Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Effective SEO Tips To Increase Your Site Traffic And Raise Your...

Top SEO Tips And Tricks To Promote Your Website

SEO Step-By-Step | Tips, Tricks and Tools to Boost your Google Rank

Local SEO Tips to Promote Websites

Website Promotion Using SEO Tips, Tricks, Techniques | Search ...

Seo Tips And Tricks To Promote Website

Secrets and tips of promoting your web page and blog

Friday, May 31, 2013

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:
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.

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.

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.

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.

 
--------------------------- ----------------------