Basic SEO advice
What anyone could do for their websites
article by Googlerankings.com staff, 06.11.2004.
While
this document will not guarantee top placement for you in any search engines,
it will increase your chances to be included in the relevant results.
Consider the information below to be subjective advice, and advice only,
which have been assembled based on both experience and research. Please
note that all search engine technologies are constantly evolving, rendering
only month-old tricks to deceive their methods useless. The only way to
keep your website at a proper place of search results is - as general
it sounds - providing content that people are both interested in and are
looking for.
In
general, search engines have been designed by people who are skilled at
gathering, storing and analyzing data, programmers, mathematicians and
other talented people with innovative ideas. However in the age when nearly
anyone in the free world can access the internet, the ratio of people
used to handling raw information have rapidly decreased. In other words,
most people do not think about information the way search engine designers
would.
Search engine optimization ( SEO ) is the bridge over the gap, it is to
bring people with average computer skills, and the information they look
for together. It overlaps the sometimes still too mathematics-based search
engine technology, and takes you a step closer to your target audience.
SEO should be about examining how people are looking up information on
the web, and not how you may trick them into visiting your website.
1.: Choosing your Keywords
- A research done
by Entireweb
31% of people enter 2 word phrases into search engines, 25% of all users
look for 3 word combinations and only about 19% of them try their luck
with only a single word.
- Do not choose a
keyword to optimize your site for that you don't have the slightest
chance of ranking good with because of the fierce competition.
- Do not choose a
keyword that nobody looks for.
- Do not choose a
keyword that does not relate strongly enough to your content.
- Only use generally
popular keywords if you do not need targeted traffic.
- Do not use words
that may get your site filtered or banned from search engines.
- Do not use images
with filenames or ALT tags ( Alt attributes of IMG tag ) that may get
your site filtered or banned from search engines.
- Only use dynamic
pages when the functionality demands it.
- Use lots of relevant
content, well laid out into separate pages.
- For best results
optimize one page for one keyword.
- Do not post half-finished
sites.
2.: HTML <HEAD> Content
2.1.: <Title>
Tag
3.: Content
- The text on the
page should contain the keywords right at the beginning of the page.
- Do not overuse
keywords. Neither keyword should take up more than 12-24% of the entire
body text. It is often considered as spam.
- Do not use too
much content right on the front page. Both loading time and redundancy
of additional words used will reduce the chance of showing up in relevant
searches.
4.: HTML Code Page
- In case your website
uses a language different than the default of the search engine which
your target audience prefers, or your website uses special characters
unique to that language, make sure to implement the proper HTML codepage
tag.
- Unicode versions
of special characters ( HTML encoded characters ) are more or less impossible
to look up in most search engines.
5.: Search Engine
Basics
- Search engines
operate by funds as well. Funds are collected either from selling advertisement
placement, selling listings, or both. When a search engine company sells
out the area above the search results as advertisement space, and displays
only relevant results based on what the users were looking for, most
people will be mislead by the placement of such links, and choose them
instead of the actual results.
- Search engines
that operate by funds generated by selling listings will not show your
website within the results regardless of its relevance, unless you sign
up for their service.
- You may be listed
for free even on fee based search engines by getting your site listed
on either of the directories the search engine company buys information
from. However, such directories such as Yahoo.com
and DMOZ.org are
moderated based on relevance and content, thus getting listed on their
websites may take some time and efforts.
- Most search engines
rank your website by relevance, which is measured by the thresold of
keywords.
- Some search engines,
such as Google.com as well, will sort even relevant sites by their popularity,
measuring the page rank by the actual links leading to the site. Also,
the text or ALT TAG text accompanied with these links will influence
the keywords the website is shown in the listings for.
- Some search engines
will consider a website more and more popular when they are clicked
on the results page. These inlude AltaVista.com
.
6.: Do not overdo
it, but do everything you can
- Eventhough META
tags have been neglected by most major search engines, some of them
still consider them when analyzing websites. Including them in the proper
manner can only help, but will never hurt your position.
- When trying to
trick search engines, you try to trick their creators, who are more
than prepared to deal with this.
- Most search engines
are updated at least annually to deal with the websites that found a
way to deceive their systems.
Most of the websites that have ever used such tactics get blacklisted.
- In order to allow
web-spiders ( analyzing programs that surf the net and categorise websites
) to inspect all of your webpages, place a file named "robots.txt"
in the root directory of your website with the following content:
# /robtots.txt
# no exclusion at all
Agent: *
Disallow:
7.: Example of
the basics
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Online Library - Out of print books
by Nonexistantlib.org</TITLE>
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Books,
Library, Author, Authors, Title, Titles, Out of print, Old Books, Rare
Books, Online Library">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Online
Library is a collection of rare or out of print books. Search by author,
title, or content. ">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1> Welcome
to the Online Library </H1>
<H6> Here you will find a collection of rare or out-of-print books
in electronic format. We provide you with a comprehensive search, so
you can look up any book by author, title, or its content <H6>
<P><H5><A
HREF="main.html">Click here to proceed to the Online Library></A></H5></P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Advanced SEO Advice
For established websites, refer to the Website Diagnostics articles at Googlerankings.com Diagnostics
articles by Googlerankings.com, 11.2006. through 05.2007.
Since SEO may differ for each and every sector, Internet Marketing and Search Engine Marketing trends shift on a near weekly basis, the DOs in search engine optimization are as vague as the ever-developing online supply and demand. Ethics, guidelines , written and unwritten rules of conduct are also vary for different areas, and while a less competitive sector may not require all that much effort in bringing a new website to the attention of the public, over populated areas produce new visions, methods and even spam on a daily basis.
Hence, the faces of SEO range from opportunism to great new marketing innovation, and there is no definite rule in what to do to reach one's goal. On the other hand, and especially because of this, Search Engines have to keep up their proper indexing and categorization efforts in order to provide relevant result, in which process they filter out websites from their results that are ( or are sending false signals to be ) in any way below the quality, accessibility, trust or importance thresholds. Also should a website be, or show signals of guideline breaches or illegal content, Search Engines may penalize and/or ban their presence from the search results, temporarily or permanently.
The DOs in SEO vary a lot, possibilities and combinations are infinite. One may experiment with any campaign freely, but only with a relative knowledge of the DONTs will a website be able to maintain a sustainable development plan.
Googlerankings.com has launched a section for the diagnostics of Search Engine Optimization related problems, including the most common accessibility and usability problems, PageRank, Linking and Anchor Text related issues, and a series of generic and very current problems an established or startup website may face in order to be properly indexed, and stay that way. You can build up your knowledge of Google Penalties and Bans and Quality Filters in order to make sure that your website is not only of quality, but also sends the proper signals to Google and other search egnines.
The list of Common Issues included
Duplicate content in Google
Supplemental Results
Omitted results in Google
Canonical URLs
Bulk update
Google PageRank
TrustRank
Website navigation
Buying links
Link Schemes
Bad neighborhood
Accessibility and Usability
issues
Anchor text link
Scraper sites
Hijacking Google results
Historic domain penalty
DMOZ snippets
Removing a web site from
the Google Index
Google Sitemaps
Reinclusion requests
The Google sandbox
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