Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide
Knowledge of search engine optimization is a crucial skill for any web designer. Without organic search engine traffic, a website will be more reliant on costly advertising methods. If a site is not search engine friendly, it might be losing a lot of traffic that you are not even aware of. Without organic traffic, direct traffic and backlinks are the only ways people can find your site. Ultimately, SEO is simply good business, which is why it is crucial to have experience in this field.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization, commonly abbreviated SEO, is the process of improving traffic from search engines through targeting specific search keywords. In general, most search engine optimization is focused on Google because it is the dominant search engine, currently commanding around 62% of total searches. Here are the basics to search engine optimization.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Most search engines are crawler based. Each search engine “crawls” the web with spiders. These are essentially requests made by a server for the webpage, the same way your browser requests a page when you visit a website. The only difference is that the spiders do it in the thousands. The spiders then follow the links on a website and find more pages, while the visited pages are collected into an index. The key to search engine optimization is how relevant your content is ranked by a search engine. The more relevant your page, the higher it will rank.
Keyword Optimization
The number one way to optimize a website is to target a specific keyword. Every site needs to target several specific keywords to be ranked for. The more general the keyword, the more results there are and thus the more difficult it is to reach the top of the search engine results page, or SERPs.
So the kind of keyword that must be targeted is a “long tail keyword“. This term refers to more specific keywords. For example instead of “buy computer”, a long tail keyword is “buy a cheap HP laptop”. Long tails have fewer results, thus it is easier to be ranked.
Sites can be optimized for the selected keyword simply by using the term more frequently. The following section will be explaining how to implement on page SEO.
On Page SEO Elements
Web Address
Search engines will read the words in a web address and search for keywords. For example, if two websites are both targeting the “cheap web design” keyword, http://www.cheap-web-design.com/ would rank better than http://www.efexstudios.com/. Note that while dashes can be used to separate words, underscores are not read by search engines as spaces.
Title Tag
The title of a webpage should also use targeted keywords. For pages other than the main page, the subject of the main page should come before the website name. For example, “Contact: My Website” instead of “My Website: Contact”.
Metadata
There are two metadata tags that need to be optimize – content and keywords. Google does not factor keywords into its algorithm because it is frequently used to keyword spam, but Yahoo! still gives it a slight amount of importance, so the keywords metatag will only be useful for being ranked in Yahoo! and is necessary.
Header Tags
Headers are basically tags such as H1, H2, H3, etc., The lower the number, the more relevance the term will be deemed. So the most important terms should be tagged with H1 and the less important with H2, etc.
Tags
Particular keywords can be optimized for with tags such as b, i, u (bold, italics, underline). These three are roughly equal in added significance.
Image Names
Just like with URLs, the name of images is also significant, especially when people are searching for specific images.
Alt Tags
It is crucial to give every image an alt tag, as it is another opportunity to optimize for keywords. In general, a good way to tag the images is by labeling them “picture subject image”. For example, if there was a picture of a laptop computer, an image can be tagged “Laptop Computer Image”. Thus keywords can be added while increasing overall word count.
Words of Caution
Keyword Stuffing
Optimizing a page excessively can adversely affect its ranking. The optimal keyword density is around 3%-4%, although given numbers may vary. Anything less and the page may not be deemed highly relevant and any more and it will be marked as spam, sending it to the bottom of the SERPs. This applies not only to the content, but the site in general. A webpage stuffed with more keywords than content will be marked as spam by search engines and will not show up in the SERPs.
Domains
Note that http://efexstudios.com/ and http://www.efexstudios.com/ are read as different websites by search engines. If you promote one version, be sure to set up a redirect from the other version so that your traffic (and backlink) power is not split.
Splash Pages
Unless your website or brand is already very well established, such as a popular music band, splash pages disrupt the ranking of your pages by making it more difficult to spider your site.
Useful Tools
This fantastic tool provides comprehensive tracking information for a website that is completely free, and it is highly recommended that it is implemented. A useful feature is the “keywords” feature which will show a site’s organic traffic and what keywords visitors used to find your site.
Google Webmaster Tools provides useful statistics about your site that Analytics does not provide such as errors received, keywords other websites are linking to you with,
Despite the rather spammy sales page, this is a fantastically useful tool for finding untapped keywords.
A great tool you can use is the Lynx Viewer, which outputs a website as all text – essentially the same way a search engine web crawler would see it. It’s a great way for checking at a glance what your site (and you’re competitors’ sites) are being optimized for.
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