11 Apr Simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques
If you are a seasoned webmaster you no doubt know the power and importance of proper search engine optimization (SEO). But SEO is not that easy a skill to conquer, and a confusing one at that. Much like getting opinions from doctors, query five different so-called “SEO experts” on the best practices and you’ll likely get five different answers. And so it is.
In my mind, securing a strong ranking in the Google search positions means coming to terms with the Holy Trinity of High Rankings, that is SEO, link development and content. There are many methods for rising up the search listings ladder, but I’ll stick with those three for now.
SEO in it’s simplest form is just making sure the search engine spider – be it Google, Yahoo or MSN or whatever – can understand and properly categorize your webpage.
If you don’t know French, good luck trying to read a French novel! Same principle somewhat applies to SEO. If you want your webpage to be about Aishwarya Rai, don’t create it about Paris Hilton. And when you do create it, make sure the HTML is clean and concise, and the language that you use within the displayed text makes sense and is easy to follow. Some search engines also frown upon excessive tables, flash and javascript, but if you keep your page simple you should be okay.
On virtually all webpages, SEO starts at the top with the title, which for me is one of the most important factors on the page. A good, succinct title gets the ball rolling. If you are creating a biography page on Barack Obama, then a strong, relevant title would be “Barack Obama Biography”. A poor title would be, “Here is the Barack Obama Biography”. The extra words “Here is the” are not needed. Again, keep it short, keep it simple and focus on the keywords of your page, which in this case are Barack Obama Biography. If you want to include your website name or title, you can, but make sure it’s just a few words after your keywords. And don’t repeat the keywords in the title, either.
And also with the title, think along of the terms of what people what type in the search engines to reach that page. Certainly no one is typing “Here is the Barack Obama Biography” in the search box, but I’m sure very many are searching for “Barack Obama Biography”. The closer your title matches what the users enter into the search box the better (in most cases).
Moving down you page, the “meta keyword” has become virtually useless, though if you want to fill it in go ahead. Just keep your words separated by commas, and limit the number of keywords you put in to under ten. The “meta description” however remains of some importance. Google sometimes uses this text in its search listing to describe the page, so make sure that it is well written, descriptive and unique – that is all the pages on your website have unique descriptions. A couple good sentences at most should do the trick.
For the rest of the page – now we are getting into “content”- you can duplicate your title text in the main body in a bold or “h1″ header, which many search engines seem to like. Don’t overdue your keyword placement within the text, just keep it natural.
If you have to use text that’s already been indexed/ published – maybe you just grabbed Barack’s bio from wikipedia and pasted it in – try to change it up some. Search engines don’t take kindly to duplicate content, so try to be unique when you can. Using duplicate content won’t get you automatically bounced from the rankings, but it’s probably not going to help with your rise up them either.
And when looking at your HTML source, the closer your main body text is to the top, the better, so cut down an any unnecessary formatting and code when you can.
As for link development, you probably don’t want more than 50 outbound links from your webpage to other pages, including those to your own website. Think about it, would a visitor really click on all of them? Would they really all be relevant to your keywords? Probably not. So don’t overdue it with outbound links. And keep your overall website menu on the short side. If you do link to other sites, make sure they are relevant to the topic and not spammy.
Incoming links to the page are another matter. The more backlinks from trusted sites the better. I’ve already hit on some easy link building tips before, so I won’t rehash them all here, but again, keep them natural. That means varying up the incoming links to the page. Don’t make every incoming link “Barack Obama Biography”, that’s not natural. Vary it up. Make one a “Biography on Obama” and another link a “Complete Biography on Barack Obama”. If you make all your links the exact same it might look like a spamming effort to the search engines, and that’s not going to help your cause.
Now let’s apply some of techniques to this site, Daily India, which my buddy Paul has been running for about four years now.
Overall this site practices good SEO, but there are areas where I see he can improve. First the title of his homepage is “Daily News from India” which isn’t very good. And I’ve told him as much. Maybe a better title would be “India News – DailyIndia.com”. Again, this better emphasizes his main keyword, India News.
On the left side of the screen you’ll notice a link for an arcade game site, India Arcade. Again, poor link title. Who the heck types the phrase “India Arcade” into a search engine box? A better link would be Free Online Games, which actually appears in the title tag for that site. There, I just did the site a favor, putting a better link out there to the site.
Paul also has many Indian celebrity news pages set up. Each is linked to by the celebrity’s full name, which is fine. But there’s no variation that I can see. All the links to Paul’s Aishwarya Rai page are the same. So here’s a free one, Paul, News on Aishwarya Rai. You don’t have to change them all, just vary a couple here and there.
If you have a 100 of the same style links, change 5-10 of them to something similar. Mix it!
There are other points I can get into but I’ll leave it here for now. Obviously there’s a lot of more to SEO, and my best advice is to read up on it as much as you can and use common sense. It’s hard work but it can really pay off in the end.
No Comments