SEO OPTIMIZATION

What is SEO OPTIMIZATION?

Well, SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads

SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:

1. Techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design referred to as White Hat SEO, and

2. Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect of referred to as Black Hat or spamdexing

 

TACTICS AND METHOD

 

White Hat SEO:

An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as White Hat if it follows the followings

• If it conforms to the search engine's guidelines.
• If it does not involves any deception.
• It ensures that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
• It ensures that a Web Page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines.
• It ensures the good quality of the web pages
• It ensures the useful content available on the web pages

Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and don't try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and definitely you will get something more.
Next chapter onward we will put light on White Hap SEO techniques. The WHST are very simple and can be done without investing much cost.

Black Hat or Spamdexing:

An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it follows the followings

• Try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception.
• Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly.
• Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the search engine ranked.
• Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO tactic.
• Using Hidden or invisible text or with the page background color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no frame" sections.
• Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. This is called Meta tag stuffing.
• Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called Keyword stuffing .
• Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar key words and phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages
• Mirror web sites by hosting multiple web sites all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs.
• Creating a rogue copy of a popular web site which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious web sites. This is called Page hijacking.

Always be away to adopt any of the above Black Hat tactic to improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all the above proprieties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get anything.

OPTIMIZED KEYWORD

We are discussing everything in Web context so in web terminology a keyword is a term that a person enters into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consists of between two and five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query phrases, or just keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive.
There are following concepts related to Keywords which helps in optimizing keywords on a web page.

Keyword Frequency:

This is calculated as how often does a keyword appear in a site's title or description. You don't want to go overboard with frequency, however, since on some engines if you repeat a word too many times, you'll be penalized for "spamming" or keyword stuffing.
In general though, repeat your keyword in the document as many times as you can get away with, and up to 3-7 times in your META tags.

Keyword Weight:

This refers to the number of keywords appearing on your Web page compared to the total number of words appearing on that same page. Some search engines consider this when determining the rank of your Web site for a particular keyword search.
One technique that often works well is to create some smaller pages, generally just a paragraph long, which emphasize a particular keyword. By keeping the overall number of words to a minimum, you will increase the "weight" of the keyword you are emphasizing.

Keyword Proximity:

This refers to the placement of keywords on a Web page in relation to each other or, in some cases, in relation to other words with a similar meaning as the queried keyword.
For search engines that grade a keyword match by keyword proximity, the connected phrase .home loans. will outrank a citation that mentions .home mortgage loans. assuming that you are searching only for the phrase "home loans".

Keyword Prominence:

A measure of how early or high up on a page the keywords are found. Having keywords in the first heading and in the first paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are best.

Keyword Placement:

WHERE your keywords are placed on a page is very important. For example, in most engines, placing the keywords in the Title of the page or in the Heading tags will give it more relevancy. On some engines, placing keywords in the link text, the part that is underlined on the screen in a browser, can add more relevancy to those words.

Best Places to Put Keywords:

Here is a list of places where you should try to use your main keywords.

• Keywords in the <title> tag(s).
• Keywords in the <meta name="description">
• Keywords in the <meta name="keyword">
• Keywords in <h1> or other headline tags.
• Keywords in the <a href="http://yourcompany.com">keywords</a> link tags.
• Keywords in the body copy.
• Keywords in alt tags.
• Keywords in <!-- insert comments here> comments tags.
• Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g., http://www.keyword.com/keywordkeyword.htm.

Finding Keywords:

There are many different ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are:

• Words people would search for to find your product or service.
• Problems your prospective customers may be trying to solve with your product or service.
• Keyword tags on competitors websites.
• Visible page copy on competitors websites.
• Related search suggestions on top search engines.
• By using an online tools like: Google Keyword Tool
• By analyzing your website carefully and finding out proper keywords. This task can be done by expert SEO Copywriters.
• Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - Particularly to what the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for that word when optimizing pages over time.
• You can do brainstorming to identify correct keywords for your site.

What is Word Stemming?

Google uses word stemming. Word stemming allows all forms of the word - singular, plural, verb form as well as similar words to be returned for a given search query.
So if someone types in "house plans", not only will pages that are optimized for that phrase be returned, but so will pages that contain all variations of that phrase, for example: "house plan", "house planning", "house planer".
Hope you have some understanding on keywords and how to identify them and where to use them. Next chapter will explain you how to optimize Metatags for better results.

TITTLE OPTIMIZATION

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.

  VERYFICATION OF WEBSITE

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.

 

LINK BUILDING

Link building is the SEO practice of obtaining links from external web sites to your own to improve both direct referrals ie. people clicking on the links and search engine ranking. Link building is all about increasing your site link popularity.
Web site Crawler will go to a site again and again whose ranking in Search Engine is high. You can verify this fact by putting your site on a high rank site. If your site link is available on a high rank web site then you have 99.99% chances that you site will be indexed with-in 24Hrs.

How to increase Link Popularity ?

There are various ways of increasing your web site link popularity. I'm listing out some important tips which are easily doable.

• Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Don't go for automated submission.
• Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org, yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories will give your site a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
• Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to your site if you have what they want and no where is available.
• Leverage your personal relationsrelations with other webmasters. Put your site link on their sites. One way links often count for more than reciprocal links.
• Participate in Link Exchange Program. Find top 20 sites doing the same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the Search Engine.
• If you are subscribed in a forum and forum does not have any restriction to keep your site link as your signature then it can help you to increase your site popularity.
• Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG, and Slashdot etc. Before submitting please go through their spam policy.
• Write good articles in blogging sites and give few references of your links with-in that article.
• Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep them busy on your site. If possible create forums, news letters, blogs etc.

There are other ways but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternative.

• Buy a place on high rank website where you can put your link.
• Subscribe for google's Adwords program to drive traffic towards your site.
• You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the number of hits on your site which will result in your site link popularity

There are various other tips related to SEO. I have not categorized them into any special category so putting in misc category. Go through these tips one by one

Don't do the followings:

• Don't keep hidden text on your web pages.
• Don't create alt image spamming by putting wrong keywords.
• Don't use meta tags stuffing.
• Don't use frames and flash on your site.
• Don't exchange your links with black listed sites.
• Don't try to fool your site visitors by using miss spelled keyword.
• Don't send spam emails to thousand of email IDs.
• Don't use too much graphics on your site.
• Don't create too many doorway pages.
• Don't try to create duplicate content of pages.
• Don't submit your website many times in a single search engine.
• Don't use sub-directory depth more than 1-2.
• Don't create too many dynamic pages. Try to convert them into static pages.
• Don't bloat your pages with code.
• Don't nest your pages.

Do the followings:

There are various other tips which can help you to optimize your web site for many Search Engines.

• Create logs of pages and each page should however contain a minimum of about 200 visible words of text to maximize relevance with Google.
• Create a Sitemap, Help, FAQ, About Us, Link to Us, Copyright, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy pages on mandatory basis.
• Create a home page link to each and every web page and provide easy navigation through all the pages.
• Pay attention to your dynamic page URLs. Google can crawl and index dynamic pages as long as you don't have more than 2 parameters in the URL.
• Check your complete site for broken links. Broken links will reduce your other pages rank as well.