SEO in a nutshell
Votes: 340What is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO? Put simply, Search Engine Optimization is tuning your content for search engines. Some of the items we'll cover are:
- Optimizing the html code
- Picking good keywords
- Write good content.
- Grass roots Web Marketing
- Tags - Title, Meta, URL, and Alt.
Optimizing HTML Code
Generating good trageted traffic needs to have a good foundation, true a poorly designed and architected website could get great search results, and then again you could also win the lottery, both have the same chance of happening.
Now the buzz these days is all about CSS layouts, shunning tables, and anything that smells of web 2.0. For all you naysayers of table-less design, there is good aurguments on both sides, I could write a whole article on that, but I won't bore you with it now. The main advantage for table-less CSS based design is it improves your code to content ratio, remember search engines only see code.
Why is the Code to Text Ratio Important for SEO?
The code to text ratio of a page is used by search engines and spiders
to calculate the relevancy of a web page. A higher code to text ratio
gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page.
-http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio/
On the above page they have a nice tool that can help you compare pages for good code to content ratio. CSS based design lends itself to better ratios as all of the "presentation" is in the css, search engines don't read css (that I know of).
So now you have better code to content ratios, but you can do more! by using a "float" based layout with the css, you can bring the "content" of your page above your side navigation. This helps with your page relevance, having your content higher int he code of your page makes it appear more relevant to search engines.
Recap of this point: Reduce code bloat, increase page relevance through code reangement, use css to make it look pretty.
Picking keywords
They key phrase to remember here "Keyword Difficulty", basically that means how hard is it for you to get good rankings for a particular search term or search phrase. Example:
- web design 73.34 % Difficulty
- web design minneapolis 55.96 %
Maybe not the best example, but you can see by adding a location, we can help our chances of getting listed higher. You also might want to try other terms in your industry. Unless you have an unlimited bankroll (If you do, you're in th wrong business) you can't get the page rank to go after difficult keywords.
Keyword tools
Content is King
Writing good content is the key, in fact I'm writing this guide for that very reason, think I'm doing it for my health? Although I do enjoy writing on this topic. Some key things to remember:
- Keyword density
- Keyword proximity
- Overall content length
- Keyword relevancy
Content that is too short and filled with keywords will be flagged as spam, Search Engine Optimization is a cat and mouse game we play with Goggle-and-Co. Right now they hold are the keys and are guarding all the doors, so we jsut have to write good meaningful content, there is no shortcut, if any company promises high rankings and does not have "good copy / content" as part of the plan, send 'em to Mr T.
I want to touch on keyword relevancy for a moment, basicly what that means is, based on your META tags, TITLE, and even URL does your content fit that category? Back in 1998 we used to put "xxx, sex" into every meta tag because it was the most popular search term, however now Google wants us to play by the rules. I don't know if that ever did anything anyway.
Market on the cheap
Sure, you can spend money on AdWords or other advertising programs, but this article all all about SEO and organic search results. Anyway you cna get links pointing to your site it's a good thing, however don't involve yourself in link farms or anything that smells of spam. Here are some goodways to get your site noticed by Google and Co. and get your PAge Rank up.
- Ask friends to link to you on thier blog, or any website they have. In the link make sure you link descriptive text.
- Try submitting your site to Digg , Reddit , Stumble Upon or any other social bookmarking website. If you get on the front page on those, you're golden.
- Write some interesting article, and spread it around. Top 10 lists, "X ways to improve X" works great as well, but only writ eif you have something to say.
Tags
Title
<title>yourwebsite.com</title> if your title tag looks like this, it's doing you no good.
The title tag helps a search engine figure out what your page is about, some say it's the new "meta tag". The first 4 words should have some keywords and be descriptive, and make sense to a human.
Your site structure and URL
http://webbake.com/?id=9 A url like this does little for you as well, if you use a CMS of some sort turn on friendly URLS, to give a more readible URL. Search engine's don't like URLS with lots of variables and mumbo jumbo in them, it usuall just causes problems for them.
Meta Tags
Some have said these are dead, they were abused, so now they are near useless, I say not so.It takes about 12 econds to put them in your page, and it's proper XHTML, and it can only help you. DON'T CRAM IN KEYWORDS INTO THE KEYWORD TAG! Pick 4-6 keywords and make sure your content talks about those. This is what "relevance" means, is your content matching up with your keywords?
Alt Tags
<img src="logo.gif" alt="Bring you great Coffee Products since 1992 - CoffeeShop.com" />
No one ever see's these, but search engines do, they help describe content, notice a theme here? DESCRIBE YOUR CONTENT! They also help with accessability or if the image fails to load.
About the author
Shawn Himmelberger is a web designer / SEO helper monkey and is a proffessor at North Central University teaching web design. He also has a side gig called Wavestatic.com - they make great websites!
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Reply #1 on : Fri October 26, 2007, 16:39:08