SEO for Dummies

SEO for Dummies

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SEO for Dummies

Table of Contents

The Importance of Search Engines Page 4

What Are Meta Tags? Page 6

Which Meta Tags Should You Use? Page 6

Meta Tags Example and Optimization Page 7

How to Build Backlinks Page 11

Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic Page 12

Recommended SEO Tools Page 13

SEO for Dummies

The Importance of Search Engines

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the potential customers. When a topic is searched for, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift

through the millions of pages it has indexed and present you with ones that match your

topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a potential customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your

website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search

engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally

it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

The keywords on your site play a more important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

Surveys say that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or

service, they find their site in one of the following ways:

The first option is they find their site through a search engine.

Secondly they find their site by clicking on

a link from another website or page that

relates to the topic in which they are interested.

Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an

article.

Thus it’s obvious the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website

will use methods other than search engines.

Just don’t focus on the home

page, keywords and titles.

The first step to a sale is when

customers first visit your site to see

if your products match what they

were looking for. Of course, search

engine optimization and better

rankings can’t keep your customer

on your site or make them buy.

Now that you have the customer

visiting your site, you need to

ensure that he gets interested in

your products or services and stays

around. Motivate him to buy the

product by providing clear and

unambiguous information. Thus if

you happen to sell more than one

product or service, provide all

necessary information about this,

maybe by keeping the information

at a different page. By providing

suitable and easily visible links, the

customer can navigate to these

pages and get the details.

By: Dawid Ryba

SEO for Dummies

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages

linking to your site). You can have a search engine optimization expert do the optimization for you, but unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the

expert, it would be better to do it yourself. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can actually do it on your own.

Understanding Your Target Customer

If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are

and what they want to buy, it is unlikely that you will make much money. Website business is an

extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask

them to complete a survey or even have them do it while they are browsing your website. Ask them

about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your

prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client

questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your

competitors? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete

a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

SEO for Dummies

What Are Meta Tags?

Way, way back, search engine algorithms were so dumb they couldn’t work out what a page was about just from the content. So some bright spark had the ingenious idea to create a set of tags (meta tags) that inferred information about a pages content to the search engines.

Great idea, except there was nothing to stop a webmaster stuffing or spamming their meta tags with irrelevant, but very high traffic keywords and keyword phrases. Which of course they did with enthusiasm, you would find adult sites using words like Disney and Pokemon in their keywords meta tag for the traffic!!

Today the vast majority of meta tags are worthless and those that are still considered by search engines aren’t worth that much. For example Google confers no benefit from any meta tags, so if you expect a high Google ranking from perfectly optimized keywords in your meta tags, don’t hold your breath.

Which Meta Tags Should You Use?

For Google, adding the Description Meta Tag won’t result in a boost in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for your SERP listings in Google. So though you won’t get a ranking boost, if your write an interesting Description Meta Tag and Google uses it (not guaranteed), you might get a higher click through rate compared to a random snippet of text from your pages. All other meta tags (including the Keywords Meta Tag) are either completely ignored or won’t result in a SERPs boost.

Yahoo says they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. So it makes sense to add one for Yahoo and any other minor search engines that still use. Also there are directories and other websites that automatically take this information to create a listing to your site. Don’t fret over it though, add the main phrase for that page to the Keywords Meta Tag and user friendly description of the page to the Description Meta Tag and forget about it.

Does your website give

enough contact

information?

When you sell from a

website, your customer

can buy your products 24

HRS a day and also your

customers may be from

other countries that are

thousands of miles away.

Always provide contact

information, preferably on

every page of your

website, complete with

mailing address,

telephone number and an

email address that

reaches you. People may

need to contact you about

sales, general information

or technical problems on

your site. Also have your

email forwarded to

another email address if

you do not check your

website mailbox often. To

help everyone be able to

buy online, provide

enough options like credit

card, PayPal or other

online payment service.

SEO for Dummies

Meta Tags Example and Optimization

Below you will find an example set of meta tags. This is for a page you want fully indexed in all search engines.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”> <HTML><HEAD> <TITLE> SEO for Dummies – Meta Tags Optimization</TITLE> <meta name=”description” content=”Create the perfect meta tags for high search engine placement.”> <meta name=”keywords” content=”Meta Tags Optimization”> <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″> <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”../seo-gold.css” media=”all”> </HEAD> <body>

The DOCTYPE

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”> Is the DOCTYPE, it’s not a meta tag and it’s not essential you add this to a page for good search engine placement, but if you want a page to validate in a HTML validation (i.e. http://validator.w3.org/) you’ll need to add the right one.

Title Optimization

The TITLE element (found within the HEAD) is very important, probably the most important part of a

page (especially for placement in Google and Yahoo) and should ideally be SEO optimized for a

small number of keywords or key phrases (preferably just the one main phrase for that page).

** There is no SEO evidence adding a keyword two or more times to a title element will increase the

SEO benefit for that keyword. For this reason it is advisable to only add a keyword once unless it

makes sense from a user or keyword proximity perspective: for example for keyword proximity

reasons a title like “SEO for Dummies – SEO Optimization” is better than “SEO for Dummies – SEO

Title Optimization” IF your main SERP is “SEO for Dummies”.

SEO for Dummies

As a general rule of thumb when it comes to the title tags less is better than more as it concentrates

the SEO benefit of the title over less keywords

We could have stuffed the TITLE element with all of these keyword phrases i.e. -

<TITLE>SEO Services – Consultant SEO Expert Services</TITLE>

Or even a list of phrases like this as the title tag-

<TITLE>SEO Services – Consultant SEO, SEO Expert, SEO Consultant</TITLE>

Instead we optimized the Title as-

<TITLE>SEO Services</TITLE>

We decided to use the short title element because this concentrates SEO benefit from the title element to that single two word phrase. Since Search Engines like Google rate the contents of the title tag as important you ideally want THE most important phrase for that page on its own.

There are exceptions to this loose rule, if you have a very small web site and lots of keyword phrases you wish to target, you have little choice, but to double or even triple up your titles keywords.

Also if you have high PR pages (i.e. PR6) and are having no problems keeping the main phrase for those pages, you could experiment by adding further highly relevant search phrases to the title tag. Take care not to overdo it, what you do today may not show full effect for several months. For example if you added an extra phrase and 4 weeks later your main SERPs had not dropped, so you add another phrase, you might not see the negative effects of the first change for a couple more months. You may find 3 or 4 months after the first change you have lost the page’s previously stable SERP!

When making changes to a successful page err on the side of caution, SEO is a very long term process and requires a lot of patience. If you are taking a risk (like adding more phrases to a title element) give the page at least 2 months and preferably 3 before deciding if it was successful or not. If a recent change results in a major drop in SERPs seriously consider reverting to the original page, but be aware what you see today might be the result of what you did 3 months ago or could be a coincidence, the search engine may have changed its algorithm (check the forums for reports of big changes) or some links to your site have been removed or changed.

SEO for Dummies

DESCRIPTION Meta Tags Optimization

There are several reasons why you need to pay attention to your meta description tag. One of the

most important reasons is that (based on the keyword used in a search query) the meta description

can show up in the actual search result. The meta description tag can also show up in the search

results, so writing a good meta description tag is not only good for search engine optimization–it is a

way to convince the people searching to visit your web site.

In this case, you can see that the meta description tag that was used on the web page shows up in

the search results in Google because the keyword phrase I used to search with is located in the meta

description tag (I searched for “Building Huge List”). If you include your keyword phrase then there’s a

good chance that it will show up in the search results.

In the sample above, here is what’s in the meta description tag:

Private Label And Master Resell Rights Products | Building Huge List The

Ultimate in Top Quality Fresh Content Award Winning Membership Site

This meta description tag is well written because it’s fairly short, to-the-point, uniquely describes the

content of the page where it’s found, and includes the keyword phrase “Building Huge List”.

<meta name="description" content="Private Label And Master Resell Rights

Products | Building Huge List The Ultimate in Top Quality Fresh Content

Award Winning Membership Site"/>

When you write your meta description tag, for search engine optimization purposes it’s good to make

sure that you include the keywords that you are targeting on the page. It is important that the meta

description be concise and to-the-point. You will want your meta description tag to accurately

describe the content of the page where it appears. So, it also must be unique. Don’t use the same

meta description tag on every page of your site. After all, each page on your web site is unique, right?

SEO for Dummies

Keywords Meta Tags Optimization

Lately, the meta keyword tag has become the least important tag for the search engines and

especially Google. However, it is an easy way to reinforce once again your most important keywords.

We recommend its usage as we believe that it may help the SEO process.

The keyword tags should contain between 4 and 10 keywords. They should be listed with commas

and should correspond to the major search phrases you are targeting. Every word in this tag should

appear somewhere in the body, or you might get penalized for irrelevance. No single word should

appear more than twice, or it may be considered spam.

<meta name="keywords" content="private label rights, plr article packs,

master resell rights, plr, resell rights, resale rights, private label,

plr download"/>

Robots Meta Tags Optimization

This tag helps you to specify the way your website will be crawled by the search engine. There are 4 types of Meta Robots Tag:

Index, Follow - The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the main/index page and then will continue to the rest of the pages.

Index, NoFollow - The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the main/index page and then will NOT continue to the rest of the pages.

NoIndex, Follow - The search engine robots will skip the main/index page, but will crawl the rest of the pages.

NoIndex, NoFollow - None of your pages will be crawled by the robot and your website will not be indexed by the search engines.

If you want to be sure that all robots will crawl you website we advise you to add an "Index, follow" meta robot tag. Please note that most of the search engine crawlers will index your page starting from the index page, continuing to the rest of the pages, even if you do not have a robot tag. So if you wish your page not to be crawled or to be crawled differently use the appropriate robot tag.

<meta name="allow-search" content="yes" />

<meta name="Robots" content="All" />

SEO for Dummies

How to Build Backlinks

The various search engines have different algorithms in order to establish which website appears higher in the SERPS (search engine ranking pages). Search engines such as Yahoo and Bing still rely predominantly on on-page factors such as correct html, meta data and copywriting, however, Google (the undoubted heavyweight of search engines) holds an increased importance on backlinks (links from external websites pointing to yours).

Google uses Page Rank which is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page (co-founder of Google). Page Rank is Google measure of 'importance' of the webpage and has a numerical value assigned between 0-10 with 10 being the greatest possible page rank and 0 being the lowest. For example the New York Times currently has a Page Rank of 7 whereas a new website will usually have 0.

In order to increase the Page Rank of your website a backlink strategy must be undertaken.

Here are some of the different methods used to obtain backlinks; we will discuss their basic merits

and downfalls.

Link Exchange - Link exchanges have now been around for many years, with numerous programs

designed to spurt out emails to all and sundry asking for link exchanges. A link exchange is basically

when a webmaster requests a backlink from your website in return for a backlink from their website. A

few years ago this method of creating backlinks was effective, today links of this nature hold little

weight, and therefore your time is better spent looking at other methods of link building.

Article Marketing - Article websites such as EzineArticles will publish unique articles that you have written, in turn you may have two self-serving links in the Authors resource box. This is a great way of building links as it can also be viral. If your article is compelling enough, people will blog and use the article elsewhere, thereby virally increasing the number of links obtained from the article. Remember, the article must be original and informative otherwise it may not get published, and even if it does it could have a detrimental effect on your business if the content is no good.

Blogging - We all know what blogs are and how effective they can be. The idea here is to start your own blog (Blogger or WordPress are the two main blog sites), make sure you update it regularly and create interesting and compelling content. A blog can then get a life of its own, earning Page Rank and ultimately allowing you to create backlinks to your website.

SEO for Dummies

Social Bookmarks - Social bookmarking websites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, Furl and StumbleUpon (there are lots of others) basically allow users to bookmark pages on the Internet that they are interested in. Social bookmarks are however public, therefore the more people that bookmark your website the more popular it will become and therefore the rank will increase.

Nine Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last

updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links

to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in

competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create an ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the

customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

9. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the bookmark.

SEO for Dummies

Recommended SEO Tools

Keyword Suggestion Tool - Search engine optimization tool that will help you choose relevant and popular key

terms related to your selected keyword.

Meta Tag Analyzer - Meta Tag analysis tool to help webmasters analyze their web pages. This search engine

optimization tool analyses not only the Meta Tags, but try to use the same spider technology as the search

engines spiders themselves.

Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer - Quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine

Optimization.

It is not enough just to have a lot of backlinks, it is the Quality of backlinks along with the Quantity that help

you rank better in Search Engines.

Robots.txt Generator - Use this tool to generate a simple robots.txt file for your website. This file allows you to

hide files or directories that you don't wish the search engines to index...

SEO Tools - Designed to assist you in configuring your website(s) for search engine optimization within the

different search engines.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Have the experts take care of it all and drive tons of traffic to your webpages.

Be sure to visit us at: Top Website Rankings

Thank you,

Brian F Adams

BVA Consulting, Inc.

888-328-1977