SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Copyright Matt Searles
SEO Basics
The “SEO Basics” series will be in 3 parts;
- Keywords
- Content
- Back Links
Keywords
Part one of three on the basics of SEO. I truly mean basic and all of this information can be found on the Internet. With some common sense you can optimize your website fairly easily. I put keywords first because to me this is the most important. If you do not know which keyword you are using, your content will not match your keywords.
Research Keywords
Keyword research is the first and most important step in SEO. You must first find your niche market and then check out the competition for keywords or phrases. A new site will find it hard to rank for a competitive keyword so in the beginning it is best to use longtail keywords.
Example: “The Jim Gaudet” instead of “Jim Gaudet”. I could not buy the domain jimgaudet.com so I had to get thejimgaudet.com. Well, I am number 2 for Jim Gaudet and number 1 for The Jim Gaudet.
Keyword Research Tool: Google AdWords Keyword Tool
There are way too many tools to list here so I am only showing one. Why not use Google’s own tool and get the data from their systems? I think this is the best free tool for researching keywords.
Site Structure
Once you have your list of keywords you should rank them. A list of 5 or so is pretty good. Now you design your site structure on your keyword priority. A small list to help you setup SEO for your site structure;
- The main page should be optimized for your top priority keyword
- Each keyword you have should have it’s own page optimized for the keyword
- You should try to name each page with your keyword
- You should link from the main page to the secondary pages with the keywords for the secondary pages in the anchor text
Keyword Placement
From what I can tell, this is the most important part of SEO. Google reads your web pages like a person does. So there are a few important things to note here;
Domain Name: Try to find a domain with your keyword in the domain, and to the far left of the domain name as possible.
Page Title: This is the same as the domain. Tr to get your keyword into the title and to the left. Remember, the page title is like a news heading, if does not bring the reader to your site then you have failed. So do not stuff the title with keywords, make it for humans.
Heading Tags: This is pretty important. Your page should be formatted like a document with heading. H! being the most important and having your keyword wrapped with this will help.
Images: Google does not look at pictures, it only reads the ALT tag withing the image. So be sure that all images have an ALT tag. Do not keyword stuff this either, try to add your keyword but in a sentence explaining the image.
Links: Whenever you link to another page on your site (assuming you want that page to rank for a keyword) you should try and make the Anchor Text have your keyword in it. All links have a title tag that should be used. The title tag will show when a user moves the mouse cursor over the link, this should be something made for a human, but can have your keywords in it.
The bottom line here is that you cannot just slam keywords all over the place, they need to be placed properly and made for HUMANS, not Google.
Extra
If you use WordPress for your blog and want great WordPress SEO check out Michael Maratines WordPress SEO Secrets
I am not an expert by any means, so if anyone wants to throw out some ideas here I would appreciate it…
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Good place to start for some basic SEO info.
I understood about 1/3 of what you said but I appreciate you putting it out there Jim. Boy, I have a lot to learn…
A link campaign is also a good idea.
Christa, if you ever have a ? just send me an email. I don't mind helping out :)
You are correct, link campaigns will help, but unfortuanately there are too many “bad neighborhood” campaigns out there. In my third part of this series (back links)I will cover some of this..
Try not to have more then 15 keywords total. I see too many people 'stuffing' keywords in their meta tags – much like your outbound links, your keywords have more search engine pizzaz if there are less of them.
Do remember that Google doesn't care about the meta keywords, but other search engines do. I believe live and yahoo will be following suit and the met keywords will disappear.
Note, we should look to HTML 5 and think about redesigning the sites. There are new tags to help search engines…