Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. In this article find out how to do basic SEO, code search engine friendly pages and how to do a basic promotion of your site.
For this I will use one of sites I’ve made, it is AdSense site and it follows SEO rules and it is good example what to do and what not to do. This site is http://www.aboutdoghealth.org/ so let’s start from the top.
Things to do
Keywords in URL
For example http://www.aboutdoghealth.org/ use whole words – keywords to best describe your site. Don’t rely on this if you don’t have keywords in other parts of your site.
Keywords in <title> tag
This shows search results as your page title, so this is one of the most important things and it shouldn’t be long 5-6 words max, and use keyword at the beginning.
Keywords in anchor texts
Also very important, especially for the anchor text, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.
Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)
One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.
Keywords in the beginning of a document
While coding your page put your main content before side bar. Because this also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings
Keywords in <alt> tags
Spiders don’t read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.
Anchor text of inbound links
This is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don’t, it is still OK.
Origin of inbound links
It is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable and the .edu and .gov sites are the most reputable
Links from similar sites
Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.
Metatags
Metatags are becoming less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are the <description> and <keywords> ones.
Unique content
Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s rankings.
Frequency of content change
Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.
Site Accessibility
Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can’t be indexed.
Sitemap
It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.
Things not to do
Keyword stuffing
Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.
Keyword dilution
When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.
Single pixel links
when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.
Cross-linking
Crosslinking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A
Duplicate content
When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned
Doorway pages
Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.
Cloaking
Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.
Invisible text
This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don’t be surprised by the penalty.
Illegal Content
Using other people’s copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.
Flash
Spiders don’t index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don’t forget to give it an alternative textual description. And also don’t have just flash home page without HTML one.
Frames
Frames are very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.
Redirects (301 and 302)
When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page.
Bans in robots.txt
If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site.
Session IDs
This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don’t use session IDs for information that you’d like to be indexed by spiders.
