I’ve posted a few articles on my website about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and have received a handful of emails about how to make your website more SEO friendly, so here’s a very basic “high level” plan. For all of you SEO junkies out there … please feel free to contribute but keep in mind this is meant as a basic guide.
So if you’re anything like the countless hundreds of thousands of people out there, you’ve spent a good deal of time putting together a website and you’ve already learn a lot but nobody’s coming … why not? Well there’s a few basic things to look at and I’d like to recommend you start with these 3 Simple SEO Tips for Your Web Site if you want to be competitive on the Internet.
If you’ve heard of SEO but have no idea what it is, here’s the basics. It stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s the process of making your website more friendly for companies such as Google and MSN. Try typing anything from apple to zebra into Google and you’ll get millions of results. The results you’re looking at are called SERP’s … or .. Search Engine Result Pages (we techies love a good acronym). Optimizing your website specifically so that’s it’s more “Search Engine Friendly” is a process designed to help Google find content on your site and index it properly.
So if you’re ready to get started and make your website stand out in the search engine rankings, let’s take a look at some basic SEO tricks, tips and suggestions:
Know your keywords.
A keyword is input into both the <head> and document of your website. There’s debate regarding how important the <meta> keyword tag is these days but in my experience placing honest keywords into your document <head> is very rewarding. However, keywords are unique for each page and must be treated as such. Do not use the same keywords on all your site pages.
Keywords must be specific, if you’re looking to improve your market penetration for web design services in your region, don’t simply using keywords such as web design, include phrases such as your city (or state) name, and mix it up with similar phrases including web marketing, web hosting or website design. Find out what people are looking for and use those phrases.
Know your code.
I bet I lost 90% of you back there when I mentioned the <head> of your document. That’s dangerous. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, how can you compete with me? Worse yet, how do you know the high priced SEO specialist you just hired isn’t ripping you off? Exactly, you don’t.
Get to know just enough about HTML (that’s the language that websites are written in) that you know what you’re presenting to the search engines. If you want to be successful on the Internet, stop worrying about what your visitors see and start being equally concerned with what Google sees. To help, I’ve created a basic tool called the SEO Checker and uploaded it for free to one of my own websites. It’s a simple tool but it’ll show you what popular search engines see … you might be surprised.
How do you learn HTML without becoming a hard core geek? It’s easy to read, your document is made up of tags, each tag starts and stops with a less than or greater than sign. For example <html> is a tag, as is <head>. Most HTML tags also have a closing tag, like </html> or </head> so all you need to do is look at what’s in between those two tags to know what’s in the respective areas of your site. Here are some basic HTML tags that you should be able to read … even if you can’t code them:
- <html></html> – Represents the start and finish of a website. If it’s outside those tags, it’s ignored.
- <head></head> – What robots such as Google and web browsers read to know more about you.
- <body></body> – The content which is show to users.
Within the <head> tag, there are some important tags:
- <title></title> – This is the title of your page, which appears at the top of your web browser. For SEO it’s one of the most important tags on your site and should be the same (or close) to what’s in your <h1> tag.
- <meta name=”keywords” /> – Contains a comma separated list of key phrases found on your page. Besides the <title> tag, it’s the most important to be both complete and accurate.
- <meta name=”description” /> - Third most important, some search engines (including Google) can use this at the text displayed to users on their result pages on occasion.
Within the <body> tag, there are a few very important tags:
- <h1></h1> – This is the title of your page, the single most important piece of text a user sees. There should be only one <h1> per page.
- <h2></h2> – Like the <h1>, it’s designed to include critical text. Unlike the <h1> there can be more than one. I like to think of the <h2> as a book chapter title, while the <h1> is the book title.
- <h#></h#> – Less important, there are more <h#> series tags <h3> to <h6> each representing various hierarchies of page structure.
- <img / > – the image tag that lets people see pictures on your site. Google can’t see pictures but it can read the alt attribute which should use the keywords or a description to support the article and image.
With an understanding of those basic 10 tags, you should be able to understand how well your website performs in a search engine’s algorithms.
Know your market.
Third but most importantly, know who you’re writing to and … why. Great articles need to be read, if you write quality content which is designed to help people you’re fulfilling the most basic need of your audience. Remember, people don’t search the Internet to be sold to, they search the Internet to learn.
Some of you may remember over the Christmas holidays I offered to 
Jun
2009
Free Link Building from a PR5 Web Site is Back!
A couple weeks ago, I deactivated the link love plugin here on my website then I explained my decision why I deactivated the nofollow in another article and with the help of a great graphic from Josh, I think I got my point across. Link building only works if the links are genuine, remarkably since deactivating the plugin I’ve seen a tremendous drop in comments (both SPAM and otherwise) but not a noticeable trail off of traffic to the website.
The problem is that genuine comments tend to get lost and too many commercialized links slip through the cracks, after all working on my blog is a part time endeavor as I do actually maintain a full time job outside my blogging activities. The other problem is that while giving away free nofollow links to some wonderful websites is rewarding on a personal level, there’s no true incentive for me to keep it up which is what’s led me to deactivate the link love plugin and make the vast majority of the links on my website nofollow, including links to much my own content.
By ensuring the majority of links on my pages are now nofollow, it provides those links which I do want to promote significantly more value with regards to PageRank.
How PageRank Works
Simply put, PageRank is Google’s measurement of authority and it controls where you rank in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). The higher your PageRank, the closer to the first page your website will appear on any given subject. While that’s an over simplification, the ideas are basically there.
When a web page links to another website, Google considers it a vote for the second website but it divides the ‘vote’ between all the links on a webpage except for those marked as nofollow. Simply put, the PageRank transferred is equal to the total PageRank of a page, divided by the number of links not using a nofollow attribute.
Spending Your Credibility
There are several ways I choose to spend my PageRank, and make no mistake that linking to other websites ’spends’ PageRank. Every time your website links to another website, Google assumes that you are voting for it by actually transferring a small part of your own site value to the new website. If you’re linking to higher value websites, there is no effect but if you’re helping to promote lower ranking websites Google counts your vote as your willingness to lose some authority while boosting another websites credibility. This process helps ensure link farming is discouraged while link swapping between genuine and reliable websites is encouraged.
Who I Link To
When I deactivated the Link Love plugin a couple weeks back, I was surprised by the reaction of a few commenters who’d assumed that my willingness to give a free PR5 link was something they simply had the right to have. In truth, nobody has the right to have links, not just from my website but from any website. I struggle everyday to earn quality links and honestly assume that everybody else does too. So who do I link to and how can you get a free link from my PageRank 5 website to yours?
Write a Guest Post
Take the time to write a guest post here on thisismyurl.com like Casper Christensen and build your website traffic by letting my readers know about your website. If thisismyurl.com isn’t your cup of tea, perhaps you’d enjoy writing a piece for one of my other websites?
Feature me as a Writer
A new section of my website called “What I’m Writing” can be found on the footer of every page and features a list of ten recent articles that I’ve written for other websites including my own.
Link to my Articles
If you’ve found an article interesting or a plugin useful, include a link to the posting here and find yourself included in the nofollow free Who’s Linking section on the bottom of every page. That’s where I list genuine, nofollow free Pingbacks to articles here on my website.
Do Something Amazing on Your Blog
Every week (sometimes more often) I write a summary article of what I’m reading on the web today, it also appears in the footer of my website and usual features a half dozen great links to wonderful articles I’ve enjoyed reading this week. It’s a great way to promote yourself.
If you’d like to learn more about how the PageRank tool works, I would encourage you to visit Ian Rogers great article on the subject.
Tags: Attribute, couple weeks, Cracks, Free Links, Free Web, full time job, Genuine Comments, google, Led, love, Measurement, nofollow, part time, Personal Level, search engine result, Simplification, spam, Time Endeavor, Vote, Web Page Links
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