search technology that will allow to search inside animation and movies and that the .swf format will contain new metadata that can be used by search engines, but until then, you'd better either refrain from using (too much) Flash, or at least provide a textual description of the movie (you can use an <alt> tag to describe the movie).

3. Frames

It is a good news that frames are slowly but surely disappearing from the Web. 5 or 10 years ago they were an absolute hit with designers but never with search engines. Search engines have difficulties indexing framed pages because the URL of the page is the same, no matter which of the separate frames is open. For search engines this was a shock because actually there were 3 or 4 pages and only one URL, while for search engines 1 URL is 1 page. Of course, search engines can follow the links to the pages in the frameset and index them but this is a hurdle for them.If you still insist on using frames, make sure that you provide a meaningful description of the site in the <noframes> tag. The following example is not for beginners but even if you do not understand everything in it, just remember that the <noframes> tag is the place to provide an alternative version (or at least a short description) of your site for search engines and users whose browsers do not support frames. If you decide to use the <noframes> tag, maybe you'd like to read more about it before you start using it. Example: <noframes> <p> This site is best viewed in a browser that supports frames. </p><p> Welcome to our site for prospective dog adopters! Adopting a homeless dog is the noblest deed that will help save the life of the poor creature. </p></noframes>

4. JavaScript

This is another hot potato. It is known by everybody that pure HTML is powerless to make complex sites with a lot of functionality (anyway, HTML was not intended to be a programming languages for building Web applications, so nobody expects that you can use HTML to handle writing to a database or even for storing session information) as required by today's Web users and that is why other programming languages (like JavaScript, or PHP) come to enhance HTML. For now, search engines just ignore JavaScript they encounter on a page. As a result of this, first, if you have links that are inside the JavaScript code, chances are that they will not be spidered. Second, if JavaScript is in the HTML file itself (rather than in an external .js file that is invoked when necessary) this clutters the HTML file itself and spiders might just skip it and move to the next site. Just for your information, there is a <noscript> tag that allows providing an alternative to running the script in the browser but because most of its applications are pretty complicated, it is hardly suitable to explain it here.

VII. Static Versus Dynamic URLs

< Based on the previous section, you might have gotten the impression that the algorithms of search engines try to humiliate every designer effort to make a site gorgeous. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either. Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like http://domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not tell much about the contents of the page. There are a couple of good reasons why static URLs score better than dynamic URLs. First, dynamic URLs are not always there – i.e. the page is generated on request after the user performs some kind of action (fills a form and submits it or performs a search using the site's search engine). In a sense, such pages are nonexistent for search engines, because they index the Web by crawling it, not by filling in forms. 

Second, even if a dynamic page has already been generated by a previous user request and is stored on the server, search engines might just skip it if it has too many question marks and other special symbols in it. Once upon a time, search engine did not index dynamic pages at all, while today they do index them but generally slower than they index static pages. The idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are special tools (different for different platforms and servers) that rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like normal HTML pages. Try the URL Rewriting Tool below, it will convert the cryptic text from the previous example into something more readable, like http://mydomain.com/product-categoryid-1-productid-5

VIII. Promoting Your Site to Increase Traffic

The main purpose of SEO is to make your site visible to search engines, thus leading to higher rankings in search results pages, which in turn brings more traffic to your site. And having more visitors (and above all buyers) is ultimately the goal in sites promotion. For truth's sake, SEO is only one alternative to promote your site and increase traffic – there are many other online and offline ways to do accomplish the goal of getting high traffic and reaching your target audience. We are not going to explore them in this tutorial but just keep in mind that search engines are not the only way to get visitors to your site, although they seem to be a preferable choice and a relatively easy way to do it.

1. Submitting Your Site to Search Directories, forums and special sites

After you have finished optimizing your new site, time comes to submit it to search engines. Generally, with search engines you don't have to do anything special in order to get your site included in their indices – they will come and find you. Well, it cannot be said exactly when they will visit your site for the first time and at what intervals they will visit it later but there is hardly anything that you can to do invite them. Sure, you can go to their Submit a Site pages in submit the URL of your new site but by doing this do not expect that they will hop to you right away. What is more, even if you submit your URL, most search engines reserve the right to judge whether to crawl your site or not. Anyway, here are the URLs for submitting pages in the three major search engines:Google, MSN, and Yahoo. In addition to search engines, you may also want to have your site included in search directories as well. Although search directories also list sites that are relevant to a given topic, they are different from search engines in several aspects. First, search directories are usually maintained by humans and the sites in them are reviewed for relevancy after they have been submitted. Second, search directories do not use crawlers to get URLs, so you need to go to them and submit your site but once you do this, you can stay there forever and no more efforts on your side are necessary. Some of the most popular search directories are DMOZ and Yahoo! (the directory, not the search engine itself) and here are the URLs of their submissions pages:DMOZand Yahoo! and Jasmine Directory Sometimes posting a link to your site in the right forums or special sites can do miracles in terms of traffic. You need to find the forums and sites that are leaders in the fields of interest to you but generally even a simple search in Google or the other major search engines will retrieve their names. For instance, if you are a hardware freak, type “hardware forums” in the search box and in a second you will have a list of sites that are favorites to other hardware freaks. Then you need to check the sites one by one because some of them might not allow posting links to commercial sites. Posting into forums is more time-consuming than submitting to search engines but it could also be pretty rewarding.

2. Specialized Search Engines

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are not the only search engines on Earth, nor even the only general-purpose ones. There are many other general-purpose and specialized search engines and some of them can be really helpful for reaching your target audience. You just can't imagine for how many niches specialized search engines exist – from law to radio stations, to educational one! Some of them are actually huge sites that gather Webwide resources on a particular topic but almost all of them have sections for submitting links to external sites of interest. So, after you find the specialized search engines in your niche, go to their site and submit your URL – this could prove more traffic-worthy than striving to get to the top of Google.

3. Paid Ads and Submissions

We have already mentioned some other alternatives to search engines – forums, specialized sites and search engines, search directories – but if you need to make sure that your site will be noticed, you can always resort to paid ads and submissions. Yes, paid listings are a fast and guaranteed way to appear in search results and most of the major search engines accept payment to put your URL in the Paid Links section for keywords of interest to you but you also must have in mind that users generally do not trust paid links as much as they do with the normal ones – in a sense it looks like you are bribing the search engine to place you where you can't get on your own, so think twice about the pros and cons of paying to get listed.