Search Engine Optimization Basics- ASZX

Paying someone for Search Engine Optimization can be expensive, and finding someone who is actually worth that money can be next to impossible. This article should help you understand the core concepts behind search engine optimization, and help you to put them to work immeadiately.

To begin, I'd like to talk about what Search Engine Optimization is, and what is isn't. It isn't some magical formula to getting millions of hits overnight, there are no real tricks, it is primarily a way of formatting and organizing your website in a way which results in the best possible rankings for your site in search engines. I will say up front that the algorithms the search engines use are not perfect, and as a result some of these techniques can be manipulated in ways that get you better rankings than you probably deserve (this is called black hat seo, I will not being going into the details of some of these advanced techniques in this article.)

What do I mean by deserve? Well, let's say you create a page all about some topic you are an expert in. A search engine could care less about your page, it has no way to tell if your article is worthy of a Pulitzer or written in broken English by an eight year old. Technically the page written by the eight year old could be well optimized, but that certainly doesn't mean the eight year old's page deserve to be higher than your well written article. So it must rely on a combination of factors to find the best articles about all sorts of topics for the users of search engines, the study and application of how that is done is search engine optimization.

So if your website is just a bunch of keywords listed with no real quality information, the search engines have ways of figuring this out. I'll get into the specifics of just how this is done later, but for now I'd like you to understand that search engines simply want quality content that is relevant to what their searchers are looking for, so the first step should be to actually have that quality content, and let everything else follow from there.

I'll start by looking at a single page of content (whether it is an article, a product you sell, or a biography about yourself)...

So you have this awesome article now, yet you still aren't getting very much (if any) traffic to it. The good news is, the hard part is over with (writing quality content), now it is a matter of making a few changes on your page, and to start you need to think of a few good keywords to use.

Keyword Selection

The biggest mistake I see with people who get this far, is choosing the wrong keywords to target. An SEO beginner will almost immediately start targeting the 'big' keywords, and wonder why they aren't making any progress. Your goal cannot be (at least not at first) to be ranked near the top of a search for some keyword that is very hotly contested. It is often a better idea to try to get ranked on 2nd or 3rd level keywords. When I owned my first web development company, I choose to target my local area and then the primary keyword (i.e. 'web design florida', 'web designer california', or 'website design new york'). After some hard work, I became #1 for 'web design florida' and stayed there for years to come. As the site became more established, I eventually made it to #1 for 'website design', and in the top 5 for 'web design' but that was long after I had already established the site using these secondary keywords. If I had tried to target 'web design' right off-the-bat, the site would have never made any real progress.

There are two primary benefits to starting out in this way:

You are more likely to receive traffic from search engines with these secondary keywords in the beginning stages. If you try right away to target the 'big keywords', your site is likely to appear on the back pages where no one will ever see your site. But with the secondary keywords, you are much more likely to appear on the first page, and thus get some traffic. Even if the primary keyword gets 100,000 searches a day, and the secondary only gets 1,000, being on the front page of the secondary will get you some hits vs. absolutely nothing (aside from some spam bots).
The ability to parlay your success with the secondary keywords, into targetting the primary ones later. For example, when I was listed #1 for 'web design florida' I was getting a good amount of traffic. Being highly ranked for 'web design florida', means that some of that will rub off on the term 'web design' itself, making it easier in the future to achieve top rankings for 'web design'. So it can be a good idea to keep this in mind when choosing your secondary keywords.

95% of sites will fall into the above category, but there are some niche sites which won't have to worry about it. Run a search for your keywords to get an idea of what you're up against.

Now that you have a good idea of the type of keywords you should be targeting, it's time to actually choose them. There are some great tools out there for analyzing trends in searches (which I'll most likely be posting about at a later time), for now we'll just stick to the search engines themselves. Often the best way to choose keywords is to ask yourself: what would a potential customer (or any visitor that would benefit from your site) type into a search engine to find your page. It may be abstract, but you know your industry better than anyone, just make sure it isn't too abstract and that a large percentage of your potential customers would actually type into a search engine to find you.

Aspects relating to the ranking of your site

Incoming Links
If you've spent any time researching optimization at all, then you've undoubtedly heard of the importance of incoming links. There are plenty of techniques to getting well ranked sites to link to you, but this article is about optimization so I'll save link building for another article, but I will elaborate a bit on why it is so important.

This is the primary method search engines use to distinguish between a useless bunch of keywords copied on to a page, and an extremely useful one that would benefit their searchers article written by an eight year old, and that which deserves a Pulitzer. They depend on other people/websites to link to it, and rank it using information from those links (using criteria like: quality of the page it came from, what the link 'said', how many pages link to it, etc...).   This is one of the reasons they weigh the anchor text of incoming links (links from other web sites) so heavily. It is possible that the author of the best page on the web about a given topic knows absolutely nothing about SEO, but that shouldn't mean that his article is excluded from the search results.    For example, if there is some page that people link to far more often than any other when talking about a certain topic, it makes sense that that page would appear near the top of the rankings.

interesting side notes:

Wikipedia Rankings - When Wikipedia came onto the scene thousands of their articles became the best of their kind of the Internet. As a result Internet users began linking to the Wikipedia articles more than any other articles for each keyword, and this is now the reason you see Wikipedia articles near the top of many search terms.
The Google Bomb - Not too long ago if you ran a search for 'failure', George W. Bush's official website would appear. I can assure you that the White House was not targeting that keyword, instead many web site owners came together and linked to President Bush's website with the anchor text as 'failure'.   So much so that it was linked to with the text 'failure' more so than any other web site on the Internet, and therefore search engines believed it to be the most relevant.

You can use this same concept to get better rankings for your site. You aren't supposed to have control over how others link to you, but it is possible to link to yourself if you own other domains, or even pay for links on quality sites..   Outside of that, you will not control how others link to you, all you can do is help guide them by writing titles and headings that contain your most important keywords, and are also appealing.

This same concept applies to internal links (links from within your own site), I'll be discussing that a little later when I start looking at the site as a whole.
URL
- Domain name: If you don't already have a domain name, then it might be a good idea to pick one that has one of your most important keywords in it... it just give that little extra boost when search engines are trying to determine relevance. If you already have your domain, don't worry about it, it isn't a big deal. In fact choosing a domain name deserves its own article.
- File name: Choosing your file names is also important. For instance, if your page is about 2008 Ford Mustangs, it is a good idea to name it 2008_ford_mustang.html, instead of 2008fordmustang.html, mustang.html, or worse some name with no relevance (i.e. page1.html). This is connected to what I was saying earlier in keyword selection, you might be tempted to think that naming your page mustang.html will get you better results since there are more searches on that keyword... but for the reasons mention already, keep it specific and relevant to your topic.
Page Title
The title of your page is very important. Not only because it is given a significant amount of weight when search engines are attempting to determine your pages' relevance, but it is also the first thing your visitors see when your site comes up in the search results, and heavily influences their decision to enter your site. So while it is a must to include your most important keyword in the title (and your 2nd if you can work it in), you should also be mindful that this is the first thing users will see about your page when deciding to enter, so it should also be readable to a human and even enticing.
Content in page
I have already talked about the necessity of providing actual quality content before anything, now I'll go into some details on what you can do within that content to improve the page's ranking without taking anything away from the content itself.
- Headings: I am referring here to <h1><h2>...<h6> tags. Text that is placed within these tags is automatically given higher priority over your normal text, so it is a good idea to place your keywords in heading tags. It is also a good idea not to use all <h1>'s, and mix it up properly (i.e. your most important in h1, 2nd most in h2... I realize this isn't always possible, but it is a good idea to keep it in mind). If you can, you will probably want to use a little CSS to modify the appearance of each tag (change font size/type/color), otherwise your h1's will be quite large. If you don't know CSS, either google it, or just stick to h2's and h3's.
- Keyword Density: It may be tempting to want to list a whole load of keywords deliberately in your paragraphs, unfortunately if you don't do it properly your page will be penalized for keyword spamming. Before search engine algorithms got 'smart', it was actually beneficial to simply list thousands of keywords on your page somewhere (for obvious reasons). But eventually the search engines caught on, and started blocking such efforts.
  
  A good rule of thumb is to make sure your content is completely logical, readable, and understandable to a human being. So you should repeat your most important keyword a few times throughout the page, but only in sentences where it makes sense to do so, and never back to back. Also try to avoid 'keyword lists', like: "we offer blue widgets, red widgets, big widgets, small widgets, cheap widgets...", it may be true that you offer all of that, but if you go too far you can lose some 'points' for potential keyword spamming. More on 'points' later.
Extras

Images: It is a good idea to name your images with your keywords. If for instance you have a picture of a 2008 Ford Mustang, it is better to name it 2008_ford_mustang.jpg, than 437g70ox54.jpg.
Image Alt tags: The idea behind an alt tag is to describe what the picture is for those who cannot view pictures (text based browsers, mobile browsers, and the vision impaired). It also happens to be a great place to work in one of your keywords (try to use a different keyword in each picture if you can, avoiding too many duplicates, and remember the descriptions should still make sense). Just in case you don't know what I mean:
```
<img src="image_name.gif" width="100" height="100"  alt="type your alt description here">
```

Search engine optimization points

When thinking about each of contributing aspects of your site, you should think of it as contributing points toward given keyword. Where when you have all aspects working together, it multiplies your point number. Also if you go too far and end up keyword spamming, or thought to be cheating in some way you will lose points (or be banned altogether if you are really out to deceive). This concept of a multiplier is very important to understanding how some sites can rank so much higher than others when all else seems equal, this is a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, optimization is about assembling those parts.

Meta tags

There was a time when meta tags were one of the most important parts of an optimization strategy. Now the joke is if you want to tell if your SEO is competent, just ask him about the importance of meta tags, if he goes on and on how important they are, it's time to get a new SEO. Anyway, while some site owners may go completely without meta tags they can still be useful, and I would still recommend including them for awhile to come.

Meta tags used to tell search engines about your website, and are actually one of the reasons keywords became so prevalent in SEO (there is a 'keywords' meta tag). There was a time when entering a keyword in your meta tag meant your site would pop up in the results for that keyword in certain search engines (provided it had been crawled and indexed). Search engines quickly realized it wasn't such a good idea to rely on the site owners alone to tell them about the pages, because they would inevitably embellish details and do anything they could to get all the hits they could. Just about all search engines have moved away from this practice, and now rely on more complicated algorithm that better reflects what the searcher is actually looking for.

Why use meta tags?

While the big search engines aren't indexing based upon meta data any longer, some smaller ones are. There are numerous smaller websites, and directories out there that still rely on meta tags to describe your information from your meta tags. Any benefit here will be small, but including meta tags won't hurt. So if you aren't in a huge rush, why not take a few seconds and write your meta tags, in the beginning every little bit helps.

Incoming (internal) / Outgoing links

Continuing with the points analogy, let's say your site has 100 points. You can increase those points by having other quality pages link to this page. On the other hand, if you link away from that page some of those points will be transferred to the page your linking to. This has a few consequences...

There are people who say that if an entire site has 1,000 points you cannot increase or decrease this amount, only change how it is used. I disagree, or at least I believe it is possible to shift those points around in such a way that there is a great net benefit. The most important example of this is the necessity of linking your pages together properly (internally, all within the same site).

Internal linking

When I talk about internal linking I am referring to each of the pages within your same site linking to each other. There are two extremes here, first where no page links to any other page (except for perhaps the home page), and where every page is linked to every other page (which is acceptable for a small site <10 pages). As with most things in life, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. You are likely to end up with some pages being more important than others, (these could be your sales pages, high traffic, or best quality pages), so try to balance your links out with this in mind, place your most important links near the top of the page. (the first link on a page gets more weight than the 20th)

The two most important things to remember are to limit the number of internal links to a reasonable amount (avoiding long link lists), and make sure the pages you do link are relevant to your current page. Again, make sure the anchor text of each of these links is chosen carefully. When you have a large number of pages, it can be good to vary the anchor text slightly where it doesn't take away from readability. For example, if one anchor is 'Samsung HDTVs', when there are a large number of pages it can often be beneficial to include slight variations like 'Samsung High Definition TVs' or 'Samsung High Definition Televisions', your users will still understand what you are saying, but you'll also pick up some 'points' for other keywords.

Outgoing links

One of the ways search engines began combating excessive link trading was to establish penalties for outgoing links. Don't let this discourage you from linking to relevant websites, in fact the complete lack of links can actually hurt your site (it makes it look like your site isn't 'normal, and you are intentionally trying to manipulate ranking, though this is only true for extreme cases). So if your article is a review of some product, go ahead and link to that product, but don't place a bunch of outgoing links to other random sites on there... you will only be hurting your own page.

This concept also works to nullify link trades (e.g. site A ---> site B (+2 points) & site B ---> site A (-2 points) ). There is reason to believe that there is a small net benefit when fully relevant sites link to each other, but just remember to keep it limited to relevant sites.

Try to implement as many of these ideas into your site as possible, but always remember to never sacrifice the users experience to do so. Best of luck.

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Comments

Devver

This is a great starting point, I've rehashed basically your entire article in the past trying to explain to clients how the core of SEO works.. probably easier to just tell them to read something like this before talking to you... lol thanks

Friday 02 January 2009, 14:35

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