Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks for Beginners

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Top SEO Tips And Tricks To Promote Your Website

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Seo Tips And Tricks To Promote Website

Secrets and tips of promoting your web page and blog

Friday, May 31, 2013

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.

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.

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.

SEO - Design & Layout

A web site design and layout gives first impression about your site. There are sites which are too fancy and regular net surfers will just reach on those sites and will come out even without creating a single click.
Search Engines are very smart but after all they are software and not human being who will read the content of their interest. If you make your site too complicated then Search Engine would not be able to parse the content of your site properly and finally indexing would not be efficient which will result in a low rank.
The actual page content should have a keyword density of about 10% and should weigh in at about 200 words - but there are as many opinions about this as there are SEO experts. Some say keyword density should be 5% and some say it should be 20%. 10% works for me.
Here are few guidelines which should be considered while designing a web page.
  • You should have more text content than HTML elements.
  • No frames. They are the enemies of Search Engines and Search Engines are Enemies of Frames.
  • No ads if possible. Because most of the ads uses Java Script which is not advised to be used.
  • No JavaScript. If you need JavaScript, call it from an external file rather than dumping the code in the HTML file. JavaScript drop down menus prevent spiders from crawling beyond your homepage. If you use them, be sure to include text links at the bottom of the page.
  • Nothing that does not fit perfectly into the page topic; There should be no doubt in the search engine's mind (or in he user's mind) what your page is about.
  • No unnecessary directories. Keep your files as close to the root as possible.
  • No fancy stuff (Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers etc.) unless absolutely necessary.

SEO - Relevant Filenames

One of the simplest methods to improve your search engine optimization is to look at the way you name your files. Before writing this tutorial I did lot of research on file names and found that search engines like Google give too much importance to file names. You should think what are you going to put in your web page and then give a relevant file name to this page.
Just try giving any keyword in Google search engine and you will find file names highlighted with the keyword you have given. So it simply proves that your file name should have appropriate keyword.

File Naming Style:

  • The filename should preferably be short and descriptive. It's always good to use same keywords in file name as well as in page title.
  • Don't use file names like service.htm or job.htm. But use actual service name in your file name like computer-repairing.htm
  • Don't use more than 3-4 words in file name and separate them with hyphens rather than underscores. Try to use 2 keywords if possible.

File Name Example:

Here are some file names which should be preferred from SEO as well as from user point of view.
slazenger-brand-balls.html
wimbledon-brand-balls.html
wilson-brand-balls.html
Notice that keywords are separated by hyphens rather than underscores. Google sees file names as follows:
seo-relevant-filename as seo relevant filename(good)
But Google sees
seo_relevant_filename as seorelevantfilename (not good)

File Extension:

It should be noticed that .html, .htm and .php and any other extension do NOTHING for your visitors, and they are simply a means of offloading some of the work of configuring your webserver properly onto your visitors. In effect you are asking your site vistors to tell your webserver HOW to produce the page, not which one?
Many Web masters think that its a good idea to use filename without using extension. It may help you but not a whole lot.

URL Sub-Directory Name:

From Search Engine Optimization point of view URL sub-directory name hardly matters. You try giving any keyword in any search and you will not find any sub-directory name matching with your keywords. But from user point of view you should keep very much abbreviated sub-directory name.

Guru Mantra:

Finally, I will suggest to keep the following points in mind before naming your files:
  • Use web page file name short, simple, descriptive and relevant to page content.
  • Try to use maximum 3-4 keywords in your file name and these keywords should be appeared in your web page title as well.
  • Separate all keyword with hyphen rather than with underscore.
  • Keep your sub directories name as shorter as possible.
  • Keep the file size fewer than 101K though because Google chops almost everything above that.

 
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