How to SEO for Beginners
How many times have you heard about the guru’s telling you the importance of SEO? I am sure a tonnes of time, but what is SEO?
SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, which means improving the quality of your site and everything affiliated with it to make it more search bot friendly in order to rank high in the search engines.
Before we start on the basics of SEO, i would like to tell you something about SEO and things associated with it, first-most is why is SEO so important? because SEO helps in making your site Search engine friendly and thus giving you more organic, targeted and valuable traffic. But first lets get used to what search engines are and what they like,search engines are smart bots that crawls your sites content and gives it a rank among search result with certain keyword among all the other sites that has the same keyword, examples of search engines are google, yahoo, bing, aol,etc etc.
Now that you know what i am talking about, lets get serious, traffic is everything. Without traffic no business or site on the net can flourish, now that there are many sources of traffic, the top most and free of cost source is search engine traffic which also known as organic traffic. In fact there are many people on the net that claims themselves to be SEO experts and takes huge amount of money for doing something which anyone with simple SEO knowledge can do, that’s why i want to teach you SEO [Although i am not a expert but i know what am doing] and possibly save you some cash.
Keyword Research
First and foremost, before you build that site or write that article, ask yourself this question: What are you trying to rank for on the search engines? You should always have a ‘keyword’ that you wish to rank for, keywords are basically the ‘search terms’ that people type on the search engines to look for ‘something’. Ranking in top 3 for a keyword will give you lots of visitors. But this also means that not every term is actually a ‘keyword’, some terms don’t even get a single visit. For proper keyword research i suggest you to use the google keyword research tool, which shows you how much the keyword gets search volume every month, the cost per click for that keyword in case you plan to make money with adsense, etc. Keyword research is important, once you like a keyword that you want to rank for, you can proceed.
Getting your site indexed
Before you can actually expect some organic traffic, you must make sure your site is known to the search bots, how can they do this? Its by indexing your site to their database, if your site has any incoming or outgoing links from other sites, then your site might already be indexed, but if not, then you need to get them indexed, top search engines like google, yahoo and aol gets many pages and sites indexed daily so its not a big issue, but you might have to manually submit them to other search engines that you may wish to be a part of. Just search on each one of them in order to submit your site, ‘Search Engine Submission’ should do.
But do remember that not every page of your site is indexed, many a times most pages are left out and in order to assure that all your pages are found and indexed by the search engines you can create a XML site map and submit them, i recommend using google webmasters tools for doing that and do read their guides and instruction. If you are want to make money blogging then you need to get your content indexed & ranked, if you have a wordpress blog then you can use wordpress blogs to easily create XML site maps for your site.
On Page SEO and Off Page SEO
There are 2 important aspects of SEO, one is called the On Page SEO which involves ‘instant’ SEO tasks that you could do on your website or blog in order to make it more search engine friendly. These factors usually involve Meta tags, keywords in Title, post/page/domain urls, keywords in the body, description, etc. There are many small tiny factors that influence your websites on page SEO. Factors such as incoming links, outgoing links, blog title, keywords, tags, etc. Some keywords have a very low competition that on page SEO is more then enough to rank for them.
On the other hand there is off page SEO. This is the most tedious part of SEO & involves ‘Link Building’. Yes, google & all other search engines WILL rank you higher if you have links pointing back at your site. Building back links should also have your keyword in anchored format. For example, ‘Make Money Online‘ is an anchored keyword linking to my site sameerjoad.com & every time a site points this link with that ‘keyword’ as its anchor text, google will rank me higher for it. Building too many links really fast can also be bad & building links from link farms or via spamming can even get your site banned & Deindexed from Google & other search engines. Back links can be in many forms, such as social bookmarks, forum signatures, blog comments, directory links, links from articles, direct links (blogroll) etc. Off page is hard but it amounts to for almost 80% of your SEO efforts. At the end the hard work really pays off.
The White Hat SEO vs The Black Hat SEO
SEO is classified into 2 types, that is the white hat and the black hat, white hate tricks are those that are legally accepted by a search engine while black hat are those which are not accepted and usually done by methods of creating link farms, spamdexing, etc
Its always advisable to follow white hat SEO and avoid contacts with companies or groups that promote Black hat methods, always remember that no one can guarantee you a #1 space in any search engine for any keywords, so don’t have high hopes if someone promises you.
While white hat SEO is based on the guide lines given by the search engines (to most publishers), black hat SEO involves deception. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking. Having too many keywords in an article or text page also accounts as black hat, commonly known as ‘keyword stuffing’.
Building the search engine friendly site
Site structure is not the only thing that needs to be taken care of but also the site content, as they say content is king and search engines obey that rule, your content should be original, keywords rich and well written. On top of all that your content must be helpful & informative to the person searching for that content. That’s what search engines are for after all, right?
I won’t go into details or else this post will be ten thousand words long, so i decided to do the SEO in parts, this is basically the guide on SEO for beginners, after you know your content always make sure that your site follows all the guidelines given out by the search engines like google, bing and yahoo.
Your sites themes should also be search engine friendly, avoid using too much flash work since flash sites don’t get indexed or recognized by the crawler bots as much as simple static html or dynamic blogs, Speaking of themes if you are into blogging then i recommend Elegant Themes as they have some pretty amazing themes at very affordable prices.. This may result in loss of organic traffic, you can always post links of your site on other sites thus giving you a back link and improving your search engine rank, but please avoid spamming and generating too much links in a short period of time.
Having a domain with your keyword in it is also very valuable for SEO. For example, a site makemoneyonline.TLD will rank higher in search engines for the keyword ‘make money online’ then a site like sameerjoad.com. (Yes i know i don’t practice what i preach, but for me branding is more important then rankings and those domains where already taken when i wanted to register!) Make sure you get your domain before its gone, domains are cheap to register & sometimes registering multiple domains and redirecting them to the same site also brings more traffic & eliminates competition. I recommend Godaddy or namecheap for registering domains, these are the services i use myself personally. Oh in case you are wondering what TLD means, then it stands for Top Level Domains like .com, .net, .org which rank quite easily. There are also country level cTLDs that rank well on the local search engines, these are lie .co.uk, .in, .us, etc.
Avoid joining sites that does link exchanges, since that basically results in your site being effected for participating in link farms. If you break rules and guidelines your site might get penalised by the search engine, i.e your site is no longer displayed on search results and that’s the end of your organic traffic from those search engines, so please avoid that.
For now i think this much SEO information is enough, i don’t want you to have a information overload and this basically explains you basics of SEO, i will keep posting from time to time and help you and myself learn newer things about SEO and the journey to dominate a keyword in rankings.
Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,
SJ
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Very Good information,I have bookmarked this site to my seo list for future and will keep a eye on your other posts.
Just finished reading your post… great work. Hope your next post will be posted soon!!
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