SEO Concise
Oct 10th, 2007 by yigber
Here’s a super short guide to SEO, compiled from several guides I found out there. A lot of critical stuff are not mentioned in them (unintentionally for sure :)) - I’ll put my personal additional methods in a future post.
SEO = Search Engine Optimization = pushing your web pages up in the search engine response page (SERP).
Most of the SEO work is on pages not on whole sites. Different SEs need different strokes.
SEOing a page means working on-page’s content as well as off-page external factors such as backlinks, etc.
The SEO recipe:
- Compile list of search-keywords most relevant to your page. Have them sorted by importance.
- If the list is too long or too diverse, consider splitting the page, each split concentrating on a subject category.
- Place your keywords in the textual elements of the page:
- TITLE tag
- Heading tags. Mainly H1, H2 and H3.
- Text Link (<A HREF…>) text
- Layout setting tags: P, DIV, SPAN, TABLE, OL, UL, etc.
- Layout setting tags: P, DIV, SPAN, TABLE, etc.
- Put most important keywords in most important text elements.
- Put most important keywords higher up in the page layout.
- Put keywords as close as possible to beginning of paragraphs.
- Use a few emphasis tags (<STRONG>, <I>) on important keywords but don’t over do it.
- Keywords density in page is important so make sure the prime ones are nicely spread and appear in the markup tags.
- Keep content out of dynamic parts of the page (javascript, applets, Flash, ActiveX).
- Optimize HEAD section:
- put <TITLE> tag right after <HEAD> before the METAs
- <META name=”description” content=”…”
- <META name=”keywords” content=“put few imporant keywords here, comma separated“>
- <META http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
- HTML-validate you page.
- Optimize links:
- <A href=”…” title=”this is important“>put relevant text here</A>
- <IMG src=”…” alt=”keywords here…“></IMG> and same goes to longdesc on APPLET, OBJECT, BGSOUND tags.
- Link building:
- Get backlinks to your page, as many as you can from diverse sites: <A href=”http://mysite.com/page.html>put keywords relevant to your page !!</A>
- Place links in your page to external “authority” sites.
- Prefer .com,.org,.net TLDs for your domain name over .info, .biz etc.
Finally: don’t spam, don’t stuff, don’t mislead, don’t over emphasize, don’t scrape and don’t duplicate.
Links:
- seo-guy and the forum there.
- SEOmoz
- IncreasedRanking (contains aff links).
- …