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Learn SEO basics

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. In this article find out how to do basic SEO, code search engine friendly pages and how to do a basic promotion of your site.

For this I will use one of sites I’ve made, it is AdSense site and it follows SEO rules and it is good example what to do and what not to do. This site is http://www.aboutdoghealth.org/ so let’s start from the top.

Things to do
  • Keywords in URL
    For example http://www.aboutdoghealth.org/ use whole words – keywords to best describe your site. Don’t rely on this if you don’t have keywords in other parts of your site.
  • Keywords in <title> tag
    This shows search results as your page title, so this is one of the most important things and it shouldn’t be long 5-6 words max, and use keyword at the beginning.
  • Keywords in anchor texts
    Also very important, especially for the anchor text, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.
  • Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)
    One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.
  • Keywords in the beginning of a document
    While coding your page put your main content before side bar. Because this also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings
  • Keywords in <alt> tags
    Spiders don't read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.
  • Anchor text of inbound links
    This is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don't, it is still OK.
  • Origin of inbound links
    It is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable and the .edu and .gov sites are the most reputable
  • Links from similar sites
    Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.
  • Metatags
    Metatags are becoming less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are the <description> and <keywords> ones.
  • Unique content
    Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's rankings.
  • Frequency of content change
    Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.
  • Site Accessibility
    Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.
  • Sitemap
    It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.
Things not to do
  • Keyword stuffing
    Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.
  • Keyword dilution
    When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.
  • Single pixel links
    when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.
  • Cross-linking
    Crosslinking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A
  • Duplicate content
    When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned
  • Doorway pages
    Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.
  • Cloaking
    Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.
  • Invisible text
    This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.
  • Illegal Content
    Using other people's copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.
  • Flash
    Spiders don't index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give it an alternative textual description. And also don’t have just flash home page without HTML one.
  • Frames
    Frames are very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.
  • Redirects (301 and 302)
    When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page.
  • Bans in robots.txt
    If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site.
  • Session IDs
    This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don't use session IDs for information that you'd like to be indexed by spiders.
Submit your site

And also a good and easy way to promote your site is to submit it to inspiration galleries, you can see most of them here

Once you have mastered the basics and are ready to learn more, take a stop by the SEOBook site and download their free tools.

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What do you think?





87 Responses so far

By DannyS
on February 5, 2010

Great list, put everything you need to know on one page

By Bob Mu
on January 29, 2010

Very nice post here get ex back

By learn seo
on January 23, 2010

Thanks for providing these places where we can submit our site, I want to promote my site, I will submit it to inspiration galleries, Thanks for these list again.

By Janine Aguero
on January 11, 2010

Thanks for the great info…very helpful!

By Kızlarla Sohbet
on January 11, 2010

Beatiful Text or Dokument Localition…

By Sohbet
on January 11, 2010

Thanx You Admin or Usher’s Very Good post is

By tricia
on January 6, 2010

I like this site. Your posts are very helpful. Maybe you can suggest where to get cheap and fast web hosting services. Thanks!

By ranya
on January 6, 2010

These tips are very useful! Providing SEO services is an emerging industry that I am very interested to learn about. This post has been very informative. Thanks!

By nia hidayati
on December 24, 2009

thanks for the tips, you are the best in seo

By DB
on November 4, 2009

Thanks for these really useful tips. Cheers

By ezel
on November 2, 2009

backing up data- that’s the one thing I often overlook, procrastinate, because it’s always such a tedious task.

By 56pfl9954h
on November 1, 2009

Great tips, trying to get the right balance for you site can be difficult but if you follow the tips here you have a great foundation.

By Mike
on October 28, 2009

This is some great advice. All of these points I take in to account when optimizing a website. There are other things too that I take in to account such as making sure that there are at least 250 words of content on each page I am optimizing.

By Love2Shop
on October 28, 2009

Thank you for this great tips.

By Excellentstock4u
on October 27, 2009

What’s more… I bought shares in this company AFTER I had picked this stock to all of my email subscribers.

Excellent Stock Trading

By megan fox fhm
on September 21, 2009

Sign: gnvkb Hello!!! kawtz and 1144chkasnpywu and 2217 My Comments: Thanks. We look forward to hearing from you again and for your opinions on the world of work.

By megan fox
on September 11, 2009

Sign: umsun Hello!!! rcuwwymhyw and 8418ssgfhphzye and 4307Great!

By sandrar
on September 10, 2009

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. :) Cheers! Sandra. R.

By Danny
on August 31, 2009

Good tips!

By cheapdanny
on August 25, 2009

Solid tips on SEO basics! Will definitely be back for more. Thanks!

By Avery
on August 6, 2009

Thank you the knowledge about SEO,cheers.

By www.csidedektiflik.com
on July 10, 2009

Thank you very much. İ’m working on, now. SEO was big problem for me.

By Jamie Allsop
on June 29, 2009

This is some really good information on SEO. I like how you have set it out in bullet points so it is easy to read and is just not streams of text. Thanks for sharing.

By elektrot
on May 14, 2009

INTERFERENCE FOREIGN TRADE web environment
We offer all products with the best service initiatives, improving the quality of service the products you ihtal web environment provides a detailed way. Category dedicated to the product range with the desired structure, providing convenient access to products from our web site to review the order or request for information from the contact form to reach us..

By elektrot
on May 14, 2009

INTERFERENCE FOREIGN TRADE web environment
We offer all products with the best service initiatives, improving the quality of service the products you ihtal web environment provides a detailed way. Category dedicated to the product range with the desired structure, providing convenient access to products from our web site to review the order or request for information from the contact form to reach us

By oyunindiryukle.blogspot.com
on May 14, 2009

Play Free Online Games, sports games, massive multiplayer games, action games, puzzle games, flash games and more, casual games.

By Search Engine Analytics
on May 2, 2009

Just found your blog today. Really like it – keep up the good work.Domain info more important than you think :-) Domain information such as DNS, age of domain and even the expiration date are used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains.Why are google doing this? Simply to get all the factors they can to get an internal “trust score”.This “trust score” is used to eliminate “doorway” pages and spam in the search result.I’M not saying that it’s working perfectly – but they are doing a pretty good job.

By informatique
on April 13, 2009

Bookmarked ! Thank you !

By chuthat
on March 30, 2009

Thank for sharing

Thank you for the information. I find it really useful! Waiting for another related article!

By mortimer
on March 9, 2009

thanks for the SEO innformation

By Essex website designer
on February 10, 2009

agree with all the points but havent Google hinted that the URL has nothing to do with the search algorithm ? it may have an impact on CTR though

By Joshua Mauldin
on January 23, 2009

Thanks for sharing this!

By voucherstar
on September 10, 2008

Thanks for this great post, but I still don’t know how to get the link from Gov. and edu. websites could you explain it LOL

By Davidc
on July 14, 2008

comments are messed up… :P

It ate a chunk of my last comment lol

By Davidc
on July 14, 2008

Great post and beautiful blog.. I just have 1 correction:

There’s no such thing as … alt is an attribute, not a tag. More like

By Yiwu
on July 10, 2008

yeah,I fully agree on it, SEO the conent is King and the links are Queen.

By Belajar Seo
on July 7, 2008

Thanks for the great steps. I would say this is the check list. I agree the keyword in URL is important too.

By dhaarvi
on July 2, 2008

Very good tips for newbie

By mirc
on June 25, 2008

Thanks you very much

By jay
on June 17, 2008

great job!!!

im a rookie is there anymore info you would like to share to help rookies like me.

By Great list
on June 13, 2008

Thanks

By alojaweb
on June 13, 2008

friend help me through this

By Smiley Faces
on June 12, 2008

It’s a little different for the URL if you are going after a “Brand”. So, unless you think you can make a brand with a creative name (ie Digg, Nike, Gatorade) that people will remember to type in, it’s best to have a keyword term that people might search for in your niche.

By Dejan
on June 3, 2008

If you are referring to “Keywords in URL”
it means for example for aboutdoghealth.com don’t use adh.com

By Great list
on June 3, 2008

Hello,
Can you explain me!

What is the meaning of these sentences Keywords in the beginning of a document?

By Dejan
on May 6, 2008

@ Sdei
Thanks ;)

@ Joomla Guys
Sure, looking forward to it

By Joomla Guys
on May 6, 2008

Indeed you have been adding a really nice list of things here. We would certainly like to see more of them and contribute with our ideas as well if there is any option to post here.

Sincerely,
Chris Neilson

By sdei
on May 6, 2008

Good Tips.
Regards

By sdei
on May 6, 2008

Dear Dejan,

Very informative tips ! Especially it talks both do’s n don’t.

Thanks

By Computer jobs
on April 24, 2008

Nice tips, i found all information i was looking for, i will use some of them.

By Christopher
on April 6, 2008

Huh… Your blog is nice in general, but this very post… It is brilliant!!! It can be never better.

By Untotheget
on April 1, 2008

Yo!
Wasjust serfing on net and found this site…want to say thanks. Great site and content!

By spostareduro
on March 19, 2008

You did a really great job in summing up a lot of key factors. Really nice work. *-)

By Segarceanu
on March 7, 2008

Although I know all of them, I rate it with a A+ (5 stars) because of the quality of the content, the well organized list is extremely useful for a rookie :D , thanks!

By GuddyGemSub
on March 4, 2008

Hello there.
Just found your site. Great job!
I like it much.

By Dejan
on February 29, 2008

@ Marc Alagem
No problem, I’m glad you liked it ;)

By Marc Alagem
on February 29, 2008

Thanks for this very useful summary. I allowed myself to add a new entry about it in my resource blog for the community (http://tinyurl.com/2mayhj)

By PraP
on February 21, 2008

This is really great info. Thanks.

By boris
on February 21, 2008

Good basic info… very helpful for many new to SEO.

By Web Design
on February 3, 2008

Thanks for the great info!

By Jermayn Parker
on January 29, 2008

Yeah Dejan good tips indeed.

Another good tip for WordPress users is to use rel=”dofollow” instead of defaulting rel=”nofollow”.

By Deepak jadav
on January 26, 2008

I feel that the information given will be here is very useful to me.

please send me vice article for my email Id.

Thanks
Deepak Jadav…………..
Search Engine Optimizer

By An Jay
on January 25, 2008

Dejan, It seems you have really worked great to make the list above. Its very useful for everyone. Keep it up!

By Eli
on January 25, 2008

Definitely a great article for the newbies, very thorough. I was actually worried about the content before the sidebar thing before, since I’m not a coder I forgot about it. I just went and checked though, and it’s all good.

By Dejan
on January 24, 2008

@ Niall Doherty
In text it strictly says “sites I’ve made” not my site. I was hired just to do a code for it, so i don’t have anything with rank, and you will have to contact owner about your question.

By Niall Doherty
on January 24, 2008

This is all well and good, but the site you use has a Google PageRank of just 2/10. Maybe the site is relatively new? I’d be interested to know how much money a site like that generates via AdSense.

By Dejan
on January 24, 2008

@ Brian Purkiss
Thank you for the good words, I’m glad you liked it ;)

By Brian Purkiss
on January 24, 2008

EXCELLENT LIST.
Loved it.
And I am very pleased to know that I am practicing just about all the good ones and none of the bad ones.
:-)

Thanks!

Del.icio.us-ed and Stumbled

By !nso
on January 24, 2008

is not a “tag”, it’s an attribute. Good list otherwise.

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