Basic SEO Tutorial

What is SEO?

SEO is the process and practice of optimizing your website so that it ranks well on search engine results pages.

SEO Tips:

This time, well move onto the important issue of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is such a hot topic these days. How do you get your web site within the first page or two of the search engines? How do you increase your Google page rank? However, there are some simple things you can do when building your site that will help increase your chances of having good results.

1. Title Tag:

The title tag plays such a large role in the indexing of your web site, that it is considered the most important of the three. A page title is the first thing a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing.

2. Meta Tags:

There are two primary meta tags in terms of SEO: the description and the keyword tag. It's debatable whether the search engines use the description tag as far as ranking your results. However it is one of the more important tags because it is listed in your search result, it is what users read when your link comes up and what makes them decide whether or not to click on your link. Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don't stuff it with keywords either.

3. Proper Use of Heading Tags

This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are. Your main page title should use the h1 tag ? this shows what your page is about.

4. Alt Attributes on Images

Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings.

5. Title Attributes on Links

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That is the little tool tip that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.

6. XML Sitemap

My last post referenced the sitemaps used by web visitors to help them navigate through your site themselves. However, there is another version XML sitemaps that are used by the search engines in order to index through your site, as well. This list of ALL pages / posts / etc. of your site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what you feel the most important pages of your sites are.

7. Relevant Content

Having content relevant to your main page or site topic is perhaps the most important SEO aspect of a page. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc. but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt. While it is important to include as many keywords in your page copy as possible, it is equally as important for it to read well and make sense.

8. Link Building

We have probably all heard of Google Page Rank, it seems to be every web site owner's dream to have as high a page rank as possible. While the algorithm for determining page rank encompasses many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your web site.