What is SEO ( Search Engine Optimization
)
In order to generate ad revenue, a site needs a lot of visitors. Visitors can
be acquired via
paid advertizing or they can be
referred to a site for free by
search engines. In
order to get visitors by search engines, a site has to be ranked higher in
search results. The process of optimizing a site to be ranked higher on Google
or any other search engine is called search engine optimization or SEO for
short. This
SEO tutorial for beginners gives you
SEO tips and
SEO techniques
to
learn SEO that can help in getting your website
better rankings on search engines.
SEO assumptions for beginners
First lets look at various assumptions. We believe that unless these
assumptions are met good SEO may not be easily achieved.
Site should contain unique content for better SEO
That is, the site should not contain content that’s already present on
another site. It is generally a beginners mistake to copy content from other
sites and try to get it ranked higher in search engines. No matter how much of
an SEO is done, non unique content will never outrank original content.
Site should be aged
That means it should not be a very new website. If its fairly new it does not
mean that SEO will not help but it just might take sometime before search
engines give good results. Beginners should be patient as
it takes
up to 6 months for search engines to start ranking new sites in
the search results.
Learn SEO steps and SEO tips and SEO techniques ( Tutorial for Beginners
)
Here we look at the list of SEO steps and techniques with examples to
understand how SEO can be increased on any website. Try to follow these SEO tips
to be successful in getting your site high Google rankings.
Identify SEO friendly keyword
Identify a SEO friendly keyword that your target audience is searching for in
the search engines. Make sure that your domain name has that necessary keyword
in it. This is not a huge deal but it is good to have from SEO perspective. Do
not get a domain name which is too large as visitors should be able to remember
it. If they remember it, they can easily come back. Most beginners make the
mistake of not picking a relevant domain name.
Use redirection for better SEO
Use of redirection from one web page to another if two pages serve the same
content. This is considered great optimization from Google SEO perspective.
For example: Note that
www.teknocrat.com is a subdomain for teknocrat.com. These are
two different URLs pointing to same home page. Therefore it is recommended to
have one redirect to another. This helps search engines treat them as one and
achieves better SEO. It is generally a beginners misconception that more pages
means more visitors. This is only true if the pages are serving different
content. All beginners should understand 301 redirects mechanism to achieve
redirection. As a test try to type teknocrat.com in your browser and you will be
taken to
www.teknocrat.com
right away.
Details on how to perform redirection can be found
here.
Find relevant keywords for any content for good SEO
Find good keywords for any new content on the site. This would give an idea
on what keywords should be targeted for the next post.
For example: If you are writing about electronics, your
keyword can’t just be electronics rather it could be “Latest electronics news”
or “Tutorial on I phone hardware”. Of course the keyword should match the
content of your site or post. This is one of the most important SEO factor often
overlooked by beginners.
Use meta tags
Definitely use meta tags on your pages for good SEO for Google. There are two
important tags used for SEO purposes, one is
Keywords
tag and other is
Description
tag. The Keywords should include the content keywords and
description should in general include what the page is about. In HTML they look
like this:
<meta name="description" content="SEO for Beginners"/>;<meta name="keywords" content="SEO,Google,beginners,quick" />
Pick a good SEO friendly title
A title tag is one of the most relevant indicators of content to search
engines and hence has high SEO significance. A title should contain all the
relevant keywords. A page title is shown on search results as well as on top of
Firefox/Mozilla browsers while browsing the page.
Use Sitemaps for helping search engines locate your content
It takes time for search engines to discover new pages of a site. Even Google
might take some time to discover them. If you have a sitemap then search engines
can use it to discover pages much faster. After creating a Google webmaster
account upload your sitemap there. This step is quite important for Google SEO.
Remember that good Google SEO means very large number of visitors to your
website as Google will send most visitors to your website.
Get Backlinks as it is most important for SEO
SEO link building is probably the
most important step for
SEO. Beginners should understand that Back links cannot be gained
overnight. This is a rather slow process.
There are 2 types of back links:
follow and
nofollow. The
ones that are nofollow do not help with respect to Google rankings while the
ones that are follow do help. With that said nofollow are not that bad if placed
in relevant blogs. Visitors can click on these nofollow back links to get to
your site. You can differentiate between a follow and nofollow link with help of
Search Status Firefox add on. To get back links, find blogs
that are about your market/niche and comment on those.
Google alert is an
excellent tool that can search and send you blogs relevant to your niche.
Make webpages load faster for better experience by users and bots
Recently website load speed has become a factor for SEO. Install
page speed
plug-in on Mozilla/firefox browser and test your page speed. Try to get a score
in 80s out of 100 as a benchmark. Check speeds of other similar sites also to
get an idea.
Block irrelevant content via robots.txt
Any content that is not relevant or optimized should be blocked from search
engines using robots.txt. Beginners should spend a little time in trying to
understand the syntax for robots.txt.
SEO tools
Following list of tools will greatly help you to perfect SEO techniques.
Keyword density Analyzer SEO tool
This SEO tool analyzes the keywords for any webpage on your website. You can
access is
here. It provides information on
top keywords and
keyword density.
Keywords finder SEO tool
Google Adwords provides an excellent tool to find
great keywords for your content. This can be accessed
here. You would need to complete free
registration. A similar tool is
Google insights which
can be used from
here.
Backlinks finder tool
SEO link building is an important SEO technique.
However to find out how many backlinks exist for a website one can use the tool
here.
This tool provides a lot more information in addition to number of backlinks
created via SEO link building efforts. It includes page and site authority
information also.
Yahoo site explorer also provides number of backlinks that exist for any
website. This tool is available
here.