SEO GUIDE
For the newbies (don't worry you are in the majority - there are always many more of these than there are web experts!) or those living on a different planet , 'SEO' stands for "Search Engine Optimisation" , it is a branch of web development that is concerned with arranging webpages in such a way as to get ranked well on the popular search engines .
Like the idea of getting regular high relevancy site traffic ? Our golden rules on obtaining traffic from the organic results of the search engines.
SEO Guide Ranking well is the 'cherry on the icing on cake' if you are looking to get a steady stream of relevant traffic at no cost (other than the man hours you put in) .
Many webmasters do not bother mainly because of 3 reasons :
1) search engines are unpredicatable , you can find they may rank a well SEO'd page very low or even place it in a supplementary index or not index it all
2) There is no instant 'magic wand' effect , changes can take days weeks or even months until the fruits of your labour come to fruition in better search engine rankings , whereas buying advertising space can lead to instantaneous traffic to your site.
3) Creating optimised sites requires changing text layouts amongst other things , which can make a page less appealing , or even amateurish .
We suggest you first create pages that are original with lots of fresh content , and then use some of the basic SEO priciples to get ranked well , Google , is the largest by far of all the net search engines , and they even provide help and guidelines on getting ranked well ... Google Webmaster Help
NetFaqs 3 Golden Rules To SEO
Rule One :
Choose keywords or keyphrases carefully , and consider creating pages for each keyword/phrase . A diagram may help the top level diagram is the complete site , break it down into components - so if you are a toy shop - the top level is toys , then you may break this down into types of toys eg: teddies , you will also have services associated with your store such as free delivery or buy one get 1 frees , each of these is a "topic" , do not be too specific else you will be doing battle with too many competitors - try and find a speciality - or niche phrase , for instance if you are selling "plush teddy bears" this would be a good phrase to go for , as there will be less competitors with pages optimised to this niche market of teddies.The other thing to bear in mind is the number of searches done on these keywords , if you are ranked no1 and no one ever searches for it , then you are wasting your time ( a good free utility is Overture search tool ) . Many webmasters get disalusioned by the few hits they get from their targetted keywords - as well as quality of pages you also need QUANTITY - each page may have the occasional hit - don't expect thousands - it may be 1 a day (or week) for niche words, you will probably need to create a lot of pages - this is why most webmasters give up SEO - it usually is V. hard work to start , as you cannot target single keywords until you have high link popularity.
Rule Two :
Code layout - use a template or write your own coding, but make sure it has clean code without unecessary tags comments etc. The aim is to get S.E crawlable content as close to the top of the page as possible , if you have tons of javascript between the header and the body try moving it to the bottom of your code . Search google for any keyword - preferable phrases associated with your website content , find a good site that is ranked highly and right click the home page , chances are they are there , ranked highly for a reason - ranking is based on link popularity (the number of links to your site) combined with SEO , you will probably find the coed is very clean , consider basing your site on the techniques employed in the high ranking site - as long as you don't copy the code - that would be illegal !(all sites are copyright - ie: as soon as they are published they are owned by the creator of the site , and you would need their agreement if you were to use their intellectual property) . - But learning from other programmers by viewing their code is of course fine . A thing to be aware of - If you are using a wysiwyg editor , such as Netobjects do not assume it provides clean code.
Rule Three :
Keyword saturation - This page is about SEO , so the keyword has gone in the filename ie: this filename is seo.php , and also in several other important sections of this web page , namely - the metatags section (see below) , the H1 title (H1 is a header directive this is bold at the top of the body of our text - but can be formatted to any font setting using .CSS or inline font html tags - more on this soon). It is also used in several places in the text of this page .
Important - If your page content relevancy is high - ie: you are writing stuff that people should or want to know about a particular topic then much of this wording will naturally suit the search engines , we suggest you write the page first without thinking about optimisation - then when you have proof read it - then go on and ensure it has the basic SEO rules enforced , you probably won't need to change the actual content hardly at all . Many 'SEO specialists' go OTT adding keywords robotically all over the place to try and get the traffic , the trouble is you could find your site gets penalised by the search engine robot if you hack your site around too much, and in any case by concentrating on good content you will have a page that your visitors will find more readable .
Link Popularity
You need other sites linking to you if you are ever going to get out of the niche arena . You can get ranked 1 without anyone linking to you but it will have to be an uncompeted phrase which will inturn is unlikely to be searched for (all the competitve keywords are taken!) To get ranked for more competitve terms (the only way to good traffic) is to get more links in . This is a bit of a black art , if you like what i have written by the way please link to my site ! Have you linked yet ? well if you have read to here you must have found something stimulating enough to hold your attention - that is they key - write good content and sooner or later someone will like what you have written and link to it . Other ways to get links are to exchange links (reciprocal links) , - search for ther relevant sites using the search engines then email the webmaster , if you have a good site they may well agree to an exchange . You can of course also buy links but be prepared to spend a fortune - and no longer free. To compete with single words you may need 100s or 1000s of good incoming links! so unless you have a lifetime - or a company of people working on your behalf then don't go too mad - stick with niche words !
Further Help And Advice
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