Search Engine Optimization: A Beginner's Guide

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Author
Alyice Edrich

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SEO: The Crash Course
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Are you tired of not being able to find your website when searching for your product or service online? Do you wish there was an easier way to get ranked high in the search engines? It doesn’t have to be as difficult as many search engine optimization companies make it out to be. The key is to do it right from the start...

First, start with your website—itself.
Even if you had the top spot in many of the search engines, it wouldn’t do any good if your website was not up to par. You need tantalizing web copy and you need a website that flows!

The Internet is so vast, that people actually get information overload; therefore, you only have a few seconds to make a good impression.

So before you decide to optimize your website for the search engines, here are a few things you want to stay away from…

Gateway (or doorway) pages that lead into your website as they don’t have anything valuable to offer search engines.
Frames as they are not search engine friendly.
Flash websites as they are all one file and cannot be read by or optimized for search engines. Search engines cannot read the files used to make flash websites; therefore, your keywords are not getting indexed.
Slow loading pages that cause visitors to leave your website before they even had a chance to visit.
All graphics and/or scripts and no real content…Where’s the beef?
Poor navigation (or site map) that makes it difficult for your visitor to find his desired destination
Web Copy that is poorly written, has grammatical errors, or rambles.
Broken links on your website can count against you when a search engine goes to crawl your website.
Bad Link Additions: Avoid making links with "?," "%," and "&" characters.

Second, make sure the name you give your web page (the extension on your url) is your most important keyword.
In other words, if you wrote an article on the importance of domain names, you would want your web page extension to be domainnames. In other words, to get to your article on domain names, one would simply type http://url.com/domainname.html in the web browser's address bar. (There is no proven fact this technique helps your rankings, but it does allow searchers to know what your web page is about and gives them more incentive for clicking.)

Third, write web copy that includes your most important keyword phrase.
You don’t want to fill each and every web page with useless or hidden words, because this will count against you when a search engine crawls your website and ranks it for their search engine results page. Instead, you want to use your keyword phrases in sentences throughout the copy of your web page.

To find the best match, start by realizing that the more informed you are when selecting your keyword phrases, the better your chances will be of turning visitors into buyers. Therefore, before you finalize any set of keyword phrases, ask yourself:

What words do you think best describe your product or service?
What do your employees think best describe your product or service?
What words do your customers use to locate you? (Ask or use email forms and website stats.)
Put yourself in your client or customer's shoes. What problem is he/she trying to solve? What keyword phrases might he/she search for when looking for your service or product to solve his/her problem? Not sure? Ask how he/she found you. Do a search yourself—as if you were the customer or client.
What keyword phrases do your competition use? How successful are they with those words?
Visit top ranking websites then right click anywhere on their website and click on "view source." This will allow you to read that company’s html coding, which will show you what their keywords are. Don’t copy their keyword phrases word for word, but see what they are using and then determine if any of those keyword phrases can work on your web page.
What keyword phrases do the keyword suggestion tools pick?
Don't just pick the top ranking keyword or keyword phrase. If it's too general, you won't get the hits or the targeted audience you want. In fact, you might not even get the conversion rate you want (visitors to buyers). Instead, look for the highest ranking targeted keyword phrase.

The idea is to find your most important keyword phrase and write your content around that phrase. Once you've finished writing your copy, go back and strategically insert your keyword phrase(s).

Another thing you want to keep in mind, is that your most important keyword should be used somewhere at the top of your web page. Use your keyword phrases in your headline as well as the first paragraph of your article. Then place your keywords throughout the content, as needed, keeping an eye on your keyword density.

You need just the right amount of keywords to make the search engines realize that keyword phrase is important to your content. Too many and the search engines think you are cramming your site and will penalize you. Too little and the search engines think the word is not important enough.

Your web pages should contain between 250 and 750 words only. (I know, I know...DM has way more than that! Our articles and interviews are often over 1000 words per page. It's just that I personally hate having to click through five pages to read one article.)

Fourth, make sure your internal pages are strategically linked with search engine optimized terms throughout your website. In other words, lets say you wrote an article on writing a press release. In another article, on another web page, you mention press releases as a vital part of marketing. Link the word press release to your article on marketing. (Known as on-topic cross linking.)

Fifth, have some form of a site map.
It is extremely important that you have all your web pages linked to each other in some format. If you forget to link a page to other pages within your website, you could hurt your search engine rankings because the search engines may not be able to crawl those pages and index them.

Keep in mind that link text is also a key factor in moving up the search engine results pages. Therefore, it is important to use your keywords as links to other sites and pages within your website.

Another thing to point out here is that without a proper map of your website, you will find it difficult to download your website from your host’s server should your computer crash and you lose the copy you were working on. (Take a look at Apple's site map, by clicking here.)

Sixth, work on the meta tags within the html coding of your website.
In the meta tag section of your web page, you want to start with your title tags, then your description tags, and finally end with your keyword tags.

In your title tag, make sure that you start off with the most potent keyword phrase for that web page and that the content in your tag relates to the content (visible text) on your web page. Avoid using your company name, author's name, or site name in your title tag.

Title tags usually have 115 characters or 10 words or less.
In your description tag, make sure that it gives an accurate description of what your web page is about. It just may be the description used in certain search engines to draw visitors to your website—via search snippets (those descriptions when you search for a certain phrase or set of words). Don't forget to use your highest ranking keyword phrase for that page in your description tag!

Description tags usually have 150 characters or less.
Many of the more popular search engines ignore the keyword tags these days (mostly likely because of spam abuse). Although search engines are turning away from using the keyword tag, it doesn't hurt to keep the keyword tag within the coding of your website. (Especially for the smaller search engines, that still use keyword tags.)
When placing keywords or keyword phrases in your keyword meta tag, don't worry about using commas. It doesn't matter whether you use them or not.
In the keyword tag, stay away from stop words that tend to use space and do nothing when someone is searching for information.

Stop words are the most common words in the English vocabulary, such as "a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, I, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, we, what, when, where, which, with, etc. "
Don’t use keyword phrases that have nothing to do with the content of your web page. If you put bogus keyword phrases in your tags, search engines may ban you from being placed on their servers.
If your keyword phrases often get misspelled and that misspelled word gets a lot of search engine traffic, use it in your keyword meta tag and body of your text.

If you use that misspelling in your content, put an * next to that word and explain why you used it at the bottom of the page. Or make a game out of it. Put an * next to the word. Then link that word to a new page that says, "We see you found our misspelled word. Email us today with the page your found our word on and the word, and we'll enter you into a drawing for __________."
Don't bog down your web pages or meta tags with too many keyword phrases. Use 2 - 3 keyword phrases, per page, throughout your web page. Pick keyword phrases that relate to your page, not the entire website, and don't repeat the same variation of a word more than four times.
Keep the keyword density (weight) under an 8% ratio to your text on that page. In other words, repeating important keywords on your website is very helpful, but you want to use the same keyword once per every 100 words.
Use different keyword phrases for each web page. If you have a party site, you'll have a different set of keywords for a page on back to school parties, than you would for a page on Halloween parties.
Consider adding a form email to your site and having one of the required fields be:
"How did you find us?" or "What phrase or word did you use in the search engines to find us?"

Seventh, get other websites to link to your website.
It is important to have a high link popularity as this helps move your website up the search engine results page. And since many search engines only crawl websites every three to six months, it’s important to have a good amount of reciprocal links before you begin asking them to crawl your website.

While swapping links and having a link partner page use to work in the past, you can reap far greater benefits by writing a great article and offering it to topic-related websites, free of charge. Just make sure you have a stipulation stating that your byline be placed at the end of the article and that your website’s url is an active link.

Keep in mind that while you want others to use your articles and link back to you, your own website should have fresh content. Google is cracking down on similar or same content web pages; therefore, if more than two web pages appear the same in nature, Google will choose only one or two of those web pages to list in their results pages! (To show your viewers which content they can freely reprint, try an autoresponder or announcement group instead.)

It is very important to focus on getting reciprocal links from those who are known as an "authority" on the main topic that you cover on your website.

b>Eighth, submit your website to the search engines.
While search engines can find your site by crawling another website that has a link to your site, you can get a jumpstart on the process by submitting your website to search engines manually--only once please. Avoid search engine submission tools, as most are nothing more than spam tools.

Start with the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. Then go to dmoz.org and submit your website to the directory.

Then start locating other directories, but don't worry about other search engines. The major search engines are the most important to get listed in! Off-the wall or unknown search engines will not drive enough traffic to your website to constitute the use of your time or money.

Every webpage on your website should be individually tweaked for search engine optimization (SEO). And since keywords that work now don't always work months from now, you have to stay on top of things. If you put an hour a day (or even a week) into SEO, by yourself, you can do this yourself.

Finally, optimizing your own website for the search engines is very time consuming. It's a lot of trial and error. It's a lot of rewriting, rewording, and tweaking of your content and meta tags. But in the end, when you finally see that your website has made it to the top ten in the search engines, like Google and yahoo, you will be so very proud of yourself! (Or your webmaster!)

You want "qualified leads" when you optimize your website. You don't want to use broad terms or words that have every looky-lou on the Internet visiting your website—these people are often bored and looking for something to occupy their time. You want to be specific in your keywords and phrases, so that you "target" a niche or group of people who are actually interested in your products and/or services... people who will either buy now or at a future date. By targeting your keywords and phrases, you will have a smaller "unique visitor" base, but you will have a better rate of return on your time, money, and investment!

Seem like too much work?

Hire an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant, but watch out for wolves in sheep's clothing. Good SEO consultants do not solicit clients by sending unsolicited emails that make false claims or intimidate business owners into believing they are losing valuable business or their SEO efforts reek of failure. They're too busy for that. Their work speaks for itself and their business grows by word of mouth, networking, article submissions, and ad placements.

Not by:

bashing the website owner, web designer, or current SEO consultant in hopes of showing how much smarter they are;
claiming a 100% guarantee on top search engine placement;
stating their current number one search engine position is not good enough because the keyword used for high ranking is not the best choice or lousy;
claiming no commas in the keyword tag is preventing high rankings;
claiming to have visited site in search of a product to purchase, but just so happened to peek at the site's HTML coding and found blah blah blah;
claiming the keyword tags carry the most weight, not the content on the pages themselves;
promising to "spam" the search engines every 48 hours or month with your web site url;
or other scare tactics.

If you don't have the time or desire to optimize your website yourself, really research the company you plan to use. Make sure that search engine optimization company knows its stuff.

Check out past and present clients.
Ask how satisfied those clients were in the beginning and how satisfied they are now.
Get Google's toolbar and check out the ranking of those companies and their clients, yourself.
Use Overture, Wordtracker, or Keyword Discovery to see how high the keywords given you, or the ones you would use when searching for those companies rank in the search engine results pages.

To tell if your SEO efforts are working, look at your stats logs:

How many unique visitors do you have?
How many come from search engines?
How many come from other sites or direct clicks?
How many visitors turn into sales or subscribers?
It's one thing to have a lot of traffic and another to have "quality" traffic.

You can also use an email contact form and ask how each visitor found your site.

About The Author
Alyice Edrich is a mixed media artist, freelance writer, and aspiring photographer. She enjoys creating things that bring joy to others. Visit our her blog, Coming Home, to check out her latest art. Or stop by her resume site, AlyiceEdrich.net to learn how you can hire her for your next project.

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