Self-Help SEO Bacics

Basic Foundation of SEO

Basic SEO:

1.Title

2.Keywords in Domain

3.Keywords in URL

4.H1, H2, H3

5.Meta Keyword Tag

6.Meta Description Tag

7.Pages treated separately

8.Keywords in Content

9.Keywords in Alt Tags

SEO Links:

1.Backlinks

2.Anchor text

3.Making a Backlink Strong

Basic SEO:

I. Title

The title is the #1 factor that determines how well a page will rank for a particular keyword. Placing the top 5 keywords for any given page is optimal unless there aren’t 5 keywords or you want to focus strongly on fewer keywords. For example, if one keyword is used alone in the title, then that keyword will have more strength than if it was one of 5 keywords in the title.

Thus, the title is very important, but often what makes or brakes a site is actually the backlinks and the quality of the links and anchor text.

Here’s an example of a good title form:

Wall Tiles | Wall Tile | Round Tile | Large Tile

Notice that singular is separate (at least for now) from the plural form of a keyword. Title keywords should be chosen using Keyword Discovery and analyzing competitiveness with standard Google searches and backlink tools such as Yahoo Site Explorer.

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II. Keywords in Domain

Although the title is extremely important in on-site SEO, so is the keywords in domain feature. For example, if your keyword was “kids clothing” and you had the domain

www.kidsclothing.com

then you will have a relatively easy time ranking first for this term, depending on the competitiveness. If the keyword exactly matches the domain then you have the power of exact match. If you have the domain

www.ikidsclothing.com or www.kidsclothing4u.com

and you want to rank for the keyword “kids clothing” then you will have a much more difficult time but the keywords are still in the domain so a domain like

www.ikidsclothing.com will have an easier time ranking than

www.socksforall.com

for example because socksforall.com does not have the word kids or the word clothing in it.

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III. Keywords in URL

For an internal page, keywords in the URL are almost as important as keywords in the domain. To continue the same example, the following internal (non-home-page) URL would be strong for the keyword “kids jackets”.

www.kidsclothing.com/jackets.html

because the entire URL contains the term “kids” and the term “jackets”. Less strong would be

www.kidsclothing.com/sweaters.html

because it only contains the keyword “kids” and not “jackets”.

Keywords in the URL are very important, and one standard is to take your strongest keyword for a page and make it a part of the URL for that page. So if your title (with 5 keywords) was

kids Jackets | kids Sweaters | kids Shirts | kids Shirt | kid Socks

And your domain was

www.clothing.com

then, following this good standard, you would name that page:

www.clothing.com/kids-jackets.html

after the strongest keyword.

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IV. Keywords in H1,H2,H3

Header tags H1, H2, and H3 are also very important in ranking for keywords – most importantly H1 tags. Say the keywords are

kids shoes

kids shoe

kids pants

kids pant

kid socks

Then the ideal headers would be

kids Shoes / kids Shoe / kids Pants / kids Pant / kids Socks

kids Shoes / kids Shoe / kid Socks

kids Shoes / kids Shoe / kids Pants / kids Pant / kids Sock

Where the first line above is the H1, the second line is an H2, and the 3rd line is an H3.

If, for cosmetic purposes, this is not possible, often what is done is to place the h1 only, just

kids Shoes/ kids Shoe / kids Pants / kids Pant / kids Socks

Somewhere where it looks OK. Note that you can use CSS styles to shrink the H1, H2, and H3 so that it is smaller, but it’s probably not a good idea to make them too small.

Other common, less cosmetically blemishing, is to just use the strongest keyword as the H1 or in the H1, an H1 of, for example,

kids Shoes

Or

All About kids Clothes and Shoes.

Where the first one would be more powerful.

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V. Keywords in Meta Tags

The meta description tag is important to have your keywords in. However, you can put up to around ten keywords in the meta keyword tag, unlike many SEO elements which take only 5 keywords. Here is an example meta keyword tag:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”kids Shoes, kids Shoe, kids Pants, kids pant, shorts, shirts, shirt, store, clothing, dress slacks”>

After the first 5 keywords, you don’t have to use duplicate words. To illustrate this, take the above

meta keyword tag. Even though the word “kids” is not used after the first 5 keyword, it is still a

part of the remaining keywords. Here’s a list of the keywords from the above example:

kids Shoes

kids Shoe

kids Socks

kids Pants

kids Pant

kids Shorts

kids Shirts

kids Shirt

kids Store

kids Clothing

kids Dress Slacks.

All of the words in the meta keyword tag should be in the content somewhere.

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VI. Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag is important to have keywords in it and also it is what people read when they find your ad by searching in Google. The top line in a google listing is the title and the rest is the meta keyword tag, unless the keywords typed in are in the content of the page body and not found in the meta description tag at all. For example, if the title of someone’s home page was

kids Shoes | kids Shoe | kids Pants | kids Pant | kids Socks

And the domain was “www.kidsdressclothing.com”, and also the meta description tag was :

kids Dress Clothing sells fine quality kids shoes, kids shoe accessories, kids Socks, kids pants, kids pant accessories, and a variety of quality kids clothing items. There are hundreds of products to choose from and our prices are outstanding.

… then the google organic (non-paid) search listing would be

kids Shoes | kids Shoe | kids Pants | kids Pant | kids Socks

kids Clothes sells fine quality kids shoes, kids shoe accessories, kids pants, kids pant accessories, and a variety of quality kids clothing items…

www.kidsdressclothing.com

It is important to include all 5 major keywords as well as as many of the other keywords in the meta keyword tag as possible in the meta description tag. The keywords closest to the front of the paragraph will be the strongest.

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VII. Pages Treated Separately

In the eyes of the search engines, each page is a separate entity and should be optimized for separate keywords. They relate to each other in that if you have a menu item pointing towards a page or a link pointing to another page, then the structure of the link is important (more said about this later) but other than that, each page work separately.

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VIII. Keyword in Content

It is important to have your keywords in the content of the page, however stuffing the page so full of keywords that it is unuseful to users is not ideal. Ideally, the keywords should naturally occur in the content at least once per keyword, preferably multiple times.

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IX. Keywords in Alt Tag

Alt tags are very important in a couple of cases. One is the header of the website. This header, with the logo, should be a link back to the home page, and the alt tag of that image should be the main keyword for the site. This is quite important. Another place where alt tags are very important is if someone puts an image on their website that is a link to your website. Normally, the structure of the link (anchor text, to be covered later) is what matters, but if it is an image that is it’s own link, then the alt tag is what matters and it should contain whatever keyword you want to be strongest in regards to that backlink. For example, say I had

www.kidsclothingline.com

with main keywords

kids Shoes, kids Shoe, kids Pants, kids Socks and kids Pant

And say further that I already had a lot of backlinks whose structure (anchor text, to be covered later) optimized for “kids shoes” and “kids shoe”.

Then say that I called up Fred and convinced him to put a link from his home page to mine, but Fred wanted to just use an image for the link, then the alt tag of that image could be

Alt=”kids pants”

So that I would have a variety of my 5 keywords strengthened by backlinks. It’s good to vary among your keywords.

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SEO & Links:

I. Backlinks:

Backlinks are the #2 most important element in strengthening a site for it’s keywords, next only to the title tag. Many times it is a page’s backlinks that make or break the site’s rankings.

Backlinks are one-way links from another site to yours with (hopefully) good anchor text. Two way (reciprocal) backlinks, where you trade links, is much weaker.

A backlink is treated by the search engines as a vote that your site is good. The more votes, the better you rank. Remember each page is seen separately as far as backlinks as well, but an internal page can inherit some strength from the home page if the home page is heavy with backlinks.

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II. Anchor Text

Here is a description of anchor text:

Suppose that the html of your backlink looks like

<a href=http://www.kidsclothingline.com”>Slacks</a>

and say that the home page (www.kidsclothingline.com) that this link is pointing to has “slacks” as a major keyword. Then that page that is being linked to is strengthened for the keyword “slacks”. The anchor text is “Slacks” above, between the <a href=”URL Here”> and the <a>.

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III. What Makes a Backlink Strong

A backlink is strongest if it

1) Is Site wide

2) Has good anchor text

3) Is around few or no other links

4) Is on a site or page with a high pagerank

5) Is on a site with content that is the same or similar in theme to your own site.

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YAHOO!

http://www.yahoo.com/

Lycos

http://www.lycos.com/

Excite

http://www.excite.com/

Alta Vista

http://www.altavista.com/

Google

http://www.google.com/