What is SEO

Here is definition from Wikipedia: ‘Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.’  In other words SEO  is the process of making web site ranking high organically on the search engines for particular targeted keywords. Organically or naturally means that your site will appear on result page based on relevancy to the search terms for free as opposed to sponsored or pay per click advertising. So by correctly following SEO rules your site will receive free traffic.

There are three major parts in Search Engine Optimization:

  1. On Page SEO.  On Page includes things that you can do on your page to increase its relevance. It includes title and meta tags, keywords placement, internal linking, content and many other factors
  2. Off-Page SEO.  Off Page includes that are located outside of you site. Things like external links to your site, listings in online directories, blog and forum postings and many other techniques.
  3. Time. You can’t expect to put up a site and start ranking in first page of Google, it takes time to for you to optimize your site and build links and for Search Engines to recognize it as an authority.

The best thing about SEO that it is free, you can get naturally high rankings if you build your site properly according SEO on-page rules, and by implementing off-pages strategies. But it takes a lot of effort and time depending on relevancy and competition of targeted keywords.
I’m not going to go into great details about keyword research here, you can read about it by reading this article ‘Niche Marketing‘. Finding right competitive keywords is both an art and a science because you want to find good relevant keywords that have significant amount of traffic and not very competitive.

On Page Optimization

  • High Quality Content.  High quality original content is one of the most important on page factors for many reasons. First, search will penalize sites with duplicate content and will not index them. Second, if you have high quality engaging and interesting then readers will spend more time reading and browsing your site which Search engines especially Google pay close attention. Third, other sites will start linking to your original content which create free back links – very important off page SEO factor.
  • Keyword in domain  name. If it possible have a keyword in domain  name. According to Matt Cuts, head of Google’s web spam team (please refer to this video- Keywords in Domain Name) Google gives a little bit more weight in rankings to the domains with a keyword in it. At least for now.
  • Keyword in the Title Tag. What is a Title Tag? It is a clue to the content of the web page, summary of the web page that is passed to the search engine. To the user it is a text that you can see it on top of the browser and also text displayed on the result page of the search engines. Title tag as an important piece of information  that describes what is the page about to Search Engines. It should be 62 characters in length or less, anything beyond this  is not going to be displayed on the search result pages.You should also try to use a keyword or keyword phrase in title tag. You should write a unique title tag for all of your website pages, but do not try just stuff keywords in your title tag, try to make it attractive. Remember it is displayed on search results pages along with other 10 title tags, so make it inviting
  • Description Meta Tag. Meta Description tag appears in the head section of the web page and also gets displayed on the search results pages along with the title tag. Its length should be 165 chars or less and it is a good idea to include your target keywords in it, because Search Engines look for how relevant your meta description tag to your targeted keywords and if keywords are not there they will take some other pieces of text from your page that has them. Do your best to entice people to click on the result and visit your website.
  • Keywords Meta Tag. Keywords tag appears also in the head section of the web page, and was designed to list keywords of your page for the Search Engines. It was an important tag in the early ages of internet but due to abuse by spammers Google does not include it into consideration when rating your page. It is been confirmed by Matt Cats in this video. But I still use it because of Yahoo and Bing still give it some importance.
  • Keyword density. Keyword density is not as important as it use to be, Search Engines become smarter and not rating your content just on presence of certain keywords, they rate it as a whole and prefer content written in natural language. it is recommended to have a keyword density of at least 1% and no more then 4%. Anything  higher will appear as a spam to the search engines. If you just write good high quality relevant content you will achieve desired keyword density naturally.
  • Targeted Keyword. Have your targeted keyword in the first 50 words on your page. Most Search Engines are focusing on first part of the page they are indexing.
  • H1 Tags. H1 tags are very important, you can compare them to headlines in newspapers. Put your targeted keywords in them and it will make your page even more relevant to Search Engines. A lot of people will ignore them because text will appear big and ugly but it could easily controlled by CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
  • Internal linking. One of the best things that you can do to help your site to get higher rankings  is to use keywords as an anchor text when you create links inside your pages. What is an anchor text? It’s a text when you click when when you want to go to a new web page. Search engines use an anchor text to figure out nature of the page that page being indexed linking to.  So if the link says ‘iPad Review’ they assume that target page has an iPad review on it. Do not link to your home page using link ‘Home’, instead use a keyword in it, for example if your site is about car reviews use ‘Car Reviews Home’.  Also don’t use ‘click here’ or ‘page 1′, use more meaningful text.
  • Website folder and file names. When creating new pages/files and folders for your site use your keywords to name them. For example for gift ideas web site instead of www.yoursite.com/gift1.html use www.yoursite.com/birthday-gift-ideas.html
  • Images alt text. Only time image alt text helps SEO when you use an image as a link to your other internal pages. In this case it is similar to anchor text of regular text links but not valued as much.
  • Links to external pages. It is a good idea to include some links in your content to some high authoritative sites. It has a couple of purposes. First you are sharing quality information that is relevant to your site with you visitors and that helps them to become more knowledgeable on the subject, and second most affiliates out there are not willing to link to your site unless there is something for them. Google use to seeing a lot of sites that have only affiliate outbound links and you want to differentiate your site from others you want to show to Google that your site is a good source of information.

Off Page Optimization

Off page SEO is all about building links to your site.  You  have less control then optimizing your own site, but if you know what Search Engines looking for you can employ link building strategies that will help you to rank high.
Why are backlinks are so important?
Links improve your Pagerank.  Pagerank is a measurement of trustworthiness and credibility of  a site. It is calculated by number of different factors like number and quality of links that point to website, the amount of good and relevant content, how old the domain is and some others. Backlinks bring traffic to your site. Don’t disregard links from low Pagerank sites, the whole idea of SEO and Pagerank is to bring traffic to your site. Not all links are created equal. Links that are coming from authoritative websites with high Pagerank, with a lot of traffic and relevant are considered a good back links. But do not worry, There are no bad back links, they all help  one way or another,  bringing traffic, helping your pages rank for keywords or improving your Pagerank.
Here is the list of link building strategies.

  • Your site content. Create unique high quality original content and other people in your field or niche will start linking to your site automatically. If it is engaging interesting and helpful to people they will talk about it on their blogs, forums, they will quote it in articles etc. It is easier to ask for backlink if it offers benefits to the visitors of other sites.
  • Directory Submissions. One of the easiest ways to get one way links to your site directory submission to online directories. Directories are sites that list links to other sites organized by categories.There are thousand directories and most of them are free, but some, usually most valuable do charge for submissions. There are couple of ways that you can use to submit to directories: Manual submission,,using Submission Service or you can purchase software that will do it for you. Whatever method you use always try to use keywords in anchor text of your site directory listings.
  • Spying on your competition. One of the best thing you can do is to see what sites are linking to your competitors sites. You can contact those sites and ask if they willing to link to yours assuming that your site is at par with competitors sites.
  • Forum & Blog Submissions. Participating in public forums and commenting on blogs is another excellent avenue of getting links to your site. Forum and Blog owners have strict rules against spammers but as long as you genially contributing and not spamming they will allow a ling to your website usually in your profile or footer of the post. But you  have to be careful when choosing forum or blog to post or leave your  comment, a lot of them implement ‘nofollow’ attribute on their outbound links, which tells Search Engines to disregard those links in their indexing and calculations. But while it is still a good idea to have those links as a source of targeted traffic, they don’t really influence your site rankings.
  • Article Submission. Another very powerful technique to get one way links to your website is submitting articles to article directories. Majority of them allow you to include links to your website in the ‘author’ or ‘bio’ box which located at the end of the article. There are many benefits in article submission. Besides that you are getting backlinks, you most likely to receive a traffic from article directory sites, plus those sites allow other site owners to copy your article and publish on their sites as long as they don’t change your bio information and links. Be sure to incorporate right keywords when you creating anchor text in your ‘author’ box, also it is important to write good quality relevant and interesting content. Article sites moderators could reject poorly written articles and if they let them through you won’t get much traffic from them and no webmasters will be willing to republish them on their sites.
  • Social Bookmarking. What is social bookmarking? It is a method to inform other people that you have found something interesting on internet that could be interesting to them as well through sharing your links to the sites that you found interesting. There are hundreds of different social bookmarking sites and they all share special relationships with Search Engines. Google intents to look at  sites that are socially bookmarked faster just because someone found them interesting. By social bookmarking your site you can create many backlinks for driving traffic to your site. Remember not to go over the board with bookmarking your site, Google might think that of them as spam and your site could be removed from  Google index. The good rule is to socially bookmark your site when you produce new content be it a new page, article or new post to your blog. And don’t try to bookmark with too many sites 5-10 is enough. If you do it daily or several times per week your backlinks grow rapidly and that will increase authority to your site. Here is the list of some of my favorites sites: Digg.com, Delicious.com, StumbleUpon.com, Twitter.com
  • Press Releases. According to Wikipedia Press release ” is a written or recorded communication directed at members of the news media for the purpose of announcing something ostensibly newsworthy”. Basically the main idea is to send out information of newsworthy event to the news media hoping that they will publish it in the magazine, newspaper or mention it in their  web sites. If that happens it could be a great source of links ant traffic, because major news media sites have high Pagerank, and Google considers them as an authority sites.

To learn more about SEO please watch video below where panel of Google SEO experts analyses user submitted sites.