What Is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is a collection of techniques used to make your site appear as relevant as possible to a set of keywords. When people search for information of the web, they go to a search engine website like Google and enter a set of search terms into the search text field. After clicking the submit button, the search engine uses its own set of complicated calculations on its own server to identify the set of webpages that it believes are most relevant to the search terms. Since most people who want to find information on the web will go to search engines as their first step in finding that information, website owners who want the world to see their website will want to do whatever they need to do in order to have their website included in that group of websites. Search Engine Optimization encompasses all the techniques that webmasters must use to achieve that goal.

SEO techniques can be divided into two categories:

· On-page techniques
· Off-page techniques

On page techniques consist of all the things that you can do directly to your own website to make it more appealing to search engines, such as making specific changes to your HTML code or adding a sitemap file to
your website. Off-page techniques are centered around the task of “link building”, which is the process of getting other websites to link to your website. SEO experts generally agree that off-page link building techniques provide you with 90% or more of the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. It is still important to use on-page techniques because they involve fairly easy changes to your own website and using them will definitely make a difference when combined with off-page techniques. But once you have made the most important on-page optimizations to your web pages, building links is by far the most important activity you must pursue to get your website ranked well.

The Importance of Good Unique Content
Before I start to talk about specific techniques, it is important to point out that SEO is designed to enhance the rankings of websites that have valuable, unique content. If you have spammy content, duplicate content, or insufficient content, SEO can only get you so far. SEO is not a substitute for making a great website with content that people want to see! The search engines are becoming more and more skilled at identifying spammy websites like made-for-Adsense sites or RSS-feed-updated sites that don’t provide much unique or useful information to the user. These sorts of sites will get taken out of the search engine index within weeks of creating them (I know, this has happened to me). These days, it isn’t even worth bothering to create low-grade crappy websites. If you’re going to put real energy into making a website rank well in the search engines, make sure you are starting with a quality site with useful and unique content.

On-Page SEO

Let’s start with the changes you can make to your own web pages to make sure the search engines see these pages as favorably as possible. We’ll look at:

• Getting good keywords
• Structuring your pages properly
• Creating and using good unique content with these keywords
• Highlighting the keywords in the most important places on your pages
• Discontinuing or avoiding the use of any techniques that search engines don’t like

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Step 1: Get Good Keywords
Remember, people who search for information on the web will type search terms into the search engine query box. These search terms are called “keywords”. The term “keywords” is a little misleading because a “keyword” for SEO purposes can be more than one word, and is therefore more properly referred to as a “keyphrase”. For example, someone searching for information on “fly fishing poles” would type the entire phrase “fly fishing pole” into the search engine query box. The entire phrase “fly fishing poles” is considered to be a “keyword” for SEO purposes. Other related keywords might include “buy fishing pole” or “new fishing pole”.
In any case, if you want people searching for your website to find it, then you must do the following:

· Identify the keywords they are likely to use when searching for your site
· Place these keywords in the most important places on your website

So before you make any changes to your website, you must find a good set of keywords that your potential customers are likely to use to find your website.

There are several good tools I recommend for doing keyword research. The first of these is totally free and is called GoodKeywords. You can get this at GoodKeywords.com. Download this tool to your Windows PC and run it. To use it, type the search terms into the search box, and this tool will find a number of keywords (keyphrases) that are similar to your searched keyword. This tool is a bit limited in the number of keywords it gives you, but it has the advantage of being completely free.
If you want something with much more power, then consider getting a subscription to WordTracker. This tool is the industry standard in keyword research. With a paid account, you can type in a starting search term (keyword) and get literally thousands of related keywords, sorted by how many searches have been made recently using these keywords. WordTracker is hands down the best tool to use to get a quick and complete start on your keyword research. The downside is that it isn’t free.

Step 2: Structure Your Website Properly
So let’s assume that you now have a really good set of say 10 or 20 or even 30 really good keywords that many people use to find websites similar to yours. How can you use these on your website? First you must realize that the only way a search engine can ever know anything about your website is to visit it. In fact, the search engines use automated software processes called “spiders” to visit your site on a regular basis and extract information from it. Spiders do this for each of the millions and millions of websites available on the web. When a spider comes to your site, it will try to extract key pieces of textual content that will best describe the website content. You want to make sure that your website is structured well so that the spiders can do this as easily and effectively as possible.

So what exactly does this entail? Here are three key things you must do when creating the HTML structure of your website:

1. Include a keyword-rich title
2. Include and use META tags in the HEAD element of your page.
3. Ensure spidering with a robots.txt file or with a ROBOTS meta tag
4. Move Javascript elements to an external file
5. Put your body content first if possible
6. Validate Your HTML

Let’s look at each of these.

Use a Keyword Rich Title
An HTML document has a HEAD section (between and ) and a body section (between and ). Probably the most important element in the HEAD section is the TITLE element (between and ). Search engines pay a great deal of attention to titles, so you should use a title that includes your
most important keywords. For example, if your website sells fly fishing poles, then a good title element would by Fly Fishing Poles. If you have two keywords you wish to put in the title, just separate them by a vertical bar “|” like this: Fly Fishing Poles | Fly Fishing Lures. What you definitely DO NOT want to do is to put junk text like “Welcome to my hompage” in the title because this text is not at all descriptive of the
content of your website. But you also don’t want to overdo it – use no more than 2 or 3 keywords (keyphrases) in your title. Keep it short and focused.

Use META Tags
Besides the title, the meta tags are the most important tags that go in your header. There are several varieties of meta tags available, but the ones that are important are the keywords and description meta tags. The keywords meta tag specifies keywords that are relevant to your website, and the description meta tag provides a longer sentence-based description of your website content.

The keywords meta tag can be specified like this:

Note that you should not repeat common elements in your keywords within the keywords meta tag – for example, use “fly fishing, poles, lures” instead of “fly fishing poles, fly fishing lures”. If you were to use “fly fishing” multiple times like this inside the meta tag, the search engines would see this as keyword stuffing and this would actually hurt you more than it helps.

The description meta tag can be specified like this:

Your description should be sentence-like and should be a concise summary of what the user can expect to find on the site. Don’t use more than 2 or 3 sentences at most – save your detailed descriptions for the main content of your website.
You should also note that the keywords and description tags should be different on different pages on your website. The content of each page of your website should be different, so make sure your meta tag content is
different too.

Ensure Spidering
When the search engine spider comes to your website, you want to make sure that you give it permission to spider your entire website. Or, you may wish to keep certain pages away from the search engines for whatever reason. In either case, the best thing to do is to tell the spiders what they can and cannot index. One way to do this is put a file called robots.txt in the root directory of your website. This file is a text file with a specific format, which you can find easily on the web by searching for “robots file”. However, there is an even easier method that
I prefer which is the robots meta tag. To tell the robots to spider your entire website, do this:
.

Put this meta tag with your keyword and description headers and the spiders will spider any of your
web pages that they find.

Move Javascript Elements to an External File
Javascript is a wonderful tool for making your website more dynamic and user-friendly, but Javascript elements in your HTML can make it more difficult for spiders to extract the information they want to see from your website. At the very least, Javascript elements that come before your content will make you content seem less important to the search engines, which is exactly what we don’t want. The best thing to do with Javascript is to reference it from an external file. Place your Javascript functions in a file called “myfuncs.js” and then reference these inside your HEAD element using this:
[removed][removed]

With this element in place, you can reference and use your javascript functions without cluttering your HTML code.

Put Your Body Content First
Inside your HTML BODY element, you want the spiders to see your good unique content as near the top as possible. But many people use a two or three column layout for their web pages, with their content in the
middle or rightmost column. This means that the spiders will see the menu and advertising content before they see your unique content!

There are several ways to avoid this problem and get the spiders to see your content first. One way is to put your content on the left and menu items on the right. Another way is to use tables and use an empty table cell. Specifically, you can structure your main content window inside a table like this:

Reading left to right and top to bottom, the spiders see the empty table column, then the content pane, and then the menu items last. Since the spider sees the content pane first, it gives greater importance to the content it finds.

Validate Your HTML
One of the reasons that websites can fail to rank well is that they use improper HTML. Remember, a spider can only extract your content if it can read your HTML. If there are errors in your HTML, it will have a difficult time reading your web page. The best way to find and fix any HTML problems is to use the online (and free) W3C HTML validator.

Just type in your URL, click the “Check” button, and the validator will point out all the HTML problems it finds.
While most browsers will still be able to show improperly formatted HTML, it remains true that the cleaner your HTML is the easier it is for spiders to properly recognize what content you have on your web page.

Step 3: Creating and Using Good Unique Content with Your Keywords
Once you have done your keyword research and have structured your website properly, as described above, you will need to create good content with these keywords, and/or optimize your existing content to use these keywords. If you don’t already have your main content written, then you should try to use your important keywords within your text when writing your content. If you have already written your content, you’ll need to go through it and take advantage of opportunities to insert your keywords in places where it makes sense to do so. Always remember that your are writing this content primarily for your users, and search engines are getting pretty good at differentiating between good content and keyword-stuffed spam. A good rule of thumb is to try to keep your keyword density down to about 5%. Roughly speaking,

keyword density is the ratio of occurrences of a keyword divided by the count of all words in the document. There are a number of good tools available online to examine your webpage and tell you your keyword density for single words, two word phrases and three word phrases. My favorite is the Keyword Density Analyzer Tool. This is free, online, and easy to use. If you see any of your keyword terms with keyword densities that are too high (say 10%) or too low (say 1%) then just add or subtract the keyword into your content as necessary.

Step 4: Highlighting Your Keywords
You want the search engine spiders to see that your web page is highly relevant to your keywords. The methods for doing this constitute the very heart of on-page SEO. Specifically, you should do the following:

· Put your keywords into your page title, meta-keyword, and meta-description tags, as described above
· Use an H1 (and possibly H2) header tag at the top of your body content. This tag should have at least one of your keywords in it. For example, a page on fly fishing poles should have:

at or near the top of the body.
· Where it makes sense to do so, use bold or italics to emphasize your keywords. For example, you can do this once the first time you use a keyword in the text. This makes your keyword stand out for human viewers and for search engine spiders. Just don’t overdo this – once per keyword is enough.
· Use Alt text in your images. Specifically, the tag in HTML lets you specify text to be shown if the image is unavailable. The original purpose of this may have been to allow browsers that cannot show images to still show the webpage. However, search engine spiders still look at this Alt text and will use it to help determine the content of the page. It is a good idea to put relevant text inside this tag to give the spider what it wants. For example, our fly fishing site could have a header image tag like this:
· Link to your own pages, or to external authority pages, using your own keywords. This is an often-overlooked SEO technique that can be very effective. Spiders actually use the anchor text of any outgoing links from your site when characterizing the content of your site. So it is a great idea to have pages on your site link to each other and to authority sites in the same niche using keywords for which you want to rank well.
· Use a sitemap file. Many times the search engines are not able to find all the pages on your site that you wish them to find. The best way to solve this problem is to use a sitemap. A sitemap is a text file in XML format, called sitemap.xml, that is stored in the root directory of your website. Google has a good page on how to specify the sitemap file and presents some sample sitemap files:

https://http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html

This is a good place to start when creating a sitemap. While on this page, you should also follow the link to Google Webmaster Tools. Google has an entire set of web pages devoted to free online tools that will allow you to submit your website, upload a sitemap, check indexing statistics, etc.
· Use search engine friendly URLs. If any of your web pages are written in a language like PHP and use parameters to dynamically create content, you should consider using your web server’s facilities for URL rewriting to create search-engine-friendly URLs. For example, if your website runs under the Apache web server, you can
use the file .htaccess in the root directory of your website to rewrite URLs like this:                                                                                        
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?action=go&item=12                
as a URL like this:                                                                                  
http://www.mydomain.com/go/12

URL rewriting depends a great deal on the exact format of your URLs, so you’ll need to search online for more complete information on this topic. A good introduction can be found here:
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html
You can even use the terrific tool here:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/url-rewriting/
to tell you exactly what to do to your .htaccess file to make it rewrite your URLs successfully.

Step 5: Avoid Using Techniques That Will Hurt Your Rankings
Just like it is true that doing some things to your website can help your rankings, it is also true that using certain techniques or tricks can actually hurt you. The things you want to avoid doing are:
Keyword Stuffing: Don’t put too many keywords on your web page. Search engines view this as spam and downgrade your page ranking accordingly
Keyword Hiding: Don’t put keywords on you page in a font that is the same color as your background, or in some other way that appears to be an attempt to trick the search engines.
Frames: Don’t use frames, since search engines have a hard time following content inside frames.
Flash or Other Animation: Sure, Flash animations look cool (sometimes) but search engines can’t read Flash files. So these animations do nothing for your search engine rankings.
Javascript Links: Make sure all your links (especially to internal pages) use regular links rather than links controlled from within Javascript.
Text Inside Images: Whenever possible, make sure all the text on your website is actualy HTML text rather than text embedded as pixels within images. The spiders can’t extract text from images, so all they will see is the image itself, and they will ignore it for SEO purposes. So for any menu items, especially those that use keywords, make sure the text is real text.

Summary Of On-page Optimization
So far, we covered a number of good techniques to use (and some not to use) to optimize your own website. These changes are generally easy to make because all you have to do is edit the code of your own website.