SEO Goals, SEO Tactics & Strategy
The ultimate goal of your personal SEO fight is obvious: more targeted traffic, more visitors, and more sales. This manifesto will teach you how to reach this aim, it will teach you how to get your website to the top of Google
Why getting top positions in Google and other search engines? you ask. It's obvious...
Why getting top positions in Google and other search engines? you ask. It's obvious...
90% of users discover new sites through search engines search engine business is the 2-nd most popular kind of Internet activity after the email usage 80% of search engine users don't browse the results except the first page ones 55% of online purchases and orders worldwide are realized on sites found by means of search engines 80% if Internet users utilize search engines every day 80% of Internet traffic consists of search engines |
Google is everywhere. It is all around us.
To tell the truth, we are fortunate to have Google as our field of battle. Remember, Google is just a program with its hardcoded algorithm — though very sophisticated, yet algorithm. And just like Garry Kasparov gained his victory over the Deep Blue Supercomputer, we'll be able to predict Google's actions and win our own SEO war.
So, now you have to make your own decision. You take the blue pill and give up this reading... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Remember... All I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more. Follow me...
Battle 1. Find the Right Keywords
On site optimization is an important part of the overall process of website search engine optimization. Search Engine Optimization, better known as SEO, is the process of working to improve a websites position in a search engines search results. Ranking high in the major search engines is one of the most important challenges a webmaster is faced with. This is because the better a site does in terms of search engine search results the more visitors it will receive which online is what drives any sites profitability.
So, just what is on site optimization? Basically on site optimization is simply optimizing those factors that you can control on your website. These factors include your keywords, meta tags, content and external links.
So, you have the site: large, content rich and full of relevant information. You submitted this website to every possible search engine. So where are the visitors? Weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website. What's wrong?
Most likely, they simply cannot find your site because the keywords they use are not found on your pages...
For example, suppose your company provides some software for search engine optimization. If you were to search for a page on SEO tools, what query would you use? "SEO tool", "website promotion software" or probably "search engine marketing product"? It is hard to say isn't it? Your first guess is probably wrong. People do not think alike.
Most likely, they simply cannot find your site because the keywords they use are not found on your pages...
For example, suppose your company provides some software for search engine optimization. If you were to search for a page on SEO tools, what query would you use? "SEO tool", "website promotion software" or probably "search engine marketing product"? It is hard to say isn't it? Your first guess is probably wrong. People do not think alike.
What you need is a tool that can tell you what keywords searchers are using when searching for a site like yours. You need a list putting the most frequently used keywords at the top.
There's a good news for us — there exist a lot of such tools, and best of all, many of them are free! Any of the tools mentioned below will give you a large number of alternative queries to the keyword or phrase you have entered into the search form.
There's a good news for us — there exist a lot of such tools, and best of all, many of them are free! Any of the tools mentioned below will give you a large number of alternative queries to the keyword or phrase you have entered into the search form.
One of the best desktop tools is Good Keywords. Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for your website into the software. In our example, the keyword would be "SEO".
You may notice that during the last month the word "SEO" was searched 67867 times at Overture (please remember that Overture is not the most popular search engine. The actual searches performed on Yahoo or Google will be much higher). Also, given one word Good Keywords will tell you all relevant combinations of that word (again this is based on actual searches done by people).
Don't try to optimize for this "SEO" word!
Why? you ask. Here's why:
Firstly, single word keywords tend to be hyper-competitive. A search for "SEO" (or any other single word keyword) in any search engine will generate hundreds of thousands of pages. For example, Google shows 25,800,000 pages for this keyword.
While it is possible that you may get your page in the top 10 for such a single word keyword, it is quite unlikely.
Secondly, because of the sheer number of pages that single word searches usually throw up, most search engine users have already realized that they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases rather than individual words. Statistical research has shown that most people are now searching for 2 or 3 word phrases rather than for single words.
Battle 2. SEO Weapon: Content
On-page optimization focuses on creating web pages which provide good content and in which a particular keyword is repeated a number of times so that the page gets a top ranking for that keyword. On-page factors affect the ranking directly by virtue of being a part of the indexed and retrieved document's content. Here are these factors:
Title Tag
The first and most important thing to consider is the <TITLE> tag.
<TITLE>The Best SEO Tool</TITLE>
You should always begin the title tag with the keyword that you are targeting. Moreover, you should avoid using unnecessary words; try to cut down on the total number of words that are in your title. It's perfect if your title fully consists of your keywords.
One could say that the title "The Best SEO Tool" I use as an example doesn't follow these recommendations. You are not quite right: most search engines do not consider extremely common words in order to save disk space or to speed up search results. These filtered words are known as "Stop Words".
But remember that quite often the search engines are going to display the title tag while they are displaying the results of a search. Besides a title is what your visitors see at the top of a browser window when they visit your site. Hence, you need to make the title of your page attractive to humans as well.
Meta Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag has become less and less important as far as search engine optimization is concerned. However, although largely a remnant of the early days of web markup, the meta keywords tag is still used by search engines as a reference point for the terms targeted by the page.
It can be of value to place some of the common misspellings of your primary targets as well as some upper/lower case variations of the keyword into this tag.
Meta Description Tag
Just like the meta keywords tag, the meta description tag is almost completely outdated in markup. But it can still be useful for describing your page to the search engines. In some cases, the engines may even use this tag as the description of your site in the results page listings, giving you greater control over your content and message. Hence, like the title tag, it is important that the meta description tag be keyword rich as well as attractive to humans.
Keyword Use in Document Text
There are millions of sites which have hundreds of keywords repeated in the meta keywords tag over and over again, in the hope that by listing the keywords in this tag, they will be able to get a high ranking.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As I already mentioned, the meta keywords tag has almost completely lost its importance as far as search engine positioning is concerned. Hence, just by listing keywords in the meta keywords tag, you will never be able to get a high ranking.
To get high rankings for those keywords, you need to use the keywords in the actual body content of your site.
Ensure that your target keyword appears in the document text as many times as possible. But remember that no keyword should just be placed on an ad hoc basis — try to mention each key term in a natural way as you are writing, so that any sentence containing a keyword could actually make grammatical sense. Besides, the repetition should be such that your human visitors do not feel that you have deliberately repeated a particular phrase throughout the page. First of all, you make a website for your visitors, not for search engines
Moreover, this is not only important from the point of view of ensuring that your readers don't get a bad impression of your site, but also from the point of view of search engine optimization — the search engines may penalize your page for spamming if they find that you have randomly repeated the keyword throughout the page. So be careful — stuffing or overusing key terms in an attempt to appear "relevant" for key phrases may negatively affect rankings.
Also, make sure to mention your main keyword at the very top and the very bottom of the webpage. Following this recommendation should be easy: a trick is to include you key phrase in the header at the top of the page and in the copyright information line at the bottom. In my opinion a heading like "The Best SEO Tool" and a bottom line "(c) 2006 copyright www.your-site.com The Best SEO Too" don't really look too strange. :)
In addition, you should pay much attention to the uniqueness of your webpage text. You must never copy someone else's text on your website! You shouldn't even use your own text if it has already been used somewhere else on your website. A document's unique elements are what is generally looked at by the search engines and if the body text or content is an exact copy of another document (whether that document is on your site or on another), that page's value will often be deeply discounted or even removed from the listings. Duplicating a large portion of a web site or page's content onto another page/site can be extremely harmful.
Do not reprint any content if you wish to stay high-rated and don't want to be named XeroxMan ;)
(believe me, those search spiders will buy nothing on your site — they are not even interested in having Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Brad poster on a wall. Well... At least I haven't succeeded in selling one ;).
H1, Bold, Underline & Other Accent Tags
Once you've finished writing the webpage, you should go through and insert some visual tags.
First of all you need to add a header tag (<H1>). Usually an <H1> header tag is used as a heading for whatever content you have on your page and is placed as far towards the top of the page as possible. The rules for the header tags are more or less the same as those for the title tag — it must be keyword reach and attractive to your visitors.
Next, you may need to create <H2>, <H3>, ... <H6> header tags and bold (<B>), underline (<U>), or italicize(<I>) some of the keywords throughout the text. These accent tags are used to indicate the particular importance of a term or phrase to a search engine.
This technique is not yet completely without merit, and it may be useful to highlight popular search terms for visitors to a site, hence the practice is still widespread. How search engines use this data is questionable, as it has been a source of so-called "over-optimization".
Remember: it is foolish to use senseless, but keyword reach phrases in you document text. Even if you are not penalized by Google and you are lucky to bring your website to the #1 position in Google, you won't be so lucky with your visitors anyway... It'd be better all round if you'd pay more attention to writing an interesting and valuable content for your visitors.
Text in Alt/Img Title Tags
Now it's time to add some SEO value to the pictures on your webpage. In most cases images take a lot of place, but don't add any extra value to search engines. It's high time to use images as one of our SEO tools.
As most of you might know, the <IMG> tag is used to incorporate in-line graphics into an HTML document.
<IMG SRC="URL of image" ALT="alternative text" TITLE="advisory text">
For SEO purposes you should describe images using your key terms and use this description as the ALT and TITLE parts of an <IMG> tag.
But you should never forget that non-graphical browsers (yes, there ARE browsers that show only text) present the value of the ALT attribute instead of the picture. Moreover, a graphical browser can be used with automatic image loading off; in that case it may present an IMG element as a small generic symbol of images with the ALT text attached. Hence, good ALT text is crucial to the document's accessibility for the significant portion of users who do not load images, so all your text must still be descriptive and human-friendly.
Nowadays both of these tags are more commonly used for targeting image searches at the engines, along with the filenames of the images shown. Nevertheless you should never skip this step as in some cases it can deeply influence your rankings.
Keyword Use in Domain or Webpage URL
Using the keyword or related terms in the domain name of the site or in the actual URL of the webpage may be assigned some weight by Google, whether used in hyphenation or strung together. However, it has been noted that sometimes 2 or more hyphens in a domain name may indicate a lower-quality or spam-ridden site. This data may be used by Google and other search engines to reduce the rankings.
Sitemap Page
Yes, existence or non-existence of a properly formed sitemap page on your website is also a part of SEO that may boost the crawling speed and influence ranking effectiveness of pages at your website. As always, make sure that links to your pages contain keyword terms or phrases.
Invalid HTML Code and Broken Links
The use of code which may not be readable or spiderable to search engine bots may directly decrease your website's rankings, or may cause losing pages from a search engine index at all. So you should carefully validate your HTML code. One of the possible ways to automate this procedure is to use HTML validator.
Other SEO Factors
There are many other aspects you should pay attention to while optimizing your webpages — from the age of a webpage (how long ago did the spider noticed the page for the first time) to the depth of a document in a site's structure (the minimum number of clicks in order to reach that document from the index page), from links to a page from site-internal pages to the proper use of webpage frames, etc...
I'm going to cover all these issues in my future notes. For now it's more than enough to put into action the recommendations mentioned above. If you follow all the general rules that I have outlined here, you may be safe for your on-page optimization.
Now I'd really like to point out that, although on-page optimization is something you really must do, it is NOT
This is one of the biggest misconceptions in the SEO world. Many people who have just started promoting their websites believe that by getting your keyword density just right, or by moving your keywords around on the page in just the right places, you'll really move up in the search engines.
No! It is the off-page optimization factors that will boost your rankings. I'll repeat once more:
how you make striking changes in your search engine ranking! Though on-page optimization is an essential requirement of moving your website up, doing it alone can bring you only comparatively trifling changes in your search engine ranking. You will never get into top ten for your keywords without doing off-page optimization!
Battle 3. Heavy SEO Weapon: Links
The problem is that they are just trying to do what they did many years ago hoping that this could bring the same results...
Stuff and nonsense!
Years ago it was much simpler to be liked by search engines, more or less you had to know how a webpage had to be built, and how to optimize it for your keywords, placing the keywords in the title, in the meta tags and in the body of the page. Then you put some links to some of the big websites and you were done! Even a link exchange page was an optional.
This was the old way to make SEO. Search engine optimization wasn't yet popular as a SEO acronym and the search engines had not yet moved most of the importance from the on-page to the off-page criteria.
As soon as Google introduced link analysis, the death of on-page criteria was imminent. By analyzing external links that point back to your web site, Google assumes that the more of these inbound links your site has, the more relevant your site is compared to a site that has few or no inbound links. It's like an online vote of confidence.
Today off-page factors rule in the Google algorithm, and you simply cannot achieve top rankings for your keywords if you don't work a lot on the off-page optimization of your site.
Remember, it is off-page optimization that really makes a difference in your website's ranking.
So, what are off-page optimization factors anyway? Google now takes into consideration factors like these ones:
Stuff and nonsense!
Years ago it was much simpler to be liked by search engines, more or less you had to know how a webpage had to be built, and how to optimize it for your keywords, placing the keywords in the title, in the meta tags and in the body of the page. Then you put some links to some of the big websites and you were done! Even a link exchange page was an optional.
This was the old way to make SEO. Search engine optimization wasn't yet popular as a SEO acronym and the search engines had not yet moved most of the importance from the on-page to the off-page criteria.
As soon as Google introduced link analysis, the death of on-page criteria was imminent. By analyzing external links that point back to your web site, Google assumes that the more of these inbound links your site has, the more relevant your site is compared to a site that has few or no inbound links. It's like an online vote of confidence.
Today off-page factors rule in the Google algorithm, and you simply cannot achieve top rankings for your keywords if you don't work a lot on the off-page optimization of your site.
Remember, it is off-page optimization that really makes a difference in your website's ranking.
So, what are off-page optimization factors anyway? Google now takes into consideration factors like these ones:
How many websites are linking to you Which sites are linking to you What is the page title of the website linking to you What is the Google PageRank of these sites Which anchor text is used to link to your site ...and more |
And these SEO factors are extremely relevant in determining the ranking of your website.
So, "off-page optimization" means you have to work on building links to your website. To keep it as simple as possible you need to get many links to your site trying to have them from sites with a high page rank and related content.
Here are some things you should pay attention to when building links:
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the actual text used within an <a> tag:
<a href="http://www.somesite.com">Anchor Text Goes Here</a>
This is extremely important to use the right anchor text, with the most important keywords for your site there, as it is one of the largest factors taken into account by the major search engines for ranking. Specific anchor text links help a site to rank better for that particular term/phrase at Google and other search engines.
Hence, you should obtain links with your keyword phrases in the anchor text.
Link Popularity of a Link Partner's Website
The link popularity (the number of other websites linking to a site) of a website affects the value of all the links in hosted documents on the site. Highly linked to sites will provide more value in their links than sites whose link popularity is low.
So, the more link popularity of your link partner, the more value is provided by the links from his/her website.
Popularity of Site in Topical Community
Topical communities are measured by the search engines as groups of websites who interlink to and with one another frequently and carry a similar topic or theme. Since topical communities are relevant and "on-topic", the links from them carry great weight. A site that is included in a topical community by way of links from many other members may be considered more relevant and authoritative on the community's subject matter.
From this we can make a conclusion that you mainly have to find websites that are related to the topic of your own websites. One of the fast ways to find a right website is to examine its title. Does it contain your keyword? If so, you should approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.
Page Rank
Page Rank is the actual Google PageRank of the webpage linking to your website. Again, you should be looking for link partners which PageRank is higher than yours.
And some other factors...
As you might understand, this is just an introduction to SEO off-page factors, but can already put you on the right path.
The search engine optimization really requires a lot of efforts and the biggest problem is that it is extremely time consuming. You have to make a lot of researches to find the right sites that can provide good and useful links, you have to contact them and convince them to link to your site (usually offering a link back), you have to monitor that these sites continue to link to your site, you have to constantly update links on your webpages making sure that nobody gets extra-value with the help of your links, etc.
Yes, it definitely is harder than it can seem from my short description... And you already know it if you already tried to win your personal SEO battle.
