SEO - Useful Resources

If you want to list down your Book, Website or any other resources related to Search Engine Optimization then please contact us at webmaster@tutorialspoint.com

Useful Links on SEO

• Google Webmaster Guidelines - A list of guidelines which will help you to optimize your site for googlebot.
• SEO Article from Wikipedia - A nice article on SEO from Wikipedia. It has other useful links as well.
• SEO Professionals - This is is non-profit organization of search engine marketers founded in April, 2001.
• Wiki Page for SEO related Concepts - Find many other concepts related to SEO.
• SEO Resource Directory - A list of various useful SEO resources.

Useful Books on SEO

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SEO Techniques Summary

This is the end of this tutorial and I hope now you have a good knowledge and at least you would need any other help to optimize your web site.

We have covered almost all major concepts related to Search Engine Optimization. Now you are familiar with most frequently used SEO related terminology as well.

You have learnt how to optimize keywords, title, alt, meta tags, anchor and other text from SEO point of view. You also have learnt importance of having good content in your web site and in Miscellaneous Techniques chapter we have suggested you other important points which will help you to optimize your web site

So in brief ethical strategies for achieving optimal ranking in the search engines are:

• All Pages Must Conform with W3C Standards
• Keyword Density is Never Abusive
• Always Include: Robots.txt, Sitemap.xml, & Urllist.txt
• Keywords are Prominent in the Title, META tags, & Headings
• ALT Tags and Title Tags are Not Forgotten
• Nomenclature is Fundamental to Being Indexed

I have listed down various good resources for SEO on the next page so if you want to do further study on SEO then you can go ahead.

Please send us your feedback at webmaster@tutorialspoint.com.

Keep visiting to us, Happy Learning!

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SEO - Miscellaneous Techniques

There are various other tips related to SEO. I have not categorized them into any special category so putting in misc category. Go through these tips one by one

Don't do the followings:

• Don't keep hidden text on your web pages.
• Don't create alt image spamming by putting wrong keywords.
• Don't use meta tags stuffing.
• Don't use frames and flash on your site.
• Don't exchange your links with black listed sites.
• Don't try to fool your site visitors by using miss spelled keyword.
• Don't send spam emails to thousand of email IDs.
• Don't use too much graphics on your site.
• Don't create too many doorway pages.
• Don't try to create duplicate content of pages.
• Don't submit your website many times in a single search engine.
• Don't use sub-directory depth more than 1-2.
• Don't create too many dynamic pages. Try to convert them into static pages.
• Don't bloat your pages with code.
• Don't nest your pages.

Do the followings:

There are various other tips which can help you to optimize your web site for many Search Engines.

• Create logs of pages and each page should however contain a minimum of about 200 visible words of text to maximize relevance with Google.
• Create a Sitemap, Help, FAQ, About Us, Link to Us, Copyright, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy pages on mandatory basis.
• Create a home page link to each and every web page and provide easy navigation through all the pages.
• Pay attention to your dynamic page URLs. Google can crawl and index dynamic pages as long as you don't have more than 2 parameters in the URL.
• Check your complete site for broken links. Broken links will reduce your other pages rank as well.

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SEO - Link Building

Link building is the SEO practice of obtaining links from external web sites to your own to improve both direct referrals ie. people clicking on the links and search engine ranking. Link building is all about increasing your site link popularity.

Web site Crawler will go to a site again and again whose ranking in Search Engine is high. You can verify this fact by putting your site on a high rank site. If your site link is available on a high rank web site then you have 99.99% chances that you site will be indexed with-in 24Hrs.

How to increase Link Popularity ?

There are various ways of increasing your web site link popularity. I'm listing out some important tips which are easily doable.

• Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Don't go for automated submission.
• Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org, yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories will give your site a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
• Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to your site if you have what they want and no where is available.
• Leverage your personal relationsrelations with other webmasters. Put your site link on their sites. One way links often count for more than reciprocal links.
• Participate in Link Exchange Program. Find top 20 sites doing the same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the Search Engine.
• If you are subscribed in a forum and forum does not have any restriction to keep your site link as your signature then it can help you to increase your site popularity.
• Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG, and Slashdot etc. Before submitting please go through their spam policy.
• Write good articles in blogging sites and give few references of your links with-in that article.
• Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep them busy on your site. If possible create forums, news letters, blogs etc.

There are other ways but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternative.

• Buy a place on high rank website where you can put your link.
• Subscribe for google's Adwords program to drive traffic towards your site.
• You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the number of hits on your site which will result in your site link popularity.

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SEO - Hiring an Expert

Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. If you are really serious about SEO and you are not getting expected result then better choice is to hire an SEO expert. There are following tasks which should be taken care by SEO experts

• Code validation and clean up - Ensure that code is SE Friendly and standards compliant.
• Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure URL's are spider friendly.
• On Page optimization - Page Title, copy writing, Call to action etc.
• Quality link building - Securing one way links from relevant sites.
• Keyword research - Building a list of key-phrases relevant to your business.
• Creating Quality Content - Build optimized pages around terms discovered through keyword research.
• Off Page Optimization - Blogs, Press Releases, Article Submissions

If you are confident that you have the required skills then you can take care of doing all the above activities otherwise its worth taking help from SEO Companies or to hire any SEO Specialist.

Choosing a SEO Expert or Company:

This is most difficult part to choose a correct SEO Expert or SEO Company. But we are giving you few guidelines which can help you for the same.

• Start searching through your friends and business partners.
• Post your queries in SEO Forums to get feedback from the community.
• Check other sites rank which they already have optimized.
• Don't go for SEO companies doing automated submission etc.
• Don't go for SEO companies doing Balk Hat tricks.
• Don't look for cheap SEO because of some pennies you can loss more. But take care, high price also does not guarantee high quality.
• Take guarantee if possible for a particular rank and any particular search engine.
• User SEO Expert or Company name in Google to find more information about them.
• Don't go just because of their fancy site and good article available on their site.
• Don't go testimonials available on their sites.

I can not list out all the factors here because there may be different situations and different views. So you should be smart enough to think what's bad and what's good.

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SEO - Verifying Web Site

You design and develop a web site but how would you know if you have put all the HTML syntax in correct way. Almost all browser don't complain against your wrong syntax but wrong is wrong. There are many SEO experts who claim that SEO is not dependent on site HTML/XHTML verification. But I will tell you various reasons why your site should be W3C Compliance.

Why HTML/XHTML Verification is Required?

There are various reasons to verify your web page before hosting it over the internet.

• Any web page quality depends on how well you have written your web page.It should be syntactically correct and should pass all the Quality Gates.
• When any Search Engine does indexing for your web page content it might get confused if your HTML tags are not written properly and much of the web page content might not be indexed properly.
• There might be many HTML tags which you are using in your web page but then have been depreciated and many of the search engines also don't support them.
• Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always appreciated by good Webmasters.

What Is W3C Compliance?

The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and since 1994 the W3C has provided the guidelines by which websites and web pages should be structured and created. Here are the links to validate your web pages:

• Validate HTML/XHTML File against W3C Standard HTML/XHTML Validator.
• Validate CSS File against W3C Standard CSS Validator.

While doing verification you will get errors along with appropriate reasons. All the validations will be done using XHTML DTD which is a refined version of HTML.

Rules for W3C Compliance:

There are following rules which you should keep in your mind while writing your web pages.

• Use the XHTML declaration statements to start every XHTML page:

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC 
  "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

• Every tag must be closed.
• The head and body tags are now mandatory.
• Empty tags get a terminating slash. An empty tag is a tag that doesn't require an end tag. Examples include <br> and <hr>.

  <BR> is now <br />.
  <HR> is now <hr />.
  <IMG SRC="--"> is now <img src="--" />

• All tags must be lower case. This does not apply to attributes, only tags. For example, both of these formats are acceptable under the XHTML DTD:

   <FONT color="#ffffcc"> is invalid
  <font color="#ffffcc"> is valid
  <font color="#FFFFCC"> is also valid 

• All the attribute values should be put with-in double quote.
• Tags may not nested

  <b><i>Text</b></i> This is invalid
  <b><i>Text</i></b> This is valid

• The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big, small, sub, or sup.
• One <form> tag can not be inside another <form> tag.
• If your code contains a &, it must be written as &amp;.
• Any use of CSS should use all lower case lettering.

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SEO - Content is the King

Content is basically includes what you see on the site: the text, graphics and even links to outside world. I would condemn using excessive graphics because they are not Search Engine Friendly plus users feel irritation when they get downloaded specially over a slow network.

Thousands of articles, books and forum entries detail how to make your site search engine friendly, but ultimately, one rule stands above the rest: Content is king. But I will say this rule is past now and I would like to say Unique, high-quality, unduplicated content is the king.

Superior the quality of your content, the higher the ranking you achieve, larger the traffic you gain and greater the popularity of your website. Search engines prefer good quality sites in their index and search results.

A relevant, fresh, and timely content is crucial to attracting and keeping visitors to your web pages. It will help you both draw traffic from search engines and create audience loyalty.

Unique, High-Quality Content:

When people visit a Web site for information, they want your unique spin on a topic. How is your material or content unique? Is that uniqueness obvious and easy to find and to understand? Visitors want unique, high-quality site content. Its not only your home page content but also all the linked pages should have useful and easy to understand content.

Now a days search engines have become very smart and they are able to understand complete grammar and complete phrase.So while raking a page against other then it matters how rich content is available on a page.

Sites with duplicated, syndicated or free content, who get given red flags by the Search Engines.

SEO Content Writing ( Copy Writing ):

SEO Content Writing (also referred as SEO Copy Writing) involves the process of integrating keywords and informative phrases which make up the actual content of your website.

While writing your web page content following tips may help you in keeping it better than others.

• The content should be directed for the specified target audience.
• Keyword density is strictly adhered as per search engine guidelines.
• Titles should always be eye-catchers, compelling your visitors to read on and want what you have to offer in your website.
• Don't use confusing and complex language. Use small statements to make your content more understandable.
• Keep your web pages short and don't put all the content on a single page.
• Divide your web page content also into short paragraphs.

Other advantages of having great content:

Its not only SEO you have to think about, but also many factors will make your site popular.

• If your site is having something really unique then people would like to suggest it to their friends.
• Other webmasters would like to create a link of your site on thier sites
• Your site visitors will start trusting on your site and they will look forward for the next content and will keep coming again and again.
• Assuming you have been listed out by any Search Engine but net surfer will click only that page whose content snippet would look more unique and interesting.

Conclusion:

Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. But in the end Golden rule of SEO is that Content is the King. Its not just because of a Search Engine but its for your site visitors. A page that is read by people is better than a page that is read by bots.

So write your content after going a serious thought. Keep your title, keywords, link text, meta tags up-to-date and unique and interesting. I am sure you will win.

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SEO - Optimized Anchor

Use descriptive anchor text for all your text links. Most search engines consider anchor text of incoming links when ranking pages. Here is an example of anchor:

<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">Anchor Text</a>

Here are following important points to notice about anchors:

• The Anchor Title plays a very important roles and will be seen by most of the search engines. So your anchor title should have appropriate keywords. Anchor title will help site visitors using a balloon and displaying written text.
• The Anchor Text is another important part which should be selected very carefully because this text will be used not only of search engines but also for the navigation purpose. You should try to use best keywords in your anchor text.
• The otherpage.htm is the link to another web page. This link could be to external site. But here care should be taken that this web page should exist otherwise it will be called a broken link and broken links give very bad impression to Search Engines as we as to site visitors.

Another example of an anchor could be as follows:

<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">
   <img src="image.gif" alt="keywords" />
</a>

In this case Anchor Text has been replaced by an image. So while using an image in place of anchor text it should be checked that you have put alt tag properly. An image alt tag should have appropriate keywords.

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SEO - Title Optimization

Hope you understand the meaning of HTML TITLE tag which is put inside head tag. The page title (not to be confused with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window, and is also what is displayed when you bookmark a page or add it to your browser Favorites.

This is the one place on a web page where your keywords MUST be present. Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your website is extremely important to Google - particularly for the home page. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, remember to do this!

The title shouldn't consist of much more than about 9 words or 60 characters, with your keywords used at the very beginning of the title. Since Google is looking for relevant keywords in the title, this means you should NOT include your company name in the title unless your company name is very well known.

Improper or nonexistent use of titles in web pages will keep more websites out of top rankings on Google than any other factor except perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page or a lack of quality links from other websites that point to your site.

Best Practices for Creating Titles:

Here are some best practices you should follow for creating titles on pages:

• Each page should have a unique title.
• If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in every title of every page.
• Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.
• Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase on your specific product, service, or content pages.
• If you must include your company name, put it at the end of the title.
• Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords based on what WordTracker says is searched on more often.
• Don't overdo it - don't repeat your keywords more than 2 - 3 times in the title
• Make sure the <title> tag is the first element in the <head> section of your page - this makes it easier to find by Google.

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SEO - Optimized Metatags

There are two important Meta Tags and they are the meta description and meta keyword tags. Some search engines may display the meta description as part of the search results, but the meta keywords tags should not appear in search results.

The general consensus among SEO experts is that meta tags are dead. Even so, many of these same experts continue to use meta tags in their own sites.

For Google adding the Description Meta Tag won't result in a boost in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for your SERP listings in Google. Yahoo says they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. So it makes sense to add one for Yahoo and any other minor search engines that still use.

What do the Meta Tags Look Like?

You can add following in the head section of the web page:

<meta name="keywords" 
         content="KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2 KEYPHRASE1 etc. 
         about 30 to 40 unique words">

<meta name="description" 
         content="An accurate, keyword-rich description 
         about 150 characters">

Meta Description Tag Tips:

There are few important tips for good meta description tags:

• Use keywords in your meta description tag.
• Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use multiple syntaxes of your key words.
• There should not be more than 150 characters in a description meta tag of a single web page.
• Use a different meta description tag for each page, as each page is different and stands a better chance of being found if you place a good title and description on it.

Meta Keywords Tag Tips:

There are few important tips for good meta keywords tags. Please refer to previous chapter on identifying good keyword.

• Use synonyms.
• Use unique keywords.
• No need to repeat any given phrase.
• You can repeat any word an unlimited amount of time as long as each time it is part of a different phrase.

Robots Meta Tag:

The important Meta Tag that you may need sometime is the Robots Meta Tag which looks like this:

meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

Using above meta tag you can tell to a spider or robot that you do not want some of your pages indexed or that you do not want your links followed.

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SEO - Optimized Keywords

We are discussing everything in Web context so in web terminology a keyword is a term that a person enters into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consists of between two and five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query phrases, or just keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive.

There are following concepts related to Keywords which helps in optimizing keywords on a web page.

Keyword Frequency:

This is calculated as how often does a keyword appear in a site's title or description. You don't want to go overboard with frequency, however, since on some engines if you repeat a word too many times, you'll be penalized for "spamming" or keyword stuffing.

In general though, repeat your keyword in the document as many times as you can get away with, and up to 3-7 times in your META tags.

Keyword Weight:

This refers to the number of keywords appearing on your Web page compared to the total number of words appearing on that same page. Some search engines consider this when determining the rank of your Web site for a particular keyword search.

One technique that often works well is to create some smaller pages, generally just a paragraph long, which emphasize a particular keyword. By keeping the overall number of words to a minimum, you will increase the "weight" of the keyword you are emphasizing.

Keyword Proximity:

This refers to the placement of keywords on a Web page in relation to each other or, in some cases, in relation to other words with a similar meaning as the queried keyword.

For search engines that grade a keyword match by keyword proximity, the connected phrase .home loans. will outrank a citation that mentions .home mortgage loans. assuming that you are searching only for the phrase "home loans".

Keyword Prominence:

A measure of how early or high up on a page the keywords are found. Having keywords in the first heading and in the first paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are best.

Keyword Placement:

WHERE your keywords are placed on a page is very important. For example, in most engines, placing the keywords in the Title of the page or in the Heading tags will give it more relevancy. On some engines, placing keywords in the link text, the part that is underlined on the screen in a browser, can add more relevancy to those words.

Best Places to Put Keywords:

Here is a list of places where you should try to use your main keywords.

• Keywords in the <title> tag(s).
• Keywords in the <meta name="description">
• Keywords in the <meta name="keyword">
• Keywords in <h1> or other headline tags.
• Keywords in the <a href="http://yourcompany.com">keywords</a> link tags.
• Keywords in the body copy.
• Keywords in alt tags.
• Keywords in <!-- insert comments here> comments tags.
• Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g., http://www.keyword.com/keywordkeyword.htm.

Finding Keywords:

There are many different ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are:

• Words people would search for to find your product or service.
• Problems your prospective customers may be trying to solve with your product or service.
• Keyword tags on competitors websites.
• Visible page copy on competitors websites.
• Related search suggestions on top search engines.
• By using an online tools like: Google Keyword Tool
• By analyzing your website carefully and finding out proper keywords. This task can be done by expert SEO Copywriters.
• Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - Particularly to what the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for that word when optimizing pages over time.
• You can do brainstorming to identify correct keywords for your site.

What is Word Stemming?

Google uses word stemming. Word stemming allows all forms of the word - singular, plural, verb form as well as similar words to be returned for a given search query.

So if someone types in "house plans", not only will pages that are optimized for that phrase be returned, but so will pages that contain all variations of that phrase, for example: "house plan", "house planning", "house planer".

Hope you have some understanding on keywords and how to identify them and where to use them. Next chapter will explain you how to optimize Metatags for better results.

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