TECHIMANIA A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Beginners Guide | Techimania – A world of possibilities
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ABOUT THE GUIDE SEO INTRO SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the activity of optimizing Web pages or web site in order to make them more search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of web page or website in search engines (i.e. Google, Bing) via the natural or algorithmic search results.
PREREQUISITES You have awareness of simple web technologies like HTML, XHTML, and Style Sheet etc. If you already have developed any website then it is an extra advantage and it will help you to understand SEO concepts very easily.
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Table of Contents What is SEO?............................................................................................4 What is Search Engine ?.......................................................................................4 How Search Engine Works?.................................................................................4 Types Of SEO......................................................................................................5 SEO Techniques and Methods....................................................................6 White Hat SEO....................................................................................................6 Black Hat SEO or Spamdexing.............................................................................7 SEO Basics................................................................................................8 Unique and Accurate Page Titles.........................................................................8 Make use of the "description" meta tag...............................................................9 Robots Meta Tag................................................................................................10 Optimizing Webpage................................................................................11 Optimized Anchors.............................................................................................11 Optimize your use of images……………….............................................................11 Content Is The King………….................................................................................12 Use Heading Tag in appropriate manner.............................................................13 Dealing With the Crawlers.........................................................................14 What is robots.txt file?.........................................................................................14 Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links.....................................................................15 Promotions and Analysis…........................................................................16 Submissions and Link building.............................................................................16 Advantages of Link building.................................................................................16 Disadvantages of Link building.............................................................................17 Blog Commenting…………....................................................................................17 Use Free Google Webmaster tools..............................................................18
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What is SEO? The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sounds like to optimizing search engines. But don’t worry it’s about optimizing website or webpage for search engines. First of all we need to understand what a search engines is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is all about optimizing a website or web pages. SEO id subset of search engine marketing SEO is the art of ranking in the search engines. SEO is the process of designing and developing a web site to rank well in search engine results
What Is Search Engine? Search engine is an internet‐based tool that searches an index of documents for a particular term, phase or text specified by user. Commonly used to refer to large web based search engines that search through billions of pages on the internet.
How the search engine works? Search engines as the way to find information on the web appeared in the middle of 90's. They crawled websites and indexed them in their own databases marking them as having one or another keyword in its content. This task is performed by software, called a crawler or a spider. Thus, in the Search Engine when we write query into the search box as a search term. Then it quickly searched its database and found which indexed pages corresponded to that query. So, the more keywords of a query a website had, the higher it was shown in the results of a search. We don't know who was the first guy realized that he can make some changes to the pages of his website to make it rank higher. 4 Techimania – A world of possibilities
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Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! Often update their relevancy algorithm number of times per month. When you see changes in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift or something else outside of you control.
What is Search Engine Rank? When you search any keyword using a search engine then it displays thousands of results found in its database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine results. If Search engine is putting your web page on first position then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed as with a high rank. SEO is the process of designing and developing a web site to attend a high rank in search engine results.
Types of SEO SEO is something that helps your site rank better in search engines. There are number of ways of SEO, some of them good considered as “whitehat” techniques, while others are restricted and considered as “blackhat” techniques. Search engines do not like blackhat SEO and effect of its usage may be disastrous for your website.
SEO On Page 5 Techimania – A world of possibilities
Off Page
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On page SEO is providing good content, good keywords selection, putting keywords on correct places, giving appropriate title to every page etc. Off Page SEO is about getting link back. And get traffic from other relevant sites.
SEO Techniques and Methods SEO Techniques are in two different categories: 1. White Hat SEO Techniques search engines recommend as part of good design 2. Black Hat or spamdexing Techniques search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect.
White Hat SEO An SEO technique or method is considered as White Hat if it follows the following rules: If it conforms to the search engine's guidelines. If it does not involves any deception. It ensures that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. It ensures that Web Page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines. It ensures the good quality of the web pages. It ensures the useful content available on the web pages. We recommended that always follow White Hat SEO techniques and don’t try to fool you site visitors. Definitely you will get something more by using these techniques 6 Techimania – A world of possibilities
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Black Hat SEO or Spamdexing An SEO technique or method is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it follows the followings: Try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. Using Hidden or invisible text or with the page background color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no frame" sections. Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO technique. Creating a rogue copy of a popular web site which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious web sites. This is called Page hijacking. Mirror web sites by hosting multiple web sites all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs. Creating low‐quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar key words and phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages. Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. This is called Meta tag stuffing. Always avoid following any of the above Black Hat technique to improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all the above proprieties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get anything.
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SEO Basics Unique, accurate page titles Hope you understand the meaning of HTML TITLE tag which is put inside head tag. The page title (not to be confused with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window, and is also what is displayed when you bookmark a page or add it to your browser Favorites.
Title tag indicates page titles. Page title contents are displayed in search results.
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In above image, you can see three different pictures which are separated by black thick line first one is about HTML TITLE tag and its show in browser window’s title. If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results. Best Practices: Accurately describe the page's content Create unique title tags for each page Use brief, but descriptive titles
Make use of the "description" meta tag
The beginning of the description Meta tag for our homepage, which gives a brief overview of the site's offerings. Meta tags are used to provide a description of the page, and a list of main keywords it uses. A page's description Meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Description Meta tags is important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Basic Practices: Accurately summarize the page's content Use unique descriptions for each page 9 Techimania – A world of possibilities
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Robots Meta Tag The important Meta Tag that you may need sometime is the Robots Meta Tag which looks like this:
Using above Meta tag you can tell to a spider or robot that you do not want some of your pages indexed or that you do not want your links followed.
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Optimizing Webpage Optimized Anchors Use descriptive anchor text for all your text links. Most search engines consider anchor text of incoming links when ranking pages. Here is an example of anchor:
The Anchor Title plays a very important role and will be seen by most of the search engines. So your anchor title should have appropriate keywords. Anchor title will help site visitors using a balloon and displaying written text. The Anchor Text is another important part which should be selected very carefully because this text will be used not only of search engines but also for the navigation purpose. You should try to use best keywords in your anchor text.
Optimize your use of images
Images are not read by search engines, and so you should avoid using too many images on your site. There is a lot of use graphics in web applications. If you want to optimize any Image kind of thing then you have to optimize the alt attribute of img tag. “Alt” Attributes are short pieces of text that are associated with a graphic. 11 Techimania – A world of possibilities
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If the graphic cannot be displayed for some reason, or if someone has set up their browser to block images, the text is shown instead. Also, browsers designed for the sight impaired read out the text content of pages, and read the alt image tags as a way of describing a page.
Basic Practices:
Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text
Supply an Image Sitemap file Supply alt text when using images as links
Content Is The King Thousands of articles, books and forum entries detail how to make your site search engine friendly, but ultimately, one rule stands above the rest: Content is king. But I will say this rule is past now and I would like to say unique, high‐ quality, unduplicated content is the king. The most important places of your content to put keywords are in the headers, at the beginning, and the end of paragraphs. Best Practices: Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things. Create content primarily for your users, not search engines Write easy‐to‐read text Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster.
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Use Heading Tag in appropriate manner
Heading tags are used to present structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most important, and ending with <h6>. Best Practices: Imagine you're writing an outline Use headings sparingly across the page
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Dealing with the Crawlers What is robots.txt file? A text file placed in the root directory and it is used to communicate with the search engines regarding the sections which you don’t want to crawl and index. A "robots.txt" file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.
All compliant search engine bots (denoted by the wildcard * symbol) shouldn't access and crawl the content under /images/ or any URL whose path begins with /search. An address of our robots.txt file. It is not necessary to have a robots.txt file. Common robot traps “Forms, Logins, Sessions” Best Practices: Use more secure methods for sensitive content Avoid Things: Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled Allowing search result‐like pages to be crawled
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Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links Combat comment spam with "nofollow": Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to. Automatically add "nofollow" to comment columns and message boards: Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this. This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user‐generated content, such as guestbooks, forums, shoutboards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties (e.g. if a commenter is trusted on your site), then there's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site.
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Promotions and Analysis Submissions and Link Building Submitting your site in important directories will help in getting ranks on search engines. Submissions on regional and product specific directories and search engines will boost quality traffic to the site. As part of creating your offline search engine optimization strategy, it is very important to make a good plan for your Link building campaign. Ethical link building campaign can generate lots of quality traffic to website and is considered one the most important Internet marketing strategy for offline SEO.
Advantages of link building Increases link popularity: Link popularity is the total number of websites that link to your website. So, total number of inbound links for your website will increase. The inbound links are the links from other websites to your website. Increases page rank: Your website page rank will increase. If you get low PR inbound links, there is a possibility that your website PR gets reduced. So, getting high PR and relevant inbound links are very important here. Also, these inbound links are the very important factor that the search engines take into account for ranking the websites. So, be careful while getting inbound links. Increases website traffic: Traffic to your website will increase. So, you will get more number of relevant visitors to your website.
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Increases sales: As more relevant visitors visit your website, there is a possibility that they will buy your products or services. So, your sales will increase.
Disadvantages of link building Chances of reduced sales: With reciprocal links method, you are encouraging your visitors to visit the other relevant websites/companies. This will lead to reduce your sales or services as they are navigating to other websites. Time‐Consuming: This is the time‐consuming process because getting the sufficient number of inbound links to increase your website PR takes many months/years. Webmaster is necessary: Webmaster is necessary to manage the link building process because it needs more follow‐ups and of busy schedule of website owners. Low inbound links PR reduces website PR: If you get the low PR inbound links unknowingly, then it will decrease your website PR. So, we should be very careful while getting inbound links.
Blog Commenting Participating in conversations on industry specific blogs and interesting online discussions not only helps in creating your presence on internet and managing your reputation online but it also brings quality links back to your site.
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Use Free Google Webmaster tools Google Webmaster Help Forum http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/webmasters/ Have questions or feedback on our guide? Let us know. Google Webmaster Central Blog http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ Frequent posts by Googlers on how to improve your website. Google Webmaster Help Center http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ Filled with in‐depth documentation on webmaster‐related issues. Google Webmaster Tools https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ Optimize how Google interacts with your website. Google Webmaster Guidelines http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html Design, content, technical, and quality guidelines from Google. Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ Find the source of your visitors, what they're viewing, and benchmark changes. Google Website Optimizer http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/ Run experiments on your pages to see what will work and what won't. Tips on Hiring an SEO http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291 If you don't want to go at it alone, these tips should help you choose an SEO company.
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