Getting started with SEO - Part 1
I used to be a SEO virgin once, neglecting the most powerful sender of traffic. I didn’t see much point in focusing my energy into something with “little benefit” I later realised that i could not be more wrong. I now see SEO traffic as quality. A good way to sum it up would is “What visitors want, when they want it” Unlike normal adverts, search engine traffic is targeted directly at your niche, the customer was trying to find you.
In these articles, you’re not going to learn to become an SEO expert. There are much better sites to learn that from. These articles will help get you started with SEO, from the basics.
Write for SEO
One of the first things you should do to your website when “seoing” it is writing for SEO. I’m not talking about stuffing your content with keywords. When I write for SEO, I write as much for people as I do for the search engines. I do not change my content at all.
Think about:
- Keywords
- Title tags
- Meta tags
- URLs
- Headings
- Linking
- Navigation
- Sitemap
I can now explain each of these in somewhat greater detail.
Keywords
Keywords are words of phrases that you want your website to rank for. It is what you expect an internet surfer to type into google and find your website listed under. Writing for SEO has a strong focus on your keywords. I will cover some “hot spots” of where to place keywords, not stuffing them.
Choose your keywords wisely before you open your site. They should reflect the content of your website. Keep in mind how competitive the keyword you are going after is. For instance, there is about 172 million results for “make money online” on google - It is very hard to rank well in this niche, unless you have a strong following. Sometimes you can try too hard to rank, like john chow who ranked top for this term yet was then banned by google.
Title tags
For those who aren’t elite coders, the <title></title> tags are an important part of your web document. They are found with in the <head></head> tags of your page. If the page title is not set, it will simply come out as “untitled document” which is definitely a disadvantage for you against your competitors. It is seen in the taskbar, and at the top of your website. This tag is seen as one of, if not the most important attribute to help with seo.
The title should contain keywords, unique to pages of your website. Most wordpress themes do this well, take a browse around this blog. In posts, the page title is the post title, on pages it is the page title. When using keywords, we don’t want a list of every keyword you can think of. My rule of thumb is to have a maximum of 3. It should fit into the top bar of the web page, without continuing into ellipses…
Do not just think about search engines when writing for seo. Your visitors will be looking at it a lot, they don’t want a load of vomit at the top of the page. Bare in mind that search engines use your title tags as an anchor text for the search engine results.
Meta tags
Meta tags used to be of high importance in a web page. However, over the years they have got less and less important. <meta> tags also go into the <head></head> tags of a web document. There were 2 main meta tags for search engines. They were the “keywords” tag which held a list of keywords you wished to rank for, and the “description” tag which holds a description for the serps (search engine results pages)
The “keyword” tag has since been deprecated by most search engines as they become more sophisticated, and bares little to no significance. However, the “description” tag can still be used. It should be a short description of the content of a web page.
More information on meta tags can be found on the wikipedia page.
URLs
Some major search engines also check the url of a webpage for any information that may contribute to search results. Not only do the urls help search engines distinguish a page, but it is much more presentable to humans. Which do you think is better?
joshbuckley.net?p=231&blah=213245&sid=31013cbd&t=22
joshbuckley.net/2007/08/19/if-business-meetings-were-like-internet-comments/
The first one is very hard for search engines to read, unlike the second which has more information for the search engines. The more information you provide them, the better results you should recieve.
In my next post, i will cover the last 3 points of writing for SEO. Right now i should be having a good time in Japan
Good article Josh !!
Another great post Josh. It’s good reading them all, and I hope you enjoy your holiday!
I can comfirm that this stuff truly is helpful.
[…] articles Getting started with SEO and the video […]
Yeah great point. When it comes to getting indexed into Google, having good meta tags helps greatly
[…] Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimising your websites so that they display high-up (usually aim for the top three pages) in search engines. If you wanted to rank on the top 3 pages of Google for a specific keyword, you would use SEO to try and increase your Google ranking. Increasing your search engine ranking will lead to more people being able to find and visit your site which in turn, could then lead to increased turnover. […]