What is SEO?

What is SEO ?

So you are here because your are wondering what SEO is? SEO is called Search Engine Optimization. The name pretty much gives you a hint itself but, let’s take a deeper look into better understanding what Search Engine Optimization is, how it works, and how it will benefit you and your website or blog.

If you own a website or a blog, you of course want to rank(be placed higher within search engines) and target as much traffic(website visits/hits) as you can. Nothing beats Organic Traffic. Organic Traffic is natural traffic that comes from people searching for keywords and terms that relate to your website within search engines and simply going to yours.

The more traffic that your website receives,the more money that you can make off of simply managing your website about something you may or may not love to write about. With this you don’t have to put in money to make it. If you are clueless to making money online with your website, shoot on over to our “Making Money Online” category.

Now that these basics are out of the way, let’s discuss SEO. As stated above, this is a practice of optimizing your website to rank well within search engines. I will discuss a couple of the main, basic ways of doing so.

• Building Back-links
• Using Anchor Text
• Using Keywords To Target Traffic
• Optimizing Your Meta Tags
• Unique Content

The best way to rank well within Google is by building back-links. A back-link is simply a one way link back to your site. Google counts this as a vote for your website. You want to build quality back-links with sites that are relevant to your niche(what your website is about) and with high PR websites. (PR is Page Rank 1-10, 10 being the highest). You can check website page rankings by simply using the Google Page Rank Checker tool.

Within back-links you want to use anchor text. Anchor text is the text within a link. Within this text you want to use keywords that you are trying to rank for within Google. So for let’s say this site, I would link with a few sites with my site link on theirs being “SEO Tips” then on a few others “SEO Tutorials” and on others “Search Engine Optimization” and so on so forth. You don’t want to over use just one keyword. Try to rank for a few different ones that are related to your website. It’s up to you how many you want to try and rank well for.

Using keywords which are related to your website to drive traffic is of course a must. As stated above, these are terms that you want people to search for within Google and stumble upon your site by searching them. Use keywords in meta tags, page titles, article titles, categories in your navigation bar, within your articles and etc. Do not overuse keywords in articles or on pages for this is called keyword stuffing and your site may get penalized or banned.

For every web page that you have, you want to have optimized meta-tags which are in the header of your page. Use keywords within your meta-title, description, and meta-keywords. Meta-keywords really aren’t too effective on ranking anymore because of the abuse of keyword stuffing in the past. It still doesn’t hurt to use it though. In your titles of pages, use some keywords you are trying to rank for. In the description, describe what the page is about while using a few keywords within the first 150 characters or so.

Unique Content is something I have to stress. Google doesn’t like duplicate pages and plagiarized work. Always update with fresh content that hasn’t been discussed before. Even if it has, write it better than all of those others out there. I do not recommend using article re-writers. If you can’t write a decent article about something you are interested in, you don’t need to be running a website.

Remember, you don’t have to pay out thousands of dollars to have your site ranked well within Google. You can do this yourself and we give you all of the tools, tutorials, and tips needed to achieve this. We use all of these methods on this site constantly and by each day that goes by, we rank higher and higher.

If you have any further questions simply leave a comment.

–R&R Craig

Learn SEO – Design & Structure

Now that we have introduced you to search engine optimization let’s move on. Design and structure play a crucial role in developing your website. You want to make it appealing but then again crawlable by search engine spiders.

Navigation

As I have explained previously, with navigation you don’t want to use images or flash in place of your text for categories. Using images behind it with text layered over it or css menu’s works fine. The reason being is search engine spiders cannot read the text for your categories when they are an image or flash object. They read text.

Now with your categories you don’t want to use titles for example if you have an seo site:

tips , tricks , tutorials and etc..

Try to use some of your targeted keywords in it that define your websites categories like:

SEO Tips , SEO Tutorials, etc..

Meta Tags:

Optimizing your tags may be tricky for some, let’s discuss meta keywords first. These will not help your page ranking anymore because of the abuse in the past but it is still good through put a few of your targeted keywords in there. If I remember the limit is 600 chars in the tag. I would only use 25 or less words to really describe my site / page.

Using a meta description for each page describes what it is about in the search engine listings. Try to make it stick out from the other sites. Now for meta title and pages titles you want to base it off of your pages topic with one or 2 keywords in it. This will help your ranking and is appealing to the user searching for selected content.

Layout

Designing a nice layout is always hard. As explained in the intro, you always want to draw out a rough draft on paper before you begin to put it to action. Don’t make your layout too overwhelming with links,text,images crammed all over. I usually stick with a nice simple structure with a few decent images and what not. It all depends on what kind of site you are running. With gaming websites you can get away with all of the cool images everywhere and what not. Remember, css does wonders.

Sitemap

Having a site map let’s spiders know all of your pages updates and what pages you have. Anytime you add new content or update a page you want to make an update your you site map. You can find free sitemap websites all over the net that make it simple to create one. You want to submit it to Google when you are done. I will just discuss the robots.txt file here. With this file it will tell search engine spiders which directories that you want crawled and which ones you do not. This helps if you have private things or just stuff you don’t want listed in search engines.

The next addition to this tutorial will be on Content. Stay tuned!

Things you should always do with SEO

So what are the do’s when it comes to Search Engine Optimization? In our last discussion we talked about things that you shouldn’t do when optimizing your blog / site for search engines. To follow up please read our other topic “Things Never To Do With SEO” before you get started reading this.

Let’s get started shall we?

Don’t optimize once then quit.

When you are going to optimize for search engines, never quit after a day or two. SEO is not a one time thing. You have to stay on top of it everyday, with every new addition you make to your site, every new page. With search engines, they are always changing their algorithms so the methods and techniques that we use now might not work down the road.

When applying SEO Techniques to your site you will never see results instantly. Keep in mind that patience is the key and the seo methods that you use on your site now will benefit you down the road.

For beginners.

If you are new to SEO the few tips that you learn are not going to be enough. Always look around the net to learn new SEO techniques. Look around for new articles and tutorials that are recent also.

Using web analytics.

This is crucial when you are applying these methods to your website. This can help you see what and what isn’t working so you can switch it up. Also keep track on all of your content and see what is most popular, what the readers like to see. That way you can base new content off of those things.

Using a site map

Site Maps are crucial to getting a higher ranking in search engines. A site map helps spiders find all of the important pages or the pages that you want to be shown on search engines. With every new page you add be sure to keep your map updated. if you have navigation menu’s that are hard for spiders to crawl this will also direct them down the right path. I have explained this in other articles about using text in your navigation menu’s. If your site is fairly big, use a few different site maps.

Using SEO in your URLs

Don’t use basic names in your urls. Don’t use a bunch of numbers or letters either. You want to make your urls have keywords in them spaced out by hyphens. Don’t use underscores, hyphens mean the same thing as a space between the words as underscores do not.Don’t over do it with the hyphens though because it will make your page look like it is a spam to users. I’d say when doing this have a limit of about 3 or 4. For example yoursite.com/seo-tips-and-tricks.html

Keyword Research

When you begin a website or a project you should do this from the start. This way you can figure out what keywords you want to rank for and what not to. Look at the volume of one keyword to the next. Try opening up a PPC account also. I prefer Google Ad Words. This helps you find out the volume of your keywords.

Title and Meta Tags

Search engines don’t care much for Meta Tags anymore because of the abuse in the past but again it does not hurt to do this. Titles are one of the most important factors. With your titles simply use the keywords that you are building your page and article around. This helps your ranking. Meta keywords won’t help you rank but when you have a Meta Description it will show up on search engines under your link and explains the page a little bit. When using Meta Keywords limit it to 600-700 characters. In the Meta Keywords only put keywords in there that don’t appear on your page.

Writing

Don’t just write for search engines and stuff all of your pages. This makes them looks spammy and your readers will not stick around. Write pages for your readers, the search engines have bots but has a bot read your article and stuck around? Has a bot bought anything or even signed up for a mailing list? You need keywords and such in your articles but don’t stuff the hell out of it.

Unique Content

As I have explained in other articles, unique content is the number one thing to do. This can be hard depending on what your niche is but if you have content that isn’t anywhere else, your readers will be intrigued. Make sure your content is interesting also, just because it is unique doesn’t mean it is great. Combine intriguing with unique and you got your self something nice.

Anchor Text – Internal Linking

As I have explained in my other article “Building Page Rank“, Anchor Text is also a must. Anchor Text helps spiders know what the page you linked to is about. Using keywords in the text helps your ranking but also tells them what the page is about when listing it in the search engines. If your anchor just says “Here”, it doesn’t help much for search engine visibility.

Building Links

Submit your site to directories that are popular, high ranked and trusted. Try and get links from popular sites in your niche and category. If you are running a site that is for your local area you can try to find trusted sites that are in your area geographically. Analyze your inbound links also to find what you may be looking for when linking and back linking. You can read more on back linking in our previous article “SEO Techniques all websites should use” along with many other techniques.

Social Media & Networks

Using social media websites like digg.com , propeller.com and many others gets your articles and sites exposed better. Also using social networks like twitter also can do the same thing. This helps you connect with many others directly to better promote your website. You can also use twitter to post new updates to your followers automatically. For more information, read the latest article I wrote for “Increasing site traffic with twitter on auto-pilot“.

And there you have it. These are some of the main things you should always do and use when optimizing your website or blog for search engines. If you have any questions please comment below or ask and discuss it in there forum. If you would like one on one training feel free to contact me.

craigygee@therantandrave.net

Things never to do with SEO

Today we are going to discuss some things you should avoid when optimizing your blog/website for search engines. Shall we begin?

SEO Spam and and paying to submit to directories.

Have you ever seen ads around the internet stating that they will submit your website to hundreds or thousands of search engines? How about 500 directories? Or maybe buying thousands of backlinks for a small price? Never give in to this, you just can’t buy this kind of work for $25.00 . Your site will be submitted to link farms of a directory. No SEO can gaurantee a number one ranking and for a small price your site won’t be submitted to all those directories and search engines. No true SEO is a spammer.

Have you ever put your content across several domains?

This is not something good to do unless you have a bulk user base and for certain content considerations. This will get a bunch of your sites in the SERPS so look up more about sub-domains and domains with search engine optimization. Submitting to search engines can’t hurt but really, only submit to a couple of the top ones. Usually you won’t have to do this because the search engines will automatically crawl your website when you are linked with a site that is being crawled.

Make your pages crawlable!

Now you never want to make your site to where a crawler can’t access it or crawl all of your pages you want. This happens when you don’t write your robots.txt file correctly. Also having sessions Id’s or too many variables in your urls can effect this. Always use words and keywords of your categories and topics in your urls. When you have a navigation menu you, never use all all images or flash. The crawlers cannot read these things. Unless you have a portfolio or something related, never use an all image or flash website period. Crawlers read the text in your site, the aren’t human and cannot read the text or images in flash.

For more information on optimizing your navigation menu’s and a better explanation on using text instead of flash and all images, check out a previous topic I wrote on optimizing your categories .

Targeting general keywords and why not to.

If you are starting a website or blog and if your website isn’t ranked well yet, never try to target general popular keywords that have a lot of competition. Always optimize for relevant specific keywords that will bring traffic that you targeted traffic. For example, you have a video game website and you decide to target the keyword “Gaming”. You will be blown away by competition without a chance, even if ranked decently. Try to rank for something more relevant than just general gaming and start off with some keywords that have lower competition and build your way up as you go up in ranking.

Keyword stuffing and irrelevant keywords.

This is a DON’T and you can get banned from it by Google. Stuffing your meta tags with irrelevant keywords means that these keywords have no relation to your website or topic. Google does not like this even though google does not base rankings off of meta tags anymore because it was too abused in the past it is still good to use them anyways. The max you should use is roughly 600-700 characters in a meta tag. Limit it to no more than about twenty targeted phrase of maybe two words or more. Make sure you separate them with commas of course. If you are using the same keyword avoid using it more than three to seven times. List them in the order of how important they are to your website and what you are trying to rank for. Do not use hidden keywords as text in your pages (people generally do this in the footer). Google considers this spam and will ban you for this. People do this by stuffing them in the footer and making the text the same color as the background color.

Avoid duplicate content.

Try to avoid this and avoid using the same titles in every page. If your page is on a certain topic, use the topics keywords in the title. Do the same with the pages of your categories. Don’t use www.blah.com and blah.com to direct to your homepage. Believe it or not, these both are two seperate addresses and will be considered duplicate content. Don’t link your home page with www.blah.com/index.html from www.blah.com either. Use the one address that you established for your website.

Site layout, structure , usablity.

Make sure that your site is optimized for both your users and search engine spiders. Use proper structure, navigation, descriptive links and text and headers. You want your website to look good and be easy to navigate your your users and visitors but at the same time you want it to where spiders will just eat your site and pages up. I stress again using text over images as much as possible.

Back-linking to relevant sites.

If your website is let’s say once again, about “Gaming” , don’t link to a weight-loss website because you have nothing in common. When building back links, you always want to build links between you and websites that are relevant and similar to what your website is about. This will work out for the both of you and eventually you can get more back links through those people.

Using anchor text and mixing it up.

When using anchor text, don’t use the exact same anchor text for each site that you are building a back link from. Switch it up. This is called unnatural link building. So vary up your keywords in your anchor text on different websites with keywords that are related to your site and related to words you are trying to rank for. If you don’t know what anchor text is, read up on a couple previous articles that I wrote that discusses Building Page Rank and Getting Indexed In Google fast .

Spamming your link.

I am sure you have seen tips on commenting in guest-books, blogs, forums and so on so fourth. There is a difference between posting comments with a link in it and spamming it. Most of the time, you have the option of including your link when posting in a blog or guest-book. In a forum you can include your link in your signature. Don’t just down right spam your link all over fast in hopes of getting traffic and links back to your site. This won’t help and you will get banned and more than likely your post will be deleted. Nobody likes a spammer, not even you.

Quit worrying about ranking.

Everyone seems to obsess and fret over Google page rank more than they should. If you keep up with the key fundamentals of running a website or a blog, your ranking will go up more and more as time goes on. Quit worrying about it because just focusing on this will end up cramping your style. Focus on keeping your site and/or blog updated with fresh unique content daily, interacting with your visitors, users, and other blog members, and keep doing basic SEO on your pages and you will be fine. Also, quit checking your rankings every single day. They are going to do what they are gonna do, let them be and stay focused.

This list can go on and on…and on! These are some key tips to running a successful site and keeping your optimization A-1. If you have any other tips feel free to comment.

SEO Techniques all websites should use

In this article I am going to discuss ten SEO Techniques that all websites should use. These are the basic fundamentals to successful website Search Engine Optimization.

1. Title Tag

Near the very top of a web site’s source code you’ll find various meta tags — the standard ones being the Title, Description and Keyword tags. The title tag is technically not a meta tag, though it is commonly associated with them. The title tag plays such a large role in the indexing of your web site, that it is considered the most important of the three.

A page title is the first thing a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing.

It’s important to include a keyword or two in the title tag — but don’t go overboard – you don’t want to do what’s known as “keyword stuffing” which does nothing but make your web site look like spam. Most people will include either the company name, or title of the particular page here, as well.

2. Meta Tags

There are two primary meta tags in terms of SEO — the description and the keyword tag. It’s debatable whether the search engines use the description tag as far as ranking your results. However it is one of the more important tags because it is listed in your search result — it is what users read when your link comes up and what makes them decide whether or not to click on your link.

Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don’t stuff it with keywords either. The description tag should read like a sentence — not a keyword list.

Due to “keyword stuffing” many search engines now completely disregard the keyword tag. It is no longer nearly as important as it was years ago, however it doesn’t hurt to include them in your source code.

When creating your keyword list, you’ll want to think of the specific terms people will type in when searching for a site like yours. Just don’t go overboard — too many duplicates are not a good thing (as in “web designer” “web designers” “custom web designer” “html web designer” “your state here web designer” – you get the idea). Those are all basically the same, so pick one or two variations at the most and move onto the next keyword.

3. Proper Use of Heading Tags

This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are.

Your main page title should use the <h1> tag — this shows what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as <h2> and <h3> are equally important by helping to break down your copy. For one, you’ll see a visual break in the text. But as far as the search engines are concerned, it will automatically know what your topics are on a page. The various heading tags give a priority to the content and help index your site properly.

4. Alt Attributes on Images

Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings.

In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader. They can’t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is.

5. Title Attributes on Links

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That’s the little “tool tip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.

As a note, you should use descriptive text for your links. “Click here” doesn’t really tell a person – or more importantly, the search engines — what the link is. At the very least put a title tag that will explain that “Click Here” really means “Web Design Portfolio” for example. Better yet – make the main link text something like “View my web design portfolio” — this will give some value to the link showing that the resulting page is relevant to searches for portfolio’s.

6. XML Sitemap

XML sitemaps are used by the search engines in order to index through your site, as well.

This list of ALL pages / posts / etc. of your site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what you feel the most important pages of your sites are. All elements that help the search engines properly find and link to all content of your site.

7. Relevant Content

Having content relevant to your main page or site topic is perhaps the most important SEO aspect of a page. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc — but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt.

While it is important to include as many keywords in your page copy as possible, it is equally as important for it to read well and make sense. I’m sure we’ve all seen keyword stuffed pages written by SEO companies that honestly don’t make much sense from the reader’s point of view.

When creating your site copy, just write naturally, explaining whatever information you’re discussing. The key is to make it relevant, and to have it make sense to the reader. Even if you trick the search engines into thinking your page is great — when a potential customer arrives at the site and can’t make heads or tails of your information and it just feels spammy to them — you can bet they’ll be clicking on the next web site within a matter of seconds.

8. Link Building

We’ve probably all heard of Google Page Rank — it seems to be every web site owner’s dream to have as high a page rank as possible. While the algorithm for determining page rank encompasses many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your web site.

Now, you’ll want to steer clear of link farms and other spammy attempts at getting links to your site. However there are many reputable and niche directory sites that you can use to submit your web site, or specific blog articles to.

With genuine content — especially if you have a blog — you’ll be able to generate links with other web sites and blogs, as well. It’s somewhat of a give and take, in that if you link out to other sites, you’ll find sites linking back to you — and hopefully see your page rank going up, as well!

9. Social Media

Although technically not SEO, Social Media is such a growing factor in getting your web site noticed, that it’s an important element to include in your plan.

Social media ranges from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more. There is a lot of relationship building involved, but as you build your own networks and build quality content on your web site or blog, you’ll see traffic to your web site increasing, as well.

As with any relationship, it is a give and take. Don’t just expect to join a site like Twitter for the pure sake of pushing your content. That just won’t fly — your true intentions will stick out like a sore thumb and do nothing but turn people off.

Even if you are on the site purely for networking reasons, the key is to make friends. Help out members of your network if they ask for a “retweet” or Digg, give helpful advice if asked, etc. You’ll see the same in return.

If you write a great post and have built meaningful relationships with peers in your niche, you’ll often find that friends will submit your posts and give you votes on the social bookmarking sites. The more votes you receive, the more likely your post is to be noticed by others and shared around, often resulting in additional link backs from other blogs, etc.

10. A Few SEO Don’ts — Flash and Splash

Along with any list of Do’s come the Don’ts. As far as SEO is concerned, two of these items are splash pages (often consisting of a flash animation) and all flash web sites.

Yes, flash is pretty! Full flash web sites can actually be amazing to look at — their own bit of interactive artwork. But unfortunately the search engines don’t get along well with Flash. Although there is talk of possible advancement in this area, for the most part the search engines cannot read Flash.

All that great content that you wrote for your site will not be seen by the search engines if it’s embedded into a Flash web site. As far as the search engines are concerned, your all flash web site might as well be invisible. And if the search engines can’t see your site content, a good chunk of potential customers will miss out on what you have to offer, too.

Equally as “pointless” are splash pages. Once very popular, the splash page should no longer be an important feature of any site. While splash pages used to serve as an introduction into a web site (often with a flash animation), it is no longer seen as helpful, and often times might actually annoy visitors.

For one — it’s an extra click to get into your content. Worse is when you don’t give a “skip intro” option or set of links into your main site content — because you’re essentially forcing your visitors to sit through the full animation. If you’re lucky, this will only annoy them… if not — they’ll just leave without giving your main web site a shot. And without an html link pointing into your site, the search engines have no way to continue either (unless you made use of a sitemap.xml file — but still…)

A good alternative to both issues is to make use of a flash header. There’s no problem to include a flash animation at the top of your main site, or as a feature within the content area, etc. Because this is an addition to your web site, as opposed to a full separate element.

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