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Getting Started with SEO in 2011
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No Hands SEO Disclaimer:
While every care is taken to ensure all of the information contained in this eBook is accurate and relevant it is provided as is and without warranty. The materials contained in this eBook are provided for general information purposes only and do not constitute legal or other professional advice on any subject matter. Pure Business Logic does not accept any responsibility for any loss which may arise from reliance on information contained in this eBook.
Created by: Pure Business Logic
Getting your website to rank highly on search engines is crucial to being successful online. Why? It’s almost a hands-off, guaranteed way to get targeted traffic that will convert, traffic that is actively seeking out what you have to offer. It requires a little bit of time and effort to learn how to do this, as well as keeping up with search engine changes, but it’s well worth it. In this report, you’ll learn all of the basics of SEO to get you started.
Meta tags and their relevance to search engines today
Meta tags are the best way for site owners and webmasters to provide search engines like Google with information about their websites. Meta tags are used to provide information to a wide variety of clients, and each system will process only the required Meta tags they understand and avoid the rest. Meta tags are part of the <head> section of the HTML page.
Meta tags are HTML codes that are part of the header on a web page, and are inserted after the title tag. They serve a wide variety of purposes and for search engine optimization, they are usually referred to in the form of Meta description tag and the Meta keywords tag.
There are lots of Meta tags out there…
However, that is not all there is to search engines and Meta tags. There are many more Meta tags that include the Meta robots tag, Meta copyright tag, Meta refresh tag, Meta http-equiv tag, and the Meta author tag, among others. These tags are equally useful and are used to instruct clients such as web browsers and search engine spiders on a wide range of topics.
What kind of weight do Meta tags hold?
The Meta description tag and the Meta keywords tag were first utilized to provide data to search engines and web browsers. However, realizing the usefulness in gaining search engine rankings with the Meta description tag and the Meta keywords tag, many webmasters chose to abuse the system and start trying to really tweak their Meta tags for ranking high in the search results. This resulted in Google having to de-emphasize their importance. However, having these tags is still important in the overall scheme of things.
Though Meta keywords tag and Meta description tags are not the priority thing search engines consider anymore when ranking websites, they should continue to remain, as they are still important. Should I say it again? Meta tags are still important.
The description and keyword tags
A Meta description tag is a concise summary of the page's content, while a Meta keyword tag is a list of the crucially important words on the page.
The title tag
While not technically a Meta tag, I still have to mention the title tag which search engines utilize as part of their ranking criteria. Web pages with keywords in the title tags are usually ranked higher than those with keywords only in the body text alone. When search results show up, the title tag appears as the title of the web page when viewed within a browser.
As the title is what users will first see when they’re browsing search results, it is important that keywords be used accurately. They should describe the web page accurately or else the user will likely discard the page as being irrelevant to what they were searching for.
The copyright tag
The copyright Meta tag is not visible in the search engine results. However, it is crawled by the search engines nonetheless and that makes them a tad bit special. What the tag does is highlight the fact that the content on the page is a copyright of the owner of the page. Some search engine crawlers that read this tag will give the page a higher ranking in all probability.
The robot tag
The robot tag is a set of commands for search engine crawlers and tells the crawls what to look for in the tags.
Minimal and targeted
For better search engine optimization, focus on a minimal number of keywords and include them in the title, description and keyword Meta tags for best results. Don’t stuff your keyword tag with a hundred variations of the same thing or you can run the risk of the search engine labeling your page or site as a spammer.
Every page or post on your site should have their own unique set of tags. Do not… Do NOT create one set of Meta tags and use them all across your site. They need to be targeted to each specific page or post that you create.
Choosing Keywords & LSI & Long tail
Keywords have always been the most integral part of any marketing effort on the internet. Content is king as they say and keywords are the foot soldiers that let the articles win in the race against other sites to outrank them.
Marketing articles online can seem like an impossible task sometimes, even for the most experienced writers. For every writer, the ultimate dream is to be visible right on top in search engine rankings. But if it was an easy task, everybody would be on top and we know that isn’t possible. It all starts with that perfect keyword, with that perfect placement, with that perfect sprinkle of related (LSI) keywords throughout the article. Choosing the right keywords hence is an important task.
You can take the example of a telephone directory. It is pretty easy to find something, as everything is categorized. Similarly, with articles it is very important to find the right keywords to organize your content and complement the article.
There are many ways to spruce up the articles. Let’s look at two important things to keep in mind when you’re researching keywords for your content…
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
LSI, also known as Latent Semantic Indexing, is the process of finding and using keywords that are in some way related to your intended keyword. This is the process where multiple keyword choices are used to make it easier to show up in search results and increase the chances of that article being found by your target audience.
You have to think about different things that someone might search for when they’re looking for what you have to offer. A nifty tool for this is Google Adwords Tool which actually gives a list of keywords people have searched and related keywords as well. It’s far from perfect, but hey… it’s free. These keywords can be handy and should be utilized for maximum exposure.
Another thing is to choose niche keywords which are very much related and have a high degree of searches with not a lot of competition to ensure that your page is amongst the top few to be visible when a particular niche keyword is searched.
Long-tail keywords
Long tail is using keywords that are not as popular, but will still draw at least some users from the search engines and increase conversion rates on your websites. Over the years long tail has become quite significant as more and more users are using search engines and searching for more exact keyword phrases to find what they’re looking for. You can expect better conversions, because they’re looking for ‘exactly’ what you have to offer.
Example: Main Keyword may be “divorce lawyer”
A long tail could be “divorce lawyer in Santa Monica”
Someone in Santa Monica probably doesn’t care about your site for a Dallas divorce lawyer. But if you rank high for simply “divorce lawyer” then it’s likely they’ll find your site. Will it get a new client though? Probably not…
Long tail-keywords are harder to develop and are usually not as productive as popular keywords but in the bigger scheme of things, they do add up. Choosing long tail keywords may lead to a steady increase in conversion rate and is a relatively easy way to achieve good rankings with these keywords, as the competition in this space is much lower than for popular keywords.
The key here is not keywords, but rather phrases containing five-six keywords that could possibly be searched for by a user. The best thing to do here is to utilize Google Sets and find related Keywords. When making long-tail keywords, you can select from the increasing variety of terms and limit yourself to the usual and most competitive keywords.
You can also utilize Google Trends to find out “hot” searches at the moment or Google Insights to get a feel of search volume over time. Long-tail involves a lot of hard work and the content needs to be kept updated, but it’s all part of keeping up with the pace of changing searching engine trends.
Targeting Your Content
Selecting the right keyword or keyword phrase you want to optimize for on a single Web page can be daunting task at first. With so many keywords out there, it’s challenging to choose the right set of keywords to get noticed. The best way to do this is to see each web page as a website in itself and optimize it accordingly. This will help reach more users, rank higher and of course, get better conversions (conversions = $$$)
The biggest mistake people make is to use every possible keyword for their target keyword and believe that people will then flock to their website. The second problem is that for some people, their website is pretty much a single page and they try to squeeze everything into it. Not a good idea at all.
The more you try to stuff keywords in there, the less natural it is going to sound. However, from the outset, SEO is time consuming and for quick results, the best approach is to use only a select few keywords for each page or post.
You have got to remember that Google indexes each page separately and its algorithms crawl each page individually (which is why you want a unique set of Meta tags for each one as we discussed earlier). Hence, the methodology of targeting different keywords on different pages should be employed for quicker results. The keywords should also be mentioned in the page titles.
Depending on the content of the website, using one main keyword with a few sub-keywords (LSI) is best. Don’t put your keyword phrase in every other sentence. Write it to be engaging and helpful to the reader, not just keyword-stuffed to try to get Google to notice you. You’re likely to end up with Google labeling your page as spam if you do that.
You can also employ long tail keywords to let Google bring you the traffic you desire. The people who actually search for those long tail keywords are the people highly interested in your content and should not be bombarded with too many keywords. The article has to come across as genuine and informative and not as a Google ranking tool!
The bottom line for any website is that its content should be relevant, interesting and compelling. The traffic that comes in needs to be encouraged to take action… whether that action is commenting or even buying a product, otherwise there is no point in putting in so much effort to rank in the first place.
Ensuring Your HTML is Valid While it’s always been important to make sure that you check your HTML code and ensure it’s correct and valid, it’s becoming even more important. That basically means that all your tags are closed correctly, your attributions are valid and complete and all elements of your code are well defined. This applies to all the code, including any CSS that you may be using. Here’s what Google recently said…
“…the Webmaster Team considers validation a baseline quality attribute. It doesn’t guarantee accessibility, performance, or maintainability, but it reduces the number of possible issues that could arise and in many cases indicates appropriate use of technology.”
You can check your code at the following link:
http://validator.w3.org/
You can check for any errors in your CSS at this link:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Can Google Read, Understand and Follow Your Links?
Another important factor to keep in mind is the type of links you’re using. You want Google and other search engines to easily be able to follow all your links without getting stuck. Especially links that interlink to other pages and sections on your site!
JavaScript Links
If you’re using links within JavaScript, you’re probably making it hard for search engines to follow them. If you look into your analytics, you may even find that they don’t “crawl” those links at all. If they do, then they may not be giving them much weight and authority to them – if at all.
JavaScript links are almost always found in Flash-designed websites. When you see animated drop down menus and pretty effects that take place when you hover your mouse over a link, you can almost be sure that those links are in JavaScript. Therefore, many people want to have them.
Try to minimize or avoid JavaScript links. Use CSS vs. Flash. But if you just have to keep your JavaScript links, at least ensure that you add standard, plain-old HTML links too.
Flash…
Ok, we mentioned Flash… so let’s talk a bit more about it. Flash is very commonly used for slideshows, videos and other interactive elements of a site. It may look absolutely gorgeous to the user, but the search engine sees something entirely different. They don’t see all the pretty effects. They only see what content it can find (text, code and images). Example:
If your site uses Flash extensively and you aren’t ensuring there are other forms of content, as well as easy-to-follow HTML links then the search engine may very well think your big, pretty site is actually only a page or two… because it can’t find and follow all the links to other pages on your site. And having a single page site with very little content doesn’t sit well in the eyes of a search engine – and your rankings will likely suffer.
More recently, Google has figured out how to usually determine what is embedded within your Flash. That is – if your designer and/or coder has correctly used the code and followed the rules needed in order for this to happen. But for good practice, it’s best to use regular links so you’re sure that Google and other search engines can figure out what is on your site. Keep in mind too, that not all searchers use Google.
Links and “Blocked” Pages
The robots.txt was born in 1994 to give webmasters a way to tell the search engines which pages and sections of a given site should be and should not be seen by the search engine bots. Google and most of the big search engines read and follow the instructions in the robots.txt file. Some people do this to avoid any possible duplicate content, but that’s just one reason it’s used.
If you don’t want a page or section to be “read” by search engines, that’s fine. But here are a few things you need to keep in mind…
First, the search engine may not read exactly what’s on that page (pay any attention to it). But it still might index it. That means that people may still may find it while searching the internet.
Secondly, any links on that page will not be ‘picked up’ by the search engine. That means that if you have several good links pointing to that page and that page points to another page on your site… you aren’t going to get any link juice from it! If you’re telling the search engine to ignore the contents of that page, then you’re also telling it to ignore the links on that page. That can be bad news if you haven’t planned properly.
So let’s look at what you can do to keep search engines from reading the contents of a page without risking losing precious link juice…
No-index
Generally, using no-index is the best alternative. If you add ‘no-index’ AND you don’t add ‘no-index’ then search engine won’t pay attention the contents on that page. But you’ll still get any link juice that may be coming from that page.
An easy way to control this if you’re using Wordpress is to use the Meta plugin. Whenever you’re creating a page or post, you simply check off the option that you want for that page in the sidebar. Here’s what you would see in your right sidebar if you’re using it:
You can get the plugin at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/screenshots/
301 Redirect
If you have pages that have been deleted, moved or anything of that sort, you should be using a 301 redirect. With a 301 redirect, you’ll still get almost all of any link juice passing through that page. You can get all the juicy details about 301 redirects at:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Password Protection
If you have a page that has confidential information that you don’t want just anyone to be able to find, then use password protection. Never rely on the robots.txt for that, because as mentioned, the page can still easily show up in search results. You can also add the no-index meta tag to your password protected the page where you login. Don’t add nofollow. If that page has lots of links pointing to it from elsewhere then be sure you add some links from that page to other important pages on your site to get some of the link juice flowing.
Canonical Tag
If you’re simply trying to block search engines from a page for duplicate content issues, then use the canonical tag. It should look something like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yoursite.com/blog" />
For a complete understandings of this sometimes confusing tag, visit:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
Too Many Links
If you go by what Google’s Matt Cutts used to say, more than 100 links is just too many. While that was just meant to be used as a rule of thumb, the “100 links” part of explaining how many links are too many has disappeared. So how many links on a single page are too many? There’s no clear-cut answer to that.
So just keep these tips in mind… the more links you include on a single page, the less likelihood that Google will read those links.
Another important factor is that if you have a lot of links on a page, they will pass much less pagerank and link juice.
Your page will always keep most its page rank to itself. A small portion of it is passed on through links on the page. If you have multiple links on the page then all those links will “share” that smaller percent, so each page you’re linking to gets only a fraction of it.
Planning SEO Friendly URL’s
What is a pretty URL and a “dirty” URL? A dirty URL would look something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=6&view=simple
A pretty and SEO friendly URL would look something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/bikes/red
Before you even start building your site, you need to have a plan obviously. But something you may not have thought to plan properly is the layout for your URL’s. You don’t want those long, ugly URL’s for several reasons…
Hard to Remember
If someone told you to go to that dirty URL above, without giving you any kind of link to click (think your mom telling you on the phone the URL), it would be tedious and difficult to try to get to – right? Yep.
Not User Friendly
If you see a link like that, you really can’t tell much about what the page is supposed to be about – right? Yep. This could affect usability, as well as traffic to your site. Someone is much more likely to click on the pretty URL that gives them a clue as to what the page is about.
Security
See the question mark in the ugly URL? That’s often a point of entry for hackers. They can change what follows the question mark in an attempt to get into your site or even attack it. Not good.
To properly plan out your site and end up with a clean, easy to follow structure with pretty URL’s, you should be identifying the categories and any sub-categories while you’re doing your keyword research.
Draw out a basic tree showing your main page, going to different categories and then on to each page of each category. Think if you were going to show this sheet of paper to someone who has no clue about your site. Anyone should be able to look at it and easily follow it to find a particular section.
When you’re naming each of your pages, try to avoid product numbers, special characters and especially spaces. Also, use lower case letters.
URL’s and Wordpress
Wordpress is one of the most popular content management systems. If you’re going to be using it, don’t even start making pages until you’ve done the following… If you start creating posts or pages before you do this, then you’ll end up with pages that don’t exist and lots of linking errors that kill the flow of your link juice!
All-in-One SEO Plugin
You should download and install this plugin immediately. Go to te settings page and check the ‘enabled’ box.
• Put in your site’s title (include main keyword but don’t overdo it).
• Put in your site’s description (again, don’t just stuff it with keywords. It should be ‘readable’ and tell users about what they can expect to find on your site).
• Put in your keywords (use your main keywords, don’t put in a hundred keywords repeating lots of the same terms).
Lots of people stop there and assume all the other settings are already set pretty much like they should be. Don’t do that. If you use the default settings then every single page and post on your site will have your main site title, a vertical bar and then the page/post title. If your site’s name is long, it not very visually pleasing.
Take out the home title for single posts and pages. See the next page for what your settings should look like…
Once you have this set up, you’ve got a good start. Every time you post a new page or post though, don’t forget to put in unique values for your title, description and keywords. There will be an All-in-One-SEO box below your post when you’re writing it where you can do this, as you see here…
Permalinks
Now you need to set up your permalinks in order to get pretty links. Otherwise you’ll end up with those long, dirty, gibberish links. That’s just the default for how Wordpress works. To do this, go to your ‘Settings’ on the left and find ‘Permalinks’. Then it’s just a matter of selecting ‘Custom Structure’ and putting in the following:
/%category%/%postname%/
(see below):
DoFollow Links and NoFollow Links
Something else that we need to make sure you’re familiar with is the use of dofollow and nofollow on both your internal and external links. Very briefly:
• DoFollow – tells search engines to pass juice through the link • NoFollow – tells search engines not to pass juice through the
link • External links – links that link to other sites other than the
one you’re working on • Internal links – links to other pages or posts within the same
site that you’re working on • All links fall into these categories, whether text, images, etc…
If you use the nofollow tag properly, your site will be better read, understood and ranked by the search engines. If you don’t use it
at all or if you go throwing it in without understanding what you’re doing, it will almost certainly have a negative impact on your site. So let’s get to it…
A basic rule of thumb to go by is to only follow links that are linking to high PR, important pages, whether on your site or another site.
Where To Use The No Follow Tag
Images
There’s no reason for the search engines to follow links that link to where your image is hosted, just as you don’t want someone reading your site to go check out just the image all by itself on your server. You want them to soak in the content on your site and what you’re telling them or trying to sell them. Add nofollow to all of your image links.
Affiliates and Ads
It’s pretty commonly agreed that Google does not like affiliate sites. If you are running an affiliate site or blog, be sure that you nofollow all of the links going to the affiliate landing page or sales page.
The same goes for any ads that you may be running on your site, Nofollow them.
Be sure to re-ping your site pages after you have updated them with the “no follow” tag.
Where and When To Use DoFollow?
Using the nofollow in crucial areas as listed above will help your site rank better. The simple and proper use of nofollow may not jump your page drastically in search rankings, but every bit of good SEO you add helps.
Just as there are areas that you always want to use nofollow, there are also times where you should always use dofollow. If you’re linking to another page or section on your site that is related to your content on that page, then make it dofollow.
If you’re linking to a page with relevant information on another site that is a high PR page or on an authority site, go ahead and add dofollow to that, as well.
Doing this makes your site appear more important and natural, thus it will help you rank better. If you’re nofollowing everything, it can appear like you’re trying to ‘sculpt’ your PR and don’t give credit where credit is due.
It’s even better if the page you decide to link to has high PR on that particular page.
**Try to link to a RELATED page that has HIGH PR with a CONTEXTUAL RELEVANT link**
A contextual link that I’m referring to is one that uses a phrase or keyword related to what you’re talking about. If your page is about fixing a leaky sink faucet and you link to the DIY network page (with high PR) about doing it, it may look like this…
In this case, “fix a leaky faucet” would be linking to the page on the DIY Network. That’s a contextual link.
SEO Myths and Misunderstandings
The world of SEO is always changing. Within that world, there are tons of views, opinions and interpretations. One SEO expert could interpret something from Google or Matt Cutts one way and another could interpret it a totally different way. While there are a lot of grey lines, there are several myths and misunderstandings that are very common.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content… Oh my. If you try to ask someone on a forum, you’ll get a colorful variety of answers. A lot of people think that if you have any kind of duplicate content on your site that you’ll get penalized. A lot of people think that if you syndicate an article with duplicate content, it won’t get indexed. Let’s try to make this understandable…
Here is how the DIY Network says is the easiest way to fix a leaky faucet without spending a lot of money.
Duplicate content is simply content that appears on more than one URL on the internet. Google doesn’t ‘penalize’ that content. However, they can’t show 10k results of the same thing. So what do they have left to do?
They’ll take all the different URL’s of where the content is found and only display one or some of them. Who gets lucky enough to be one of the results they show? Google tries to figure out which one was the original one OR which is more ‘trusted’ If one site has no PageRank, no backlinks and very little traffic and another showing the same content is the website of a national newspaper, guess who will probably win. Yeah… the newspaper. It’s credible and more trusted.
Here’s an amazing description of duplicate content with nice diagrams to give you a better understanding:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
Reciprocal Linking
Reciprocal linking has gotten a very bad rap. Some people (most people) say that Google does not like them, doesn’t respect them and even penalizes your site if you have too many of them. Reciprocal linking is simply two sites that link to each other.
The truth is that Google doesn’t like massive, automated reciprocal link building that is meant for search engine ranking purposes. It doesn’t have anything against reciprocal links at the core of it. Reciprocal links are natural! That is, as long as it happens natural. Go ahead. Look at your top competitors (ranking in the top of search results in Google for what you want to rank for). Go to Analyzebacklinks.com and put their URL in. If
you dig deep enough, you’re almost guaranteed to find reciprocal links.
The dark side of reciprocal linking is what Google doesn’t like, massive pages with tons of links all for the purpose of getting a backlink themselves. That’s what a lot of directories do. You know, where you want to submit your site to a directory but in order to do so, you have to link to them first? Yeah. Google doesn’t like that.
But if you have a site about saving your marriage and you link to a helpful resource about saving a marriage – they notice you linked to them and they mention your site in an article they write… that’s perfectly natural. And done right, you can get a lot of targeted traffic from it.
Quality Links and Trust Rank
Don’t jump on board of the biggest linking packages you can find just to get ‘tons’ of links. Sure, more backlinks are almost always a good thing. But you also need quality links:
• Links that come from high PR, trusted, authority sites.
• Links that come from high PR pages that are related to your site
• Links that are contextual (relevant)
• Links that come from sites with a really good trust rank
• Links from lots of different websites
Trust rank? What?
Google TrustRank, the big boy stuff, This is where you can really make your site successful… if it gets good TrustRank. Unfortunately, they’ve never come right out and said they use it
or what it is or how it works. But it’s obvious it’s real and you need to understand it. You need to make it a priority.
Trust rank is pretty much just that. How much value Google gives your site and how trusted of a site they think that your site is. So how can you help improve your trust rank? Here are some things to consider for getting a better trust rank…
Quality
Everything you do should be to give visitors to your site a better experience and help them achieve whatever it is they came to your site to do… whether that’s learning about something or to buy something.
Blogging
If you consistently post quality content to your blog, then you’re showing visitors and Google that you care about whatever the subject your website is related to.
Tweeting, Facebook Google+
Use them. I don’t care if it’s one or all, but be genuine and be active. Not only does this help you interact with others in your industry and your target audience, but it builds your ‘brand’ and Google is using social indicators in determining your site’s rankings.
Legalities
Make sure you have a privacy policy, about us, terms and conditions and a contact page. If you need to collect sensitive information, make sure you get SSL for your site. All of this makes you look ‘real’ and credible to Google.
Backlinks
Yep, we’re back to linking again. Links, on your site and pointing to your site, are a huge part of how well your site ranks and how much trust rank you ‘deserve’. Make sure you get a variety of backlinks and always be on the lookout for backlink possibilities from large, authority or niche-relevant sites.
