SEO 101: Back To Basics

Beginner Level

If one of your goals is to be found on search engines, then your website better be search engine friendly. Of course, websites should always be designed with the end user in mind first, but there are certain things you can do to make your site more apt to be crawled, indexed and displayed in search results. These techniques are commonly known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Over the course of time, we will dedicate many newsletters to SEO and further define topics like how to sculpt page rank and build more "link juice" into your site. However, before we move onto these advanced topics, it is important we go back to the basics.

SEO is all about how you build your site, how often you update it and how relevant and timely the content on your site is. The techniques mentioned below will assist you in kicking off SEO efforts for your site.

Meta data: Meta data can take on many forms, but we will focus solely on meta keywords and meta descriptions. Search engines have increasingly placed less emphasis on these “tags”, but I strongly believe not having them on the pages of your site is sloppy SEO. Meta data is placed in the code of your website and is not visible in the content of the page, but engines will see it. Meta keywords should be no more than 1,024 characters in length and meta descriptions should be no more than 250 characters in length.

Title Tags: Title tags are important, as they are often the text of your page that is returned with a search result. The title tag appears in the upper left corner of your browser. Each page should have a different title tag, pertaining to the content on the page. “Homepage” is not a good title tag. Instead, use words that describe your company, brand or services that you offer.

Domain: If you can, choose a domain with your brand and related keywords in it. Keywords in URL’s are very powerful, and also tell the end user what is about. Take Fortune’s URL for example. The brand and what the company does are present: FortuneWebMarketing.com. This is much stronger than this URL, for example: FortuneAgency.com.

Directory & Page Names: Just like keywords are important in your domain, naming your pages and directories with keywords in them is just as important. Besides, a cleaner URL exudes professionalism. Here are both good and bad examples of URL structure (all URL’s are fictitious and do not exist):

• Good: BuyOurProducts.com/discount-printers/HP-laserjet-p1005-printer
  
  
• Bad: BuyOurProducts.com/webapp/catID12/product687catalog?id=7h79ja83ka02i9
  
  

You can see that the latter URL is confusing and tells us (and engines) nothing about the page. Also note that engines will not crawl parameters (i.e. question marks, equal signs, etc.). This can be troublesome for some eCommerce websites pulling catalogs from a database. Try URL Rewriting to fix this problem.

Copy/Content: There are a few things we need to say about content, so here it goes.

• Engines LOVE content. Update your site as much as possible; keep it fresh in the engine's eyes. Good, keyword filled content is the most important aspect of SEO.
  
  
• The headings & titles of your page should be bold and in bigger font. Engines place emphasis on text that is meant to be called out. Make sure the heading includes keywords found on the page.
  
  
• Hyperlink keywords within your copy. Saying "click here" is a big pet peeve of mine. Engines are thinking 'Click here for what?'. Instead, hyperlink the title of the product or text that describes your service (i.e. “View Details on HP Laser Jet P1005”).
  
  
• Place as many keywords in the copy of the page as possible. Place most of them “above the fold” of the page, or closer to the top.

Images: Search engines will crawl images if they link somewhere. Describe what the image is linking to by using an alt tag. This will help tell the search engine what the page the image is linking to is about.

Flash: Engines do not crawl flash. Yes, it’s pretty and it illustrates your product well, but use it wisely.

PDF’s: Engines crawl PDF’s. Save the PDF with keywords in the title as the title of the PDF will be part of the URL string.

Know Your Keywords: Optimizing a website for hundreds of keywords is difficult if not impossible. If you did it, it would take a very, very long time. Work with your webmaster, marketing department or agency to help you define a set of targeted keywords you want to be found for. Feel free to expand the keyword list, but be realistic as to how much you can get done in a certain amount of time.

In conclusion, I want to warn all of you that there is no magic wand anyone can wave and instantly achieve high organic rankings. SEO TAKES TIME. In future issues we will explore why that is, why content is so important and more advanced SEO techniques. For now…this should get you started!

For a more comprehensive overview, download our SEO whitepaper.

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