SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION A GUIDE TO IMPROVE SEARCH ENGINE PERFORMANCE FOR YOUR WEBSITE
TABLE OF CONTENTS WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION? KEYWORD RESEARCH ONSITE SEO LINK BUILDING
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?
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WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
is the process of improving a website to perform well in search engines. You can make improvements on your website and off your website. ON SITE • Coding (Titles, meta tags, URLs, links etc.) • Content (Articles, blogs, increasing amount of copy per page etc.) • Best Practices (robots.txt, XML sitemap etc.) OFF SITE • Link Building (link bait, directory submission, social media, articles etc.) The foundation of SEO is keyword research. If you do not target the correct keywords, the rest of your SEO efforts will be futile.
RESOURCES:
SEOMoz: http://www.seomoz.org/
CHAPTER TWO
KEYWORD
RESEARCH
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KEYWORD RESEARCH
KEYWORD RESEARCH The first stage of researching keywords for your site is generating a list of terms and phrases relevant to your industry and what your site or business offers. The brainstorming phase should ideally result in a list of several dozen to several hundred keyword searches that will bring relevant, qualified visitors to your site. After the initial brainstorming phase, PPC data, Analytics data and a mix of online keyword research tools (free and paid) and software (free and paid) can be used to refine your list. Keyword research should be based on 3 factors: 1) 2) 3)
Search Volume Relevance Competition
The ideal keyword has a high search volume, is highly relevant to your target site and has relatively low competition in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). After you have a good list of keywords, you want to group them into themes and find pages on your site that fit these themes. The themes should include 1 primary keyword and up to 2-4 secondary keywords but usually no more than that. You only want to target one keyword theme per page. If you target the same keyword on multiple pages you only end up competing against yourself in SERPs because search engines will only index 1-2 pages of your site for any given search query. Keyword Research is not always a linear process. Sometimes you will find a great keyword that has no obvious home on your site. This could give new ideas for page content. Other times, you have a page where there is no obvious keyword. Brainstorming a little more may reveal some new keywords you hadn’t thought of.
RESOURCES: • Google Adwords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal • Keyword Discovery http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html • Word Tracker http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ • SpyFu http://www.spyfu.com/
CHAPTER THREE
ONSITE
SEO
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ONSITE SEO
ONSITE SEO On-site SEO breaks down into Content and Coding. Place your keywords in the site’s HTML code. It is important to get keywords into: • • • •
URLs Title attributes Meta tags Alt text
Placing targeted keywords within site content is a crucial piece of improving search rankings. Some important content areas to place keywords are: • • •
Page copy Headers Link anchor text
The most important thing to remember here is to always keep the site’s users in mind ahead of the search engines. If keywords do not sound right or if using certain keywords in certain places degrades the user experience, don’t do it. There is always a compromise to be struck between site usability, programming and Search Engine Optimization.
CHAPTER FOUR
LINK
BUILDING
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LINK BUILDING
LINK BUILDING Link building is one of the first tasks thrust upon marketers new to the web. Among the most time-consuming and frequently frustrating of all Internet marketing obligations, link building is, nonetheless, critical to the success of businesses of all sizes. The goals of link building are centered on improving the visibility, reach & accessibility of web content. Since links are the web's primary system for directing traffic; the marketer's focus must be to improve their ability to drive that traffic – links create credibility, visibility & direction for the www's audience. Larry Page and Sergey Brin publicly pioneered the use of link measurement as an indicator of search relevance when they created the Google search engine. The initial idea behind their legendary PageRank system was that a link to a particular page is equivalent to a vote by the linking page for the linked-to page. As the theory goes, by measuring not only the keyword relevance on a page, but also the number of “votes” it had, you could accurately determine which pages were considered by the web’s users to be most valuable for the given search terms. Furthermore, links from web pages with high PageRank would be more valuable (considered more authoritative and reliable) than links from low PageRank pages. Some important factors to consider when building incoming links to a website. Some link building tactics: • • • •
Link Bait Directory Submission Social Networking Sites (profiles, bookmarking, blogs) Articles
RESOURCES: http://ericward.com/ http://seomoz.org/article/link-building-guide http://copyblogger.com/link-building-strategies-that-work/ http://seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml