Your website may be top notch but what's the use of an online presence if no one can find it? In this quick start guide to search engine optimization we'll review an assortment of tactics to increase your page ranking.
A word from the Author
Before we start looking at these techniques, just know and understand this: don't expect overwhelming changes to occur over night. Getting higher ranks on search engines through SEO is a meticulous process and takes times to obtain positive results. Don't be too hasty and more importantly, don't resort to black hat SEO techniques. It may give you almost instant results but in the long term, the search engine is probably going to flag and blacklist you. You don't want that. Take it slow, be earnest and wait for the results.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the number of visitors by achieving a high position within search results when relevant keywords are searched for. It is common knowledge that people rarely look passed the second or third page of the search results. Optimally you'll want a first page position or even the first result in the first page. However, to accomplish this, you'll need to optimize and code accordingly.
Choose the Right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords can be painless or extremely tricky depending upon the scenario. You'd want to avoid the generic ones since it is going to be extremely difficult to optimize for them. Try to pick keywords that are just as specific as they need to be. For example if you are a freelancer based in Melbourne, your optimal keywords would be freelancer Melbourne or web development services Melbourne. Going for the generic freelancer or web development keywords isn't going to do you any good.
Research your keywords. Know which ones are probably going to be searched for most and go from there.
Focus on the Content
Content always comes first. It doesn't matter if you perform some dark voodoo to get your site the top place in the results. You'll still need solid content to back that up since the visitors are going to be leaving pretty quickly if they don't find what they are looking for.
Having good, relevant content is the most important aspect of SEO. Your content needs to be suitably useful for the people who you'd want to find your site. You need the content to make sense to the reader. The content needs to appeal to people and make them come back for more.
Having original content is very important. Don't expect to just copy-paste some text from another site, throw in some keywords and call it a day. You need lots and lots of original content with the keywords in the content itself. If people searching for jQuery come to your page, they expect something related to jQuery to be found on your page. Throw in relevant keywords within the content of the page. But don't just spam them sporadically like with tweeting. Your keywords need to be in the appropriate position and of appropriate density. Throw too much keywords around in the content and you are going to be flagged for spam.
Just as important as having original content is having regularly updated content. Fresh content will bring in people and bots alike which in turn will let you get your site indexed with much more frequency which will in turn return fresher results to the search results. But don't update just for the sake of updating. Bots have little incentive to come back if all the updates you perform are only marginally incremental. Just try to have something fresh for the visitors and you should be alright.
Get a Proper Domain Name
This is a hard to obtain part. If at all possible, get a domain name with the keywords in the domain name itself. www.webdevelopmentaustralia.com is going to have a lot more weight with search engines than www.somecompany.com. Obtaining a domain with the proper keywords should be difficult though.
Domains with the keyword as part of it do look ugly but keep in mind that keywords in the domain name carry very great weight.
Create Pretty URLs
Using a URL scheme where parameters are passed as a query string through the URL make it difficult for search engine spiders to look through your site. More importantly, when you are passing the session ID as part of the URL you are essentially creating a separate URLs for each session with almost the same content. This is probably going to get you penalized for duplicate content. We'll talk about that later on.
Human readable, bot parsable URLs are generally preferred over traditional parameter filled URLs. www.somecompany.com/games/2009/callofduty6 is generally preferred to www.somecompany.com/index.php?cat=game&year=2009&name=callofduty6. When crafting pretty URLs try to avoid days, months and years. www.somecompany.com/blog/seobasics is preferred to www.somecompany.com/blog/2009/09/09/seobasics
Dish out Relevant Page Titles
The text within the title tags: the text that is displayed on your browser's title bar is amongst the most important elements of a page. Actually I'd venture so far as to say it's the most important part of your page after the actual content itself.
Make sure the title is unique for each page and contains relevant keywords. With regards to the title's structure itself Page Title -> Site Name is vastly preferred to Site Name -> Page Title. There are no reasons for you to feel the title needs to be as terse as possible but on the other hand don't try to make it too long. 60 characters is the accepted limit.
Also whilst using keywords in your title text, please don't try to spin it too much. If the search bot sees too many keywords, you are going to be flagged for spam. Remember, the title text is what appears on the search engine result page. You need to convey as much information as possible without sounding too spammy.
Tweak the Meta Elements
The meta elements used to matter eons ago when search engine bots were less sophisticated and relied on the meta description and keyword attributes to help them. When this was taken advantage of by spammers, search bots started giving less importance to meta elements.
Having said that, it doesn't hurt to include the meta description element. This is the text used in the description of your site. Try to limit yourselves to 200 characters, keep it simple, grammatically correct and include relevant keywords. Keep the descriptions unique for each page.
Optimize the Page Structure
Layouts vary. Positions of your sidebar or navigation vary too. But with respect to the core markup itself, it's best to put your main content as close to the body tag as possible. If your other elements have to be placed before the content, use CSS to position it before the content instead of moving the markup itself before the content.
Footers are wonderful places to link to other content on your site. Don't just ignore your footer. Place links to recent posts or popular posts in the footer. Having said that, try to not make it look like a link farm.
Use Appropriate Tags
Use the appropriate tags when developing a site. The heading tags are widely under used. People are instead using generic div tags to encapsulate important information. This is wrong. Strictly looking at the markup alone, the heading tags lets us see the informational hierarchy of the page and this applies for the bots too. Use h1 for the title of the post, h2 for each section's heading and so on.
If you are including some code, use the pre tag. If you think some information is important feel free to make it bold. Bots tend to place value on bolded text just like we immediately see what the bolded text. As always, use it sparingly. You don't want to be flagged for spam.
Craft Proper Links
When creating links, try to stay away from the generic read me text. It's not very SEO friendly. Try to include a part of the child link's title to the anchor text itself. This is not as hard as it sounds. For example, instead of using read more, use read more about seo. It doesn't take that much time to change but yields a lot of SEO benefits.
While linking to page on your site, try to make the anchor text as focused as possible. Portfolio is a better candidate than What I've Done. The latter sounds more catchy but the former represents better SEO.
Link Internally
Courtesy of Opera
Don't be scared to interlink the pages in your site. If the number of pages is small, putting it all up on the navigation bar is the way to go. If yours is a big site with a ton of pages, just put all the main category pages on the navigation bar. One way or the other, make sure your pages can be found through links on your site.
Thinking outside the box, you could just as easily include a popular post section on each page. This way you get the interlinking SEO needs and at the same time your visitors can get to see some of the popular posts on your site. It's a win-win situation.
Make your site Accessible
Remember, search engines are meant to bring people to your site. Which means your site is primarily for human parsing. Design with them in mind.
Include alt attributes for all images on your site. This is not only good practice but also a necessity if you want valid markup. If it's appropriate include relevant keywords in the alt text. Remember, search bots can't really look at a picture and decide whether it's relevant or not. Appropriate keywords lets it make that decision. As always don't go overboard on the text. Keep it simple and to the point.
Please don't hide your content behind obnoxious JavaScript or Flash. Spiders can't go through those to get to your content. And without content, the entire point of your site fails. Miserably. Avoid this unless you absolutely have to.
Avoid Duplicate Content
Google is very strict about duplicate content and severely penalizes sites which do so. This is regardless of whether the content is on different domains. If the same, exact content appears on different pages, the page last indexed is going to be penalized.
This is mostly common sense: don't have the same content on each page. The footer text can be repeated with no penalties but not if your footer text is big enough to qualify as an article.
Also, your site may dish out alternative print capable pages which might be seen by the search engine as duplicate content. In this case, use robotx.txt to disallow indexing on these pages.
Use robots.txt
Create a robots.txt file to allow/disallow spiders from certain parts of your site. You just create a file named robots.txt and place it at the root of your web site and all co-operating spiders will respect the rules you've mentioned in the file.
You can do everything from disallowing all bots from accessing a specific folder to disallowing bots from a specific search engine. Read up more about it here.
Create a Site Map
Courtesy of Opera
A site map lets the search engine know about the existence of pages it might not have discovered through spidering through your site normally. Ideally, you should create a normal HTML site map for your users and an XML site map for the search bots. If at all possible, link both.
Avoid Frames
I can't say this enough: frames are bad. Both from a web developer perspective and a seo perspective. Content inside frames are virtually invisible to search engines.
More disturbingly, even if one frame of the page gets indexed and is returned as result the result would take you to just the frame without all of its supporting frames inside the parent document. Frames cause undue confusion to people and virtually stop spiders from crawling through your site. Unless you absolutely have to, don't use frames.
Reduce Code Bloat
And by this I mean 2 things:
Move your JavaScript and CSS to their own separate files. Spiders have no business with them and it is best practice to remove them from the core markup. Create separate files and include them later.
No presentational markup. This is not only SEO friendly but also best practice. Your HTML markup is no place to define how the content should look and similarly the bots have no reason to know how your site is programmed to look. Format the document to your heart's content in your CSS and leave the markup pristine and clean.
Avoid using a Flash Only Navigation
This is common sense but a lot of designers and developers tend to overlook this. Bots can't crawl through flash based content and if the only navigation is flash based, the bot has nothing to crawl through.
If your entire site is flash based, it makes sense to create a text only version for spiders and bots to crawl through and find your content. It'll take extra time to create that but without a text version to fall back on your site will be virtually invisible to search engines.
Use a Common Domain Naming Scheme
Decide on a common naming scheme and stick to it. Personally I prefer www.somename.com but others may like http://somename.com. Decide on a format and stick to it. Use URLs of this format while linking other pages on your site.
Also decide on a whether trailing slashes are required or not. Search engines considers www.somename.com/seo and www.somename.com/seo/ to be different URLs and there is a possibility you are going to be penalized for duplicate content. To get around this, modify your .htaccess file to redirect to the format you like with a 301 redirect. This tells the bot that the page has been moved permanently.
Submit your Site
If your site is newly hatched and hasn't been indexed yet, it's a good idea to get the ball rolling by submitting it to search engines and inspiration galleries. This not only let the search engines get to your site early but also brings in a ton of new traffic and back links.
Do not resort to link submitters unless you absolutely trust it. A lot of these submit your links to a number of link farms, an activity which might get you penalized. Just stick to the big search engines and galleries.
Check for Broken Links
Nothing stops spiders dead in their tracks quicker than broken links specially in the home page. Check thoroughly for broken links to ensure the bots have something to start crawling through your site.
Create a proper 404 page in case the search engine leads the visitor to an old URL. Include appropriate links in the error page.
Get Linked by Peer Sites
This is the massive step that is going to take you a lot of time to get right. Ideally, you'd want a lot of sites linking to your site and your posts . Each link to your site is considered as a vote to your site by the linking site. Getting inbound links from sites catering to the same user base is extremely vital since the current way of ranking relies on the fact that if a lot of sites link back to you then the site must contain relevant information.
Unfortunately, this is a long, arduous and never ending task and only one thing can assure you this: good content. Provide good content and sites will automatically start linking to your content. The more sites link to you, the higher your rank is going to be.
Do not resort to illegal means to get back links. This includes link farms and so. Doing anything like this is going to get you kicked out pretty quickly. Accepted means of getting back links includes reciprocal linking where a site places a link to another site in exchange for that site linking back to the original site.
The way I prefer is to write for Net Tuts. Each article I write nets me a back link and Net Tuts being as large as it is, these contribute heavily to my rankings. Plus it brings in a ton of interested new visitors. :)
Use Appropriate Tools
Tools like Google Analytics helps you analyze and track a number of data including from where your traffic comes from, which pages visitors look at, how much time they spend at each page, how many pages and so on. Use this data to fine tune your site.
Don't forget Google WebMaster tools. It lets you look at the search queries which bring visitors to your page, whether the spider encountered any error while trying to crawl through your site, which sites link to you and more. Invaluable when you are trying to optimize.
Avoid Black Hat Techniques
I can't say this enough: don't try to cheat. Sooner or later, most probably sooner than you think, you are going to be caught and kicked out with no chance of getting listed again. This includes legit sounding techniques like link farms or cross linking to keyword stuffing and keyword dilution.
Just don't do it.
Wait for the Results
At this point, you've hopefully done everything right. The only thing you need to do is sit back, generate some quality content and wait for the rankings to increase. Be patient, this doesn't happen over night but it definitely happens once you have the basics nailed down.
Continue Learning
These are of course only the tip of the huge iceberg that is search engine optimization. Here are some links to get you started:
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Evan Jones September 11th
Hooray for SEO articles! Good introduction for beginners.
( )lawrence77 September 11th
gonna read…
Thanks for the tut…
( )Dustin Lakin September 11th
Great post, thanks for creating such an in depth article. A good reference to use while creating a new website.
( )Kent September 11th
“Craft Proper Links” – this one is key! I had a site which was following all of the other rules in this tut except that one and it was only performing moderately. Shortly after crafting proper links the site jumped up within the top 5 search results on most search engines. Do not overlook this step!
( )Mohammad Atif September 11th
Excellent work .. Very descriptive ..
( )NetChaos September 11th
Nice to SEO articles on nettuts. Would like to see an SEO article from a developer perspective.
( )Scott September 11th
Considering this article talks much about crafting proper URLs, avoiding code bloating, following accessibility standards and using proper page structure, I’d say this is extremely developer-focused.
( )Dave Hanas September 11th
Great article. I agree with just about everything you said. I do, however, have one comment on the flash issue.
While I agree it’s good practice not to build flash-based navigation, flash-based sites are indexable by Google (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html) and have been for about a year. Building a text only version of your site only for spiders and bots runs the risk of getting penalized by Google for duplicate content.
A better idea to consider is to use SWFobject, or another SWF replacement method.
Thanks again for the great article!
( )Niklas Br October 4th
It is only indexable by Google though. Your internal search engine (Such as Wordpress’, Drupal’s or other CMS’s), Bing, Yahoo or other search engines will have trouble understanding the navigation.
( )Shane September 11th
Is this the first article on nettuts about SEO? I can’t remember there being another.
Interesting article. From what I’ve seen, SEO requires ongoing work, and there are no quick fixes, no silver bullets.
Though I did see an ad the other day from a local design company that ‘guaranteed first page google results for every site they produced’.
( )Jonathan September 11th
I always wonder about people who make guarantees like that. As this article points out, and even Google themselves, there are no magical little tricks when it comes to this stuff.
I have personally being doing a lot of reading on this topic recently. It’s something our clients are asking about – some of them have been enticed by people making crazy guarantees. In fact, one of them actually made changes to a client’s site, which included adding hundreds of keywords to the bottom of the page in a small font.
Seems to come down to one main thing – you need to have content people are interested in.
( )Jeffrey Way September 11th
I think there might have been one other, but I can’t remember.
( )David Rojas September 12th
Yep, I wrote one not long ago, but it was published on Themeforest.
( )Lee Lonitz November 7th
Hi guys, sorry to be late to the conversation on SEO 101 here! Yeah, any company that “guarantees” you top ranking is fooling you. Multi-billion dollar Google depends heavily on advertising revenue and, thus, wouldn’t make it *that* easy for SEO firms to know the secret to their algorithm (which changes more frequently these days than before).
I’ve gotten numerous clients telling me about the same question as you guys and I always respond that the best way to go is to NOT game the system but play by the rules for the best return on your effort (and money) in the long-run. It would really *suck* for a client to sink, say $5000, for black hat efforts to be ‘guaranteed’ first-rank for maybe 30-60 days, only for Google to discover being gamed and yank the rank from the client’s website.
The article above has a lot of good info and definitely underscores the point that SEO takes good content, time and a lot of effort to get up to and stay at the top. If someone promises you top-ranking for little effort, you can probably be guaranteed one thing: an empty wallet.
Aayush September 11th
Great tips for beginners….It’ll be good to have more articles on SEO…I wonder what the big firms that guarantee good rankings do, except for linking….
great read anyway….
thanks!!
( )jlapitan September 11th
nice article.. tnx!
just want to share another link about SEO
http://www.seowizz.net/2009/03/seo-tutorials.html
( )AK September 11th
kewl
( )Ignas September 11th
Great job! I like to see more about SEO. Keep working!
( )Juan C Rois September 11th
Great article Siddharth, many thanks!
I constantly find myself writing code non stop, only to realize later that I have to go back and change things just because I did not kept in the back of my mind how important SEO is.
Especially now that websites come out left and right. One important thing to remember is that you are not only trying to get Google (and others) to index and rank your site but also try to make your site beat other sites for that precious 1-10 search result.
Agree with the author, Don’t try to cheat, because in my opinnion you’ll only hurt yourself in the long run and could cause Searc Engines to make it harder on everybody else.
Thanks for the article.
( )Siddharth September 11th
I am glad you liked it.
( )Raspo September 11th
This is maybe the best SEO article I’ve ever read.
…And where did you find those images? They are genius! XD
( )Siddharth September 11th
I’d by lying through my teeth if I said I made them myself.
Royalty free stock images are your friend.
( )igro82.loon@seznam.cz September 13th
I’ll bet my pants, that this is even better:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization
SEO must read!
( )Yorick Peterse September 11th
Search bot CAN actually index Flash : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
( )Jacob Stoops September 11th
Great list of tips. This is a really good starting point for anyone looking to do SEO on their site, or for any SEO pro to brush up on their skill set!
( )Nathan Youngman September 11th
Fyi, Google is actually are indexing Flash nowadays, using a headless Flash player that Adobe created just for that purpose. If using Flash, alternate navigation is still a good idea though.
Thx for the article.
( )Siddharth September 15th
Thanks. I’ll cover this in a future article.
( )Scott September 11th
Thanks for this article, it was great, and though I love the tutorials on here, it’s great to see a very in-depth article on a topic like this.
( )Sergiu Naslau September 11th
the sad part in seo is that people tend to depend to much on plugins and to little in the actual optimization process. good article.
( )Scott September 11th
Using “pretty” URLs actually isn’t that much better according to Google. This article talks about how a query string such as search.php?q=keyword is far better than search/keyword/ since Google can interpret the query string, recognize that this is a search file, and perhaps even try other searches to index more content. Using clean URLs doesn’t give Google much information on the context of the page.
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018319.html
Though . . I will say, clean URLs are far better since they’re easier for end users to read and understand, which can be even more important than proper SEO.
( )Meshach September 12th
I would rather type http://www.nettuts.com/videos rather than
http://www.nettuts.com/index.php?cat=1
( )Nuclear Gorilla September 11th
I like the SEO tips.
( )Thanks for the pointers.
Connor Crosby September 11th
Very nice explanation. I am sort of new in SEOs and this has helped me A LOT! Thanks!
( )Martijn397 September 11th
How well does placing links to your own site in the comment sections of big sites work?
for example: placing a link right here as a comment.
does this help with link building or doesnt it help at all?
ps. Great post! learned a great deal!
( )WebHostDesignPost September 11th
Cool article, definitely the basics of SEO, each section could be a whole article by itself.
( )umoor September 11th
Nice list Siddharth. Each items could have been populated with some related links. Hope to see some more SEO articles like this one on tuts.
( )chirst burnet September 12th
oh my god,,
( )i scared looking up your avatar.
its really spooky.
Ant September 11th
As from customer point, I don’t like very long names in title.
( )Hooman Asgari September 11th
Finally a new article on SEO from Envato we trust, Now thats something to read more than once.
( )Thanks Envato
Brett September 11th
Wow, this is a fantastic article. Much needed right now. Thanks for the advice!
( )rizq September 11th
Nice !
( )Paul September 11th
a lot of good points to focus on. very nice. maybe we could see an SEO 102?
( )Siddharth September 12th
Anything specific you want to see?
( )Marcus Neto September 11th
I just ranted something fierce over at EETemplates.com about yet another email sent from yahoo, gmail or hotmail hawking SEO services to me. I hate these spammers. And lo and behold you all write a kick butt article on SEO. Just linked to it…
http://eetemplates.com/index.php/blog/comments/moron_seo/
( )Siddharth September 12th
Heh. As you said in the page linked above, you can’t really just buy a front page spot. You need to put a lot of work into it and actively try to maintain that spot.
( )Myfacefriends September 11th
nice article.. very helpful…
( )Jason September 12th
Well written article Siddharth, can we expect SEO 102?
I’ve found that many people who are new to SEO get discouraged when their site doesn’t rank after 2 weeks and then quickly resort to instant gratification via Blackhat. For anyone considering this path, let me reaffirm here that whitehat SEO techniques are the only option for serious webmasters who are concerned with the long-term.
( )Siddharth September 14th
Since it seems a lot of people are interested about SEO, you can certainly expect more about it.
( )Alizain September 12th
thanks for your brilliant suggestions. I help me a lot to bring me site at top page on Search Engine
( )Webdesign Genève, Toopixel September 12th
Great article here about optimization, this is really the Whitehat 101, I think the linking section would require a self article on itself and there are also plenty of other SEO technics to do for a website. A bit of Greyhat things in a SEO campaign are not too bad also.
( )Karl Foxley September 12th
A really nice post and well worth a retweet.
( )Franky September 12th
Well done!
( )chirst burnet September 12th
good job…
( )amnesia7 September 12th
Great article. Here’s a link to an seo article I found interesting in case its of use to anyone else:
http://www.soapmedia.co.uk/seo-layout-for-a-webpage/
( )Siggi Arni September 12th
Good post, its a healthy read for anyone who is into SEO.
I also recommend reading Matt Cutts blog:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
He is mr.SEO at Google and is always posting good tips for proper SEO and Google.
( )Kiran September 12th
Matt Cutts blog looks interesting…. and again a great article about SEO I need to start adding stuff i always avoided them but it seems OK
( )Léo Renaud-Allaire September 12th
Interesting read, thanks for the article.
( )technology review September 12th
its really helpful for us
( )Yigit Ozdamar September 12th
Woow i wasn’t know that if i’ll not decide a stable domain name format, it will be a problem for me about SEO.
Thanks dude.
( )Ivan Pidov September 12th
I totally disagree “Use h1 for the title of the post, h2 for each section’s heading and so on.”
It’s well known that you can have only one “h1″ tag per page. Now imagine that your home page has two or more articles listed with an excerpt. This means you have two or more H1 tags on one page, which is unacceptable.
My advice is two wrap the title of your site in H1 tag and the article’s titles in H2 or whatever you think suits best
All the best,
( )Ivan Pidov
Chopper Hotdogg September 16th
Correcto.
The accepted usage should be the header of a page (such as the logo) is H1. This will only ever appear once, no matter which page you are on. Headers/titles of sections should be H2, then sub-titles should be H3.
So for this page the NetTuts logo will be wrapped in H1, “Search Engine Optimization 101″ should be H2, then all the subtitles (“A word from the Author”, “What Is SEO?”, etc) should be H3.
( )Hasse September 12th
Avoiding Blackhat techniques or not is all a question of the purpose. I do a lot of BH and it’s all depending on the purpose. If I run a site or blog for short time purpose I will get to the top of Google in hard competive niches with less effort and shorter time through BH techniques. It sure won’t stay there for any longer time but if the focus only are to get a site up and sty for a few weeks I wouldn’t care to even bother about WH methods. Keyword stuffing and linkfarming i just plain stupid. Cloaking is ok in many cases but one need to know what one are doing and one need to have the propper tool for it. Else it will result in prblem, unless you run any major site like New York Times which is cloaking and still getting away with it.
Another point of view should be to look at simple static sites. They often look like crap but do get indexed verry well. If choosing any blog platform, go for Wordpress rather then Joomla or any other. They get indexed verry well too and that’s mainly due to a cleaner output of the HTML code. Or rather… Clean code no matter what platform, or if coding the site by hand is probably the best tips anyone can give for sucessfull onsite optimization.
Thanks for a good article but there are tons of more to write about this subject. Still a good start.
( )Daniel Whyte September 12th
Thanks, i was looking for something like this lastweek, I’m still looking for a more in-depth article on Using relevant tags ie. for different things, as i was always one of those silly people using generic div’s
( )abhi September 12th
Pretty great and usable techniques !!
( )thank you !!
James September 12th
Thnx for the post.
( )Jay September 12th
It’s all stuff I continually use in practice, but its always fun to read a refresher article to make sure I’m still in check. Good post!
( )James Ballard September 12th
There’s just no replacement for great content.
( )Siddharth September 15th
Truer words haven’t been uttered.
( )Ashwin September 12th
All necessary SEO tips to help a site get on top, has been accumulated in a single post. Nicely done Siddarth!!
( )DBlizzard September 12th
All is a very big 3 letter word.
( )I doubt ALL necessary SEO tips are in this one post. There are some good ones but nowhere near ALL of them
Chris September 12th
The following statement is completely incorrect!
“I can’t say this enough: frames are bad. Both from a web developer perspective and a seo perspective. Content inside frames are virtually invisible to search engines.”
Solution: Rephrase
“Using frames for navigational layout, having a main content area as it’s own frame is Not Wise”
Why do you disagree with the original statement?
Because, I have(had) a Joomla site with a Wrapper(frame) loading a Google Doc as it’s content. I was first on Google search for “joomla training melbourne” for ages. Ok, I still am. Note: I say “had” because now all the content is within my CMS and no longer using a wrapper, reason… see downfall of frame below.
Downfall of Frame Content Wrapper
( )The Downfall of a wrapper is that google may link directly to the html page within the frame. The visitor may see your content without your website [shell]. (To coders out there: Yes, you can use Script to detect this and redirect, but that’s just creating mess.
Manuel September 12th
very helpful list, thx
( )lee September 13th
hi all iam having trouble with my site http://www.diyanswerdirect.com and need some help with the xhtml on it. I have 54 warnings when i try to verify it iam using site builder with yahoo and cant see the html all i can see is the files in my site. my question is how do i solve this problem is there any webpage anyone knoes of that can give me some advice thankyou lee
( )David September 13th
Great article on SEO basics. Would like to see more of these Siddharth!
A good plugin that can assist in css, xhtml, links, wcag validation is:
http://www.totalvalidator.com/
This is a good start in making sure your site is as valid as possible
( )Fynn September 13th
Great and useful list! Although I think you’re underestimating the importance of the meta description.
“Having said that, it doesn’t hurt to include the meta description element. This is the text used in the description of your site. Try to limit yourselves to 200 characters, keep it simple, grammatically correct and include relevant keywords. Keep the descriptions unique for each page.”
Indeed, in terms of higher pagerank the meta description isn’t as powerful as it once was, but the power now lays in improving you’re CTR.
My tips for a good meta description; add a decent call to action and let it match the content for that specific page. You also have to stuff it up with keywords you want to be found on. (They turn bold, which makes you’re meta desc. stand out more.) So, improve you’re CTR with descent meta descriptions, play with it, tweek it and do a lot of a/b-tests! (The meta description is much more important than -tags, url rewriting, etc.in my opinion)
Also, one tip I would add is linkbuilding. Another underestimated trick. If you’re content is good, search for sites that are in the same field of industry or attract the same target audience. I used to put hundreds of sites in an excel file, and mail them one by one. After 20/30 inbound links, you’re organic visits will probably double because of the increased pagerank! It’s amazing to see how some business sites can at least double their turnover by doing 20 hours of linkbuilding a month!
Just my 2 cents
Again, nice article!
( )Tom September 13th
I think nettuts is not really accesible.
( )I mean, you’d probably never tried to “read” it with a robot, for blind people.
The same thing occurs with lots of sites, where relevant information (article) is after a lot of heading elements no one reads…
Fadel September 13th
thx
for example we have : http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/search-engine-optimization-101/
where is the article id in the url ?
( )Diego SA September 13th
Awesome, found some new tips for SEO here. It’s so hard to let a website totally visible on Google. Thanks a lot!
( )Dian Reid September 13th
Wonderful article. Super helpful for someone like me who thought they knew what they were doing, and is figuring out what beginner I still am =)
Thanks!
( )Annoyer September 13th
Nice tutorial : )
( )Mr Right September 13th
Unfortunately most of the stuff here is pointless. For a start you shouldn’t submit your site to any of the search engines. Let them find you. It’s deemed more natural
Way to many SEO “experts” today.
( )Siddharth September 14th
When your site is new, it doesn’t hurt to submit.
Care to elaborate as to why the other points are useless?
( )Siddharth October 5th
Still waiting for your reply.
( )J. Revuelta September 13th
A real 101 for beginners, indeed. Thanks for sharing!
( )Waheed Akhtar September 13th
Nice articles for starters!
( )Zahid September 13th
Nice post.I really learn much. Keep it up.
( )Ned i vekt September 13th
Very interesting, gonna use alot of these tips for my new WP blog
( )Cesar Noel September 14th
Superbly done article. Very simple but detailed and concise. Two thumbs up!
( )Stephen Hamilton September 14th
I feel like a whole a series on SEO is in order. That could be an entire new section of Nettuts actually. Just a suggestion…
( )wien September 14th
very helpful, thanks
( )CSS Deluxe September 14th
So good for begginers, thanx for share it
( )Stephen Webb September 14th
Interesting article, there are so many factors in regard to SEO that it is an area of web design all by itself! I was aware of some of these previously, but there are many listed here I wouldn’t have thought about, such as the robots text file, and using heading tags.
I’ve looked into obvious SEO factors such as the content before, but wasn’t aware just how much keywords in this content assists in getting the page ranking higher. Does anyone know just how much the meta tags are now used by Google? This is something I’ve wondered about for some time as I knew these are given much less priority today, I was wondering if they really have any effect anymore?
( )sensiblochamaeleon September 14th
thank you for this article.
you put the disreputable SEO techniques (as described in http://sensiblochamaeleon.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/seoethik-heiligt-der-zweck-die-mittel/)
back in a more non-ideologic context, far away from hyping unimportant things up by using backlinks of lots of redundant and useless spamsites.
SEO techniques appear here as a matter of good webdesign,
and your hints are easy to understand because you use a really graphic and clear way to illustrate what you mean.
i hope we will reach a time when importance and quality of content decides whether something is relevant for searchengines
( )Spadez September 14th
Ive been told that using a keyword in the domain doesnt carry much weight, but you say it does.
( )A Web Design Company October 29th
I have heard that too. I think people are fifty-fifty split on this.
My thought is that if you use your keywords in your domain then when someone links to you they use the keywords from your domain to make anchor text when linking to you. At this point it becomes beneficial to have keywords in your domain.
For example before I starting up my web design site, I did some research on keywords people would use to find my business, not only did I use my keywords in the domain, but I named my business with the keywords in mind. I think in this way having keywords in the domain are extremely useful, if not for the only reason that they tell people what keywords to use when linking to your site.
Thoughts?
( )Carl - Web Courses Bangkok September 14th
A great resource for beginners to check out, thank you very much for the article!
( )Timbronze September 14th
What a great resource, in particular for those new to SEO and its benefits.
Cheers NetTuts+
( )Jason Beaird September 14th
This is an excellent breakdown of how to do SEO the right way. I worked for a company when I was fresh out of college that did a lot of black hat SEO (mirror sites, gateway pages, hidden content, shady link farming…) and had a bad taste in my mouth for a long time. For more in-depth information on doing SEO the right way, I highly recommend Aarron Walter’s Building Findable Websites: http://buildingfindablewebsites.com
( )iklan baris gratis September 14th
Great post, thanks for creating such an in depth article. A good reference to use while creating a new website.
( )DemoGeek September 14th
Siddharth –
Just a little background…I had 2 other blogs where I was posting some interesting technical stuffs…then I thought of consolidating it and went with a new blog, DemoGeek.com. I think I did a mistake of bringing in some of those articles from those blogs to the new one without altering it much…I wasn’t aware of the duplicate content penalty at that time. Since then I’ve removed those articles or have updated the later articles to have some distinction in terms of title and the content itself.
The new blog had a good page rank before (at the beginning) but then the page rank dropped by half lately. And since then it’s been staying in that place for the past couple of months. There is a decent search engine traffic coming in but I’m sure if the page rank improves it would bring in more.
My question here is, how could we let Google know (effectively) that the duplicate content has been removed and ask it to re-index the new blog again?
( )Siddharth September 14th
If you still have control over the old blogs, the best thing to do would be to use a 301 redirect. That should tell the bot that the content has moved, permanently from the old blog to the new one.
Of course, I am no SEO expert.
( )Siddharth September 14th
Just a heads up. It has been pointed out to me that using robots.txt to avoid duplicate content isn’t really the best solution. More about this later.
( )Francoise September 14th
Thank you for sharing…Very helpful article!
( )Khan September 15th
Great Post, how much time did it take for you to write these kinda detailed post?
( )Kasper Lau September 15th
Pretty nice basic exposition of SEO
( )Brett Jankord September 15th
Good tips for easy SEO.
( )Gauree September 15th
Hey nice article! Let me see where am lacking…
( )Mohan September 15th
Good for beginners
( )sishimaru September 16th
clean and dept article.. thankyou
( )Aaron September 16th
The HTML example under “Reduce Code Bloat,” made me cringe. I sure hope no one codes like that anymore…but sadly, they do.
( )IGotDinged September 17th
Great Post
Thanks a lot for sharing ..!!
Cheers
( )Poison Rain September 17th
just following what google themselves have to say about SEO was good enough for me… they have a very in depth post about it if you search for seo on google you’ll find it.
( )Mike Grace September 17th
Perfect timing! I read this article and a few days later I was able to answer some of my bosses questions about SEO. Thanks for a great article.
( )Siddharth September 17th
Glad I could be of help.
( )เพชร September 18th
this is very interesting article
( )Vicky Nimbalkar September 18th
Nice Post Guys……
Thanks a lot…
( )Paul September 18th
Thank you, I’m brand new at this stuff. Good information and not to far over my head that I can’t use a lot of it.
( )oes tsetnoc September 20th
thanks for this great and informative information..
( )wai han September 21st
Excellent article!
( )varun September 23rd
hi..,,
very helpfull….thnks a lot
( )shootdatarget September 26th
thanks ^^
( )already digg it ^^
Dustin October 3rd
Great overview of SEO…such a huge concept but this article makes a clear, if brief summary of successful SEO practices. Thanks for the info!
( )Vicki Ayala October 5th
Another great article by you. THANK YOU again so much for taking the time to put this information in an article for both new and seasoned SEOers!
( )balu October 14th
Great Share..
very helpful list, thx
( )Austin October 19th
It seems more and more IF you have relavent content, search engines do there job and you don’t have to worry about SEO. But I suppose if you had strict competition it would really matter.
( )Abhijeet October 20th
really great tips thanks ………………..
thank you once again for sharing this great tips
abhijeetkhewale nagpur
( )Carl - Web Courses Bangkok October 28th
Love this article, thank you!
( )pirlanta October 29th
its really greeat….
( )Emil November 1st
Unfortunatly many things that need clarification.
Clean URL’s. It’s a good thing, no doubt. It makes the user understand what to expect when clicking the link. As for SEO, you shouldn’t worry to much. Spiders are good at crawling ugly links. (This said, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do clean URL’s)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I&feature=channel
Meta description and keywords havn’t been payed attention to for ages. It’s just to easy to trick. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU
Just a heads up, links in footers are treated differently than links in text.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE
It could be worth mentioning that a HTML site map is of first priority and the XML is of second.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi5DGOu1uA0
About the page structure. It’s definitly a good thing for accessability, but for SEO purposes, don’t worry about it.
Javascript and Flash, once again. For accessability purposes – you’re right, but it should be mentioned that Google (and Bing) bot are quite good at understanding both Flash and Javascript nowadays. (But of course good accessible navigation is a great thing)
( )http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce6cLrrfS5E
Lee Lonitz November 7th
Hey Emil, very good clarifications. However, regarding meta descriptions (not keywords), I feel they are still important for two reasons:
1) Google still searches for keywords in the text of the meta description, which often shows up in SERP’s (search engine results pages). Obviously if there is no meta description, Google then goes to the first paragraph or so in-page for a description it feels it should display (if the site doesn’t have one in say DMOZ).
2) Crafting a good description that will be seen on search engine results can make the difference between a user clicking it or not (resulting in a potential contact).
What do ya think? =)
Cheerz, Lee
( )Tino Flohe November 2nd
Nice guide for SEO starters
( )posicionamiento natural November 3rd
Thanks for article!
En esta web : http://madridwebdesign.es/blog/category/seo/
hay mas referencias SEO y consultas frecuentes, herramientas..
( )Boston SEO November 5th
Linking internally and externally is one of the biggest factors involved in Great Search Engine Optimization. Many people do not spend enough time on linking and miss out on a great number of potential views, especially ones from their niche market.
( )Lee Lonitz November 7th
True. I’ve come to learn that one reason why linking is a ‘missing link’ for many people is that they simply don’t know how to ‘ask for a link.’ Some people tell me ‘how do I ask’ or even “WHOM do I ask” once I find the website I want to link to me.
( )JV November 16th
Great article. I love the fact that you focus so much on content. This way it’s not just great for SEO, but for people, because that is what the web is about.
( )ex3mist November 25th
Hello there, I just want to ask something about this statement:
“Google is very strict about duplicate content and severely penalizes sites which do so. This is regardless of whether the content is on different domains. If the same, exact content appears on different pages, the page last indexed is going to be penalized.”
Because I’m using Article Generator to generate articles to my site using the RSS feeds of other sites, could this be considered as a duplicate content? Could I be penalized for that?
( )Can anyone tell me, please?
Anton Ranestam November 28th
Very nice article!
( )SEO Services London December 3rd
Great Post…..
I found your site on stumbleupon and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!
Thanks for sharing….
( )hafriyat December 3rd
Cool tutorial there
( )reagards to the author
Shafaat December 16th
Nice article, very informative and to to point. Thank you
( )Calgary webdesign December 18th
Good article with a few things i need to work on for sure
( )edmonton Fittesting December 18th
There are a whole lot things i do not know about seo thanks for the info!
( )seo December 26th
Nice to see a tutorial website that realizes good design. Thank you so much for everything you do to improve our creative.
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