Oct 24, 2010
What are the SEO basics? I teach SEO101 as a public seminar to website owners and developers. It is surprising how many don't know the SEO basics.- Search Phrase Selection - find out what people are looking for
- Adding those words into the right places on your pages
- Correcting sitewide SEO issues. Having an SEO friendly Content Management system
- Getting more, and better inbound links than your competitors
- Time - waiting until Google ranks you. Google likes old websites, and old inbound links.
Search Phrase Selection
- Use the Google search phrase tool to help you find the best search phrases for your website.
- Select the country - ie New Zealand, to see the number of searches for each phrase on Google.co.nz
- Select "exact" rather than "broad" matching.
- Order by the traffic for that month.
- Then Google for each search phrase using the SEO for Firefox tool.
- Note the Google PR for each competing website page
- Note how well they have search engine optimised the words in the title, and on the page
- Note the number of backlinks that each domain has.
- Then decide whether you are able to do better than the competition - better than the first result, and better than the last result.
- If you consider that you can achieve better than the competition, you should be able to rank for that phrase once your website, and inbound links are old enough.
- Select phrases based on each category your website relates to,
- Select phrases based on each product that it promotes/sells.
- Consider regional phrases - like "Auckland Search Engine Optimisation".
Adding the words to the right places on your pages
- Title - search phrases at the front, and max 70 characters
- Meta description - max 155 characters with the words of the search phrase in the description and one or more of the words repeated a second time. This ensures that the meta description is used for the snippet by Google. The description is a sales pitch to entice people to click through to your website.
- H1 - a general intro telling Google that the content is starting
- Content - include the search phrases in the opening paragraph. Possibly have the first instance of the search phrase in bold, and the second in italics
Correcting sitewide SEO issues
This is a little outside SEO101, but I will briefly cover a few issues- one url per page - ie one domain, only http or https per page, choose between www and non www. In all cases, use 301 permanent redirects to from one alternative to the other
- unique titles and meta descriptions per page. Better to have no meta description if you are not going to make it unique
- use Google analytics for measuring, and register against Google webmaster tools
- meaningful url's - ?id=123¶m=trkl is rather meaningless for the url of a page. While the search engines have no troubles with it, merely by it existing you are proving you have not put much thought into your website. It is more likey than not that multiple url's will exist per page of content. If you go to the effort of more user friendly /seo101/ style url's, they are more clickable once they get ranked on Google, and you are more likely to have thought through the issues to make sure that there is only one url per page.
- have unique text around the first instances of the search phrases being on each page. Google often does not rank pages that are found to contain the same words as other websites pages. Even when other websites are copying your sites pages.
- onsite sitemap. An onsite sitemap like linked to, is another way of getting Google Page Rank to your pages. You want the least number of click throughs to get to any one page.
- good internal linking. Tag clouds, menu and footer links, last articles linked to... all provide good keyword rich internal linking within your website.
- an xml sitemap lets Google know when you have created new pages faster than it would find them by spidering your website. But Google will in general only visit your website as often as it would based on the Google PR of your most powerful page.
Inbound Links
- You need keyword rich links coming into your website
- Better that the links come from pages that are themselves optimised for those phrases, and ranking high for those phrases
- don't use all the same text in the links into your homepage. Optimise your home page for a number of phrases, and get inbound links with that variety of phrases
Like cheese, websites get better with age
- There is what is commonly called the sandbox. Where you go and play, until you are old enough to get out and rank with the big boys. The more competitive a search phrase is, the longer you will have to wait in order to even rank in the top 1000 for a search phrase.
- as the inbound links age, the value of those links increase
- There is even a waiting period on a per phrase basis. You website might be powerful, but you might not be let up the ranks for a newly created page/new search phrase, until you have a number of inbound links, and your page gets older.
- but be careful that you know that you are doing everything right, as some of those wrong things might be why you are not ranking, rather than age. So wise to really know SEO, or to consult with the professionals like SearchMasters.
Yes, I could write on for many pages. But have to stop somewhere.
