SEO 101
It is my goal to help you learn as much as possible about search engine optimization so that you can take it and run with it. I’ve taken some time and written this overview of how SEO works.
This may not get into all the nuts and bolts of technical SEO, but it will give you a good jumping off point. If you like this content, maybe you can reward me with a link or subscribe to Agent SEO.
Why Do You Need Search Engines?
If you have a website that isn’t search-friendly, you could be missing out on a lot of traffic (and potential eyes on your business)! Keep in mind, besides users who type in your site directly (“www.yourwebsite.com”) and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find your site.
Think of search engines as FREE arenas to promote your business and brand. The benefits of doing well in the search engines are numerous and could help you expand to horizons you thought were previously unreachable.
On average, I have noticed that my site as well as my client’s sites receives about 40-50% of their website traffic from the various search engines. Now ask yourself the question again, “Why Do I Need Search Engines?” Now imagine losing thousands of potential eyes on your business, and I think the question answers itself.
How Search Engines Work?
Let’s examine how search engines work in a little more detail.
Each search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) has its own automated program called a “web spider” or “web crawler.” The main purpose of the web spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then brings back the information that it crawled and deposits the collected data into the search engine’s database (I.E. the ‘index’).
When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index. The quality of the search engine can be determined by the relevancy of the information it returns when a user types a query.
Search engines organize their indexes by what’s called the search engine algorithm. These algorithms are determined by many varying factors that help the search engine display the most relevant results for any given query. The search engines DO place more weight on certain factors; however any factor in the algorithm is subject to change at any time.
The more respected your website is within the search engines (the higher your page ranks for these factors), than the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.
Setting the Right Expectations
Half the battle in SEO is having (or setting) the right expectations.
Face it, there are tons of factors that affect how a search engine ranks your website, and no search engine will ever work on your time table. This is why setting the correct expectations for time tables and rankings up front is absolutely critical, and will keep your from pulling your hair out if your not ranking after one week.
So you’ve done everything right, but you’re still not ranking well for any of your target keywords? It’s true, you may have done every single thing right. You must understand that like everything else, success in the search engines takes time. It takes time for the search engines to index and rank your site (especially for new domains). So, be patient.
Another reason for poor rankings – it could be the keywords that you’re trying to target? Some keywords are very, very competitive. Try tweaking the keywords on the webpage. You may experience better results? Above all remember, you are competing with millions of web pages on the internet, and a search engine doesn’t have to rank you if it doesn’t want to.
Being a Search Engine Optimizer Means?
Being a Search Engine Optimization expert means wearing many hats. You must understand the general factors that influence the algorithm can affect your search result position. Doing this sounds simple, but I assure you it’s not.
Being a successful SEO means investing your blood, sweat, and tears into understanding not only your client’s business from a holistic scale, but where they should be and where they are trying to go.
A professional SEO has many job functions, but two main areas of focus, which are On-Site SEO & Off-Site SEO.
On-Site SEO consists of the things that done directly to your site that can make an impact in the search engine rankings. This can include editing the site’s Titles, Meta, HTML markup, ad copy, internal linking, site structure, etc.
Off-Site SEO refers to things that are not done directly to your website, but may affect your search engine rankings. These are things that you have much less control over such as inbound links, link anchor text, etc.
Common SEO Mistakes
Below are some SEO mistakes that are often made by web designers, web developers, and webmasters alike. Avoid these mistakes and your site shouldn’t have too many problems ranking.
1. Splash Pages
This is a big mistake that I’ve seen many times! A splash page basically creates an uncrawlable barrier between a webcrawler and your website’s homepage (which is generally your site’s most important and most frequently crawled page). Of course, this is fine if you don’t care about how or if search engines rank your website.
Many times people try to use a big “bells and whistles” splash page to “facilitate” a user’s journey and “help” them enter a site. This is a huge mistake as the entrance link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.
Think about it. Users and search engines already WANT to enter your website. Why stop or slow them with unnecessary obstructions?
2. Non-Spiderable Navigational Menus
Many designers like to use those pretty Flash menus within their site’s design. This is another big mistake. They might look cool, however they can’t be seen by the search engine webcrawlers; and thus the links can’t be followed.
3. Flash Content
Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.
4. Content in Images
Surprisingly, there are still many websites out there that place text within images. It is well documented that search engines can only read images if there is an alt attribute. Otherwise, an image is viewed as a big blank spot on the webpage.
Make sure that any text you want to place in your website is done so within the regular HTML and not within a flattened image. This is the only way your HTML content can be scanned and indexed.
What if you want to use a font that isn’t considered web-safe? There are many CSS techniques that can be used as workarounds that will allow you to use non-web safe fonts while still maintaining scanable HTML text.
5. Framed Content
The practice of framing content has been giving SEOs trouble for years. Basically, framed content is content that is placed/framed into your site via an <iframe> or some other type of frame. The content within the frame resides on a different server and therefore isn’t able to be crawled by spiders.
This presents an unnatural roadblock for search engines, and it can have big implications to your site’s rankings if you’re heavily using frames. All of that content that you wanted attributed to your site will be credited elsewhere. This practice is especially prominent in the auto industry as a lot of car dealer’s frame in their inventory.
6. Overuse of JavaScript & Ajax within Navigation
Many designers & developers try to impress their visitor by implementing many JavaScript or Ajax features within the site’s main navigation.
Did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? JavaScript and Ajax are both dynamic coding languages, and therefore load the content dynamically. They make it difficult for webcrawlers to crawl the content within them.
Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends. This means that there aren’t unique URLs for every page on the site, which is a big no-no.
7. Poor Page Titles
Page titles are the most important factors when determining where and how your site will rank. It is very important that you have quality page titles throughout your website. Below are some common SEO blunders made when creating page titles:
A. Failure to Use Target Keywords
Search engines are very literal creatures and not always the smartest, therefore you shouldn’t leave it to them to determine what your site is about. By using your target keywords in your page titles, you give the search engines a better indicator of how and where they should rank your website.
B. Duplicate/Similar Title Text
Every page on your site should have a unique tag with the target keywords in it. Many designers & developers make the mistake of duplicate or similar title tags throughout the entire site (and some even leave pages untitled).
Why is this bad? It’s basically like telling the search engine that every single page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.
C. Exceeding the 65 Character Limit
Many websites have very long titles that exceed 65 character spaces. What’s wrong with this? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. If you pay attention, you will notice that most titles get cut off at around 65 character spaces.
What does this mean? You have about 65 characters spaces to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.
D. Keyword Stuffing in the Title
Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times won’t make your site more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good).
A smarter strategy would be to repeat the same word, but in different ways. For example:
“Garden” and “Gardening” are pretty much the same word repeated twice. However, they are used in different ways due to the fact that your audience might use either one when performing a search query.
8. Keyword Stuffing in the Meta Sections
Due to much abuse by spammers and keyword stuffers, meta tags generally have a much less prominent role within ranking algorithms than in years past. However, these areas may still play a role if used wisely. Using this space to stuff keywords is a bad idea and is viewed as a big negative by search engines.
By properly utilizing your meta description and meta keywords tags, you can give search engines information about your website that may help play a role in how the rank it. It’s still a good idea to use your target keywords, their variations, and service localities…just within moderation.
When writing your meta descriptions, place an emphasis on the first 150 character spaces, and try not to exceed 300 characters. When listing your meta keywords, try to keep it around 10-15 keywords/phrases and try not to use more than 500 character spaces.
9. Poor Link Anchor Text
It never fails! I always see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the anchor text for hyperlinks. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”, but if you want to tell the search engines to rank your page for a particular topic, then you need to use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text.
It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}.” Also, try to vary your anchor text, as using the exact same anchor text may cause your links to be mistaken as spam to search engines.
10. Empty Image Alt Attribute
You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user.
Why should you describe your images? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is important in describing what the image is supposed to be. Also, if your images are utilized correctly it is another way to illustrate what your website is about.
Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. In addition, it is necessary to tag your images in order to keep them accessible to users who are visually impaired and utilize screen reading technology.
11. Unfriendly URL Structures
Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. By default, most dynamic websites set up their URL’s to be dynamic as well, which can result in long (and keyword-less) query strains.
Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is an important spot where your target keywords should appear.
Example of an SEO-Friendly URL: domain.com/webpage-title
Example of a Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=132
SEO Tips to Follow
In addition to avoiding some of the common SEO mishaps, there are many other factors that you should consider when optimizing your website.
1. Write Content for Users – Not Search Engines!
Write content that is focused on user-experience and not search engines. Many times I come across websites with awkwardly-choppy, keyword-filled sentences that were clearly never meant for the user to read. Well you know what? Search engines can tell when you’re not writing for your users and they will ding you for it.
What should you do? Use your creative writing skills to talk about things that people want to hear about. If you keep your sentences natural, the relevant keywords should flow naturally. By doing this, you will ensure that your readers and the search engines are happy!
2. The Right Keyword Density
Short disclaimer! Don’t obsess over keyword density; write naturally and it will come.
Since you have taken the time to create a beautiful website, why not help the search engines find it? How do you do this? Keyword Density!
Keyword Density is the number of times a keyword appears in a page compared to the total number of words. You want to make sure to try to include your target keywords in several crucial areas:
- Title Tag
- Page URL (SEO-friendly URL)
- Headings (H1 or H2)
- At least once in the 1st paragraph of text.
- At least 3 times in the body content, depending on amount of content. Use your judgment here. Don’t overuse the keyword if it doesn’t make sense (I.E. don’t be awkward!).
Most people aim for a keyword density of 4-6%. This means that you use the target keyword in the text 4-6 times for every 100 words. What if you target keyphrase is longer? Keep it natural. Remember, even if keywords aren’t right next to each other in the paragraph, search engines can still connect the dots.
For example, if you have the word “search engines” in the line 1 of the text and “optimization” in the 6th line, a search engine will still be able to piece together those words and decipher that your paragraph is probably talking about “search engine optimization.”
3. Consider the Variations
This is the part where your keyword research? In the English language, there are many ways to say the same thing (synonyms). So, not only should you consider optimizing for your target keywords, but for their variations as well.
For example:
- Pop & Soda
- Lawn & Yard
- and many others!
4. Utilize Internal Links
Search engines WANT to crawl through your site and find all the pages! Why not help them? Make sure that there are plenty of internal links within your site pointing to all your pages. A good way to take care of this is to utilize sitemaps.
Tip: You can promote the more important pages by inserting text links within body content. Make sure you use relevant linking text and avoid using “click here” (as mentioned earlier).
5. Monitor & Fix Broken Links
You should always look for & fix the broken links on your site. Do this if you’ve removed a page or section. You can use the robot.txt to prevent the spiders crawling and indexing the broken links.
If you have moved a specific page (or your entire website), you can use a 301-Redirect to bounce a visitor to the new URL.
Tips: You can use the Google Webmaster Tool to find broken links and your 404 Not Found errors. In addition, you can also use Webmaster to remove 404-Error pages from the index.
6. Pick a URL Preference
To search engines, a www and a non-www URL are considered two different URLs. You need to keep your domain and URL structure consistent.
It doesn’t matter if you pick the www. or non-www URL, just pick one or the other! Once you pick one, set it up in your server so that you are using one or the other, but not both.
Additional Ranking Factors
Making sure your website is SEO-friendly can improve how well a search engine can access and rank it. Now this doesn’t guarantee you’ll end up at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but it certainly will go a long way to help give your rankings a boost.
There are many factors in determining the search result position (and nobody knows them all for sure), and I’ve discussed many of them above. Here are a few of the other basics:
1. Google PageRank
PageRank is only one of numerous methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It’s a nice little benchmark to let you know how important Google sees your web page as.
Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google looks not only at the sheer volume of votes. Among hundreds of other aspects, it also analyzes the quality of the page that casts the vote.
PageRank is based on incoming links, but not just on the number of them – relevance and quality are important (in terms of the PageRank of sites, which link to a given site).
Some professional SEO’s pay attention to Google’s PageRank metric and some don’t. In my opinion, it doesn’t hurt to have a high Google PageRank, and it’s a good idea to have incoming links from pages that have a PageRank.
Here is a great article about Google PageRank written by Smashing Magazine.
2. Inbound Links
Based on what you read above about Google PageRank, you know that every inbound link that a site receives in looked at as a “vote” for that site. By having a high amount of quality inbound links, you can improve your site’s rankings.
What do you mean by “quality” links? You can tell if a link is quality or not based on a couple of factors:
- Is the link from a respected website?
- Is the link from a related website?
- Is the link from a page with high PageRank?
If your links falls into one of these 3 categories, then you can probably consider it a quality link. Some examples of bad links are:
- Links from link farms
- Links from bad reputation sites
- Links that point to 404-error pages
How do you get inbound links? You can get people to link to you in a variety of ways. You can run a link building campaign, link exchanges, and many other tactics. It has been my experience that inbound links are one of THE MOST IMPORTANT ranking factors with regards to Search Engine Optimization.
If you’d like to know more about how to go about link building, you should read my follow-up article entitled “The Ultimate Guide to Link Building“.
3. Domain Age
Domain age is another factor that search engines consider as part of the search engine algorithm. Since older domains generally have a history, their site is often looked at as more credible than the website that launched a week ago. This is why older domains sometimes rank a little better in the search engines.
4. Website Crawlability
This seems like a no-brainer, but it is often the cause of many stomach aches in the SEO community. If you want your website to be found, you have to make sure that search engines can crawl it.
Here are some common issues that may be affecting your website’s crawlability:
- Server errors
- robots.txt file blocking URLs
- Redirect issues
- Dynamic URLs
- Code bloat
- No HTML text
- Poor internal link structure
- Broken links
- No sitemap
If you are having any or all of these issues, chances are you have a bigger belly ache than most. If this is the case, say goodbye to your rankings. Luckily, these are issues that a good SEO should be able to detect and address.
In Closing
I know this page doesn’t get into all the nuts and bolts of SEO, but I feel that it will give you a pretty good jumping off point! If you want to learn a little more about the nuts and bolts of SEO, why not subscribe to my blog?
