A Beginners Guide to SEO
A beginners guide to Search Engine Optimisation and selling online.
If you are just starting your carrier in SEO /On line marketing, it can be very difficult to understand where to start. Because of internet you have so many resources available but too much knowledge can be a problem as well.
I found it very useful to have a clear path in front of me so I would like to share this with everyone.
This article gives you tips for not only optimising a site but also making sure that it sells well online if it is e-commerce site and achieves its goal if it is a non e-commerce site.
So here is my guide for the beginners
1. Study the website for structure usability first.
This is very important to do before you actually start optimising the site.
This helps your develop the strategy whether you need additional pages (example If your site is using dynamic pages you will be better off creating some plain html pages which are Search engine friendly and easy for the bots to crawl.
Site usability is very important for your site visitors.
The more user friendly your site is the more likely your visitors will convert.
2. Get key words/ phrases from your clients.
Getting correct key word and key phrases is absolutely essential as this is what determines whether your site will get general traffic or targeted traffic. If your key words are too general they will bring volume of traffic which probably will not give you conversions (This can be sale/ lead, anything that is the client's goal). Again general key words / phrases are harder to achieve rankings for. So make sure you choose correct key words when starting.
To find different variations of a keyword and to find its search popularity use
Google own keyword suggestion tool or Search for Keyword Research tools on line.
Although this is meant to be for PPC but there is no harm in using it for natural listings.
Remember : Always start optimising for the correct keywords. Don't start with the low competition keywords .Once the search engines (especially Google) ranks your site for these lower keywords it becomes very hard to achieve rankings for the more competitive keywords.
I also recommend starting an adwords campaign if possible for this site. See what keywords converting the best so that you can try to use them while optimising the site which give better rankings for keywords which result into better conversions.
3. Now start optimising the site. Start with the homepage and once you are happy with
the home page follow it through the other pages.
There are mainly two parts of optimisation:
3.1 On page optimisation:
a. Page titles are the most important. Use your keywords in title tags. Have your most important keywords first and then the second and so on. Google only takes up to 4/5 words characters in consideration while Yahoo takes more.
b. Meta keywords, Meta descriptions are also important. Meta descriptions are the one that appears with your search results. Since Dewey update Google is also using Meta descriptions with your search results. So make sure that it is attractive and briefly describes your services.
Your page should support the keywords you are optimising for by having appropriate content.
Your online audience/visitors won't wait to read each and every part of your page, so you have to make sure that your content is useful and easy for your visitors to read.
c. Use HTML header tags.
H1 tag is very important for search engines.
So having your keywords in this tag at the beginning of the page can also be beneficial.
Then dividing your content into nice, easily readable chunks by using further HTML tags as headings describing content underneath in short. You can use H2, H3 upto H6 HTML tags for making the content attractive and easy to read.
Remember:
You can only optimise one page for 2/3 keywords so don't overdo it.
Do not use your keywords more than necessary as this makes it look like spam/Black hat /Bad SEO.
The content /text on your page should be unique and giving useful information to your visitors.
Make sure you do not copy it from somewhere as this could result in a penalty by Search Engines.
Start putting articles about your products, your industry on your website.
This unique content will draw visitors to your site and also make it tempting for others to start linking to your site/article.
d. Use ALT tags for your images . These are for the people who are unable to view images .Make sure that it describes the image and not only your keyword.
e. Internal Linking
It is important to start linking to your pages internally. This is best done by putting some textual content on a page and using the keywords as your Anchor text to link to a relevant page.
Make sure that do not overdo it.
Benefits are better indexed and ranked internal pages giving a chance for better conversions as it reduces the amount of clicks a user has to go through to find a desired page.
3.2 Off page optimisation
Link Building
Along with optimising your pages another very important factor to look at is link building.
Links work as a vote to your site. The more votes your site gets the better chance it stands for better rankings.
This also improves the page rank of your websites pages.
Although page rank does not play a major part in rankings but if your site has good page rank (measured on the scale of 1-10) it shows that your site is well linked from others and it is likely that other sites might want to link with yours.
a. Start building link s from directories/ relevant websites along side. Good way to find out about this is looking at competitor links. Getting links from authority websites in your particular industry is great because they make your site trustworthy for search engines. Yahoo gives good information about a site backlinks
Linkdomain:www.competitorsite.com
b. Get links from forums/review sites depending upon the industry your site belongs
c. Get links by publishing articles on different websites or use online press release services.
Submissions
Search engines like to find the sites themselves through links from other sites but some times it can be useful to submit the site manually by going onto the search engines particularly if it s brand new site.
Automated submissions are no longer liked by Search engines (At least the major players don't like them)
4. Keep adding good content every so often.
Remember this should be a continual process and done regularly.
Keep adding unique content which is optimised for search engines and they will keep coming back to you for more.
5. Install Google analytics.
It is important that you track how your work is affecting the performance.
This is a great analytics software/tool and is free. You can also start tracking your adwords into the analytics giving you all in one statistical data.
An interesting observation I have made is if you have a site which does not get crawled frequently by Google bots, after installing Google Analytics it gets more visits from the Googlebots.
Also sign up for Google webmaster tools, this gives you a good idea about your TOP search queries, your indexed pages, any problems with your pages/URLs and links pointing your pages.
Special Notes:
1.Add Robots.txt file to the root of your domain to allow or disallow robots to go in and index any particular parts of your website.
2.Use 301 redirects for any pages which are getting replaced by new pages .These redirects are Search engine friendly and they tell the search engines that a page is permanently moved to another location ,transfer all the association(indexing ,ranking) to the new page.
If you are just starting your carrier in SEO /On line marketing, it can be very difficult to understand where to start. Because of internet you have so many resources available but too much knowledge can be a problem as well.
I found it very useful to have a clear path in front of me so I would like to share this with everyone.
This article gives you tips for not only optimising a site but also making sure that it sells well online if it is e-commerce site and achieves its goal if it is a non e-commerce site.
So here is my guide for the beginners
1. Study the website for structure usability first.
This is very important to do before you actually start optimising the site.
This helps your develop the strategy whether you need additional pages (example If your site is using dynamic pages you will be better off creating some plain html pages which are Search engine friendly and easy for the bots to crawl.
Site usability is very important for your site visitors.
The more user friendly your site is the more likely your visitors will convert.
2. Get key words/ phrases from your clients.
Getting correct key word and key phrases is absolutely essential as this is what determines whether your site will get general traffic or targeted traffic. If your key words are too general they will bring volume of traffic which probably will not give you conversions (This can be sale/ lead, anything that is the client's goal). Again general key words / phrases are harder to achieve rankings for. So make sure you choose correct key words when starting.
To find different variations of a keyword and to find its search popularity use
Google own keyword suggestion tool or Search for Keyword Research tools on line.
Although this is meant to be for PPC but there is no harm in using it for natural listings.
Remember : Always start optimising for the correct keywords. Don't start with the low competition keywords .Once the search engines (especially Google) ranks your site for these lower keywords it becomes very hard to achieve rankings for the more competitive keywords.
I also recommend starting an adwords campaign if possible for this site. See what keywords converting the best so that you can try to use them while optimising the site which give better rankings for keywords which result into better conversions.
3. Now start optimising the site. Start with the homepage and once you are happy with
the home page follow it through the other pages.
There are mainly two parts of optimisation:
3.1 On page optimisation:
a. Page titles are the most important. Use your keywords in title tags. Have your most important keywords first and then the second and so on. Google only takes up to 4/5 words characters in consideration while Yahoo takes more.
b. Meta keywords, Meta descriptions are also important. Meta descriptions are the one that appears with your search results. Since Dewey update Google is also using Meta descriptions with your search results. So make sure that it is attractive and briefly describes your services.
Your page should support the keywords you are optimising for by having appropriate content.
Your online audience/visitors won't wait to read each and every part of your page, so you have to make sure that your content is useful and easy for your visitors to read.
c. Use HTML header tags.
H1 tag is very important for search engines.
So having your keywords in this tag at the beginning of the page can also be beneficial.
Then dividing your content into nice, easily readable chunks by using further HTML tags as headings describing content underneath in short. You can use H2, H3 upto H6 HTML tags for making the content attractive and easy to read.
Remember:
You can only optimise one page for 2/3 keywords so don't overdo it.
Do not use your keywords more than necessary as this makes it look like spam/Black hat /Bad SEO.
The content /text on your page should be unique and giving useful information to your visitors.
Make sure you do not copy it from somewhere as this could result in a penalty by Search Engines.
Start putting articles about your products, your industry on your website.
This unique content will draw visitors to your site and also make it tempting for others to start linking to your site/article.
d. Use ALT tags for your images . These are for the people who are unable to view images .Make sure that it describes the image and not only your keyword.
e. Internal Linking
It is important to start linking to your pages internally. This is best done by putting some textual content on a page and using the keywords as your Anchor text to link to a relevant page.
Make sure that do not overdo it.
Benefits are better indexed and ranked internal pages giving a chance for better conversions as it reduces the amount of clicks a user has to go through to find a desired page.
3.2 Off page optimisation
Link Building
Along with optimising your pages another very important factor to look at is link building.
Links work as a vote to your site. The more votes your site gets the better chance it stands for better rankings.
This also improves the page rank of your websites pages.
Although page rank does not play a major part in rankings but if your site has good page rank (measured on the scale of 1-10) it shows that your site is well linked from others and it is likely that other sites might want to link with yours.
a. Start building link s from directories/ relevant websites along side. Good way to find out about this is looking at competitor links. Getting links from authority websites in your particular industry is great because they make your site trustworthy for search engines. Yahoo gives good information about a site backlinks
Linkdomain:www.competitorsite.com
b. Get links from forums/review sites depending upon the industry your site belongs
c. Get links by publishing articles on different websites or use online press release services.
Submissions
Search engines like to find the sites themselves through links from other sites but some times it can be useful to submit the site manually by going onto the search engines particularly if it s brand new site.
Automated submissions are no longer liked by Search engines (At least the major players don't like them)
4. Keep adding good content every so often.
Remember this should be a continual process and done regularly.
Keep adding unique content which is optimised for search engines and they will keep coming back to you for more.
5. Install Google analytics.
It is important that you track how your work is affecting the performance.
This is a great analytics software/tool and is free. You can also start tracking your adwords into the analytics giving you all in one statistical data.
An interesting observation I have made is if you have a site which does not get crawled frequently by Google bots, after installing Google Analytics it gets more visits from the Googlebots.
Also sign up for Google webmaster tools, this gives you a good idea about your TOP search queries, your indexed pages, any problems with your pages/URLs and links pointing your pages.
Special Notes:
1.Add Robots.txt file to the root of your domain to allow or disallow robots to go in and index any particular parts of your website.
2.Use 301 redirects for any pages which are getting replaced by new pages .These redirects are Search engine friendly and they tell the search engines that a page is permanently moved to another location ,transfer all the association(indexing ,ranking) to the new page.
Source...