Updated Beginner SEO Starting Points
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Nov 19, 2009, 11:30:06 AM11/19/09
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GENERAL SEO STARTING POINTS
by: Darren Sucato
Preface
The following article was created as a starting point for the type of
thinking and ideas that go into real SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
This article is absolutely packed full of general ideas and process’s
of how to start thinking about the complex algorithms which are
today’s search engines.
“This article will not guarantee any ranking increase for your web
site; rather, change the design of your layout to include search
engine friendly techniques to better help you be visible on the
internet.”
Unfortunately, this article will be very confusing at times so I will
do my best to speak as “user friendly” as possible. After years of
toying with techniques of optimization, a new language of HTML, JAVA
and PHP has developed and It becomes difficult to speak in Layman’s
terms.
So without wasting anymore of our time,
General SEO Starting Points
strategy of web site design
By Darren Sucato
Diving into this article, we are first assuming a few things:
This is not a ,How To create a web site, paper and there is an
understanding that basic web design has already been covered.
You already have a web site , of some sort, which you would like to
increase traffic to
And finally,
You have a web site that someone, if not you, have built and it’s
structure and design is not a template or pure PHP language markup.
HTML THE DINOSAUR
The title of this section was merely to get your attention. For those
of you out there who think that HTML is going away and is not much
used anymore, you can’t be more wrong.
As with all aspects of the internet, they are constantly evolving at a
fantastic rate into a more streamlined and improved version. In the
years past, it was easy to get to the top of the search engines
organic listings by simply following a formula that was put together
which raised the base value of your listings results, therefore,
raising the natural listings of your web page.
Today is a very different story, with new versions of HTML, DHTML,
XHTML and many others, it is a guessing game to properly format for
which ever language you choose from.
The point is,
HTML is still the most widely used and search engine friendly language
out there and will be for years to come. As other languages find way
to integrate into databases and use call functions for scripts, they
are all based around an HTML frame, or better defined as the ability
for other languages to integrate into HTML usually for database
reference or database inquiry techniques.
Time after time I have been asked the question whether or not the age
of the domain makes a difference in SEO work and the simple answer is,
maybe..
You see, the, registered on, date doesn’t really matter to search
engines, whether or not it’s been around for years doesn’t really
matter. What DOES matter is whether or not there has been a site up on
that domain and for how long.
Example:
Let’s say I have a domain name that I registered in 2005 named
OldDomain.com and I have a new domain which I registered in 2008 named
NewDomain.com. Now let’s assume I finally scraped up enough personal
time to properly develop a site for both domains and put them up the
exact same day, then according to the internet, they both have the
same amount of time to generate attention by other internet sources.
Now that same example except I had my personal blogs up on
OldDomain.com and it has been on the internet with hosting since 2005
and I still put up both new sites for Olddomain.com and NewDomain.com
at the same time.
This time, the Olddomain.com has years of simple back link progression
and I would gander that most if not all search engines have already
found it in some way or another.
Keywords and Content
There is no better definition for Search Engine Optimization other
than have relevant content on your page. Sure, there are many other
aspects to SEO work but none are more important than content.
Your keywords, are a combination of what your web site is absolutely
about, not what you want it to show up for, but what it is about.
For instance,
If you own a bakery, XYZBakedGoods.com, and you specialized in Coffee
cakes, then you probably want Coffee Cake to be in your keywords. But
remember to not be go generalized when choosing keywords. If you go to
the internet and type in the word bakery, I think you will see by the
listings, that getting to the top of that organically would not only
be difficult, but also you will find that people who are searching for
a bakery probably wouldn’t just type in bakery. So let’s dig a little
deeper. If you were a consumer searching for a coffee cake in your
city, maybe a better keyword would be Dallas Coffee Cakes. But Dallas
Texas is a big city and there are probably dozens of bakeries that
service the growing coffee cake industry. So let’s assume you need one
today, so this time you search for Dallas Coffee Cakes Ready Made, or
Coffee Cakes to Go Dallas. This time you see real relevant results
show up like Madeline’s Coffee Cakes and Sidney’s Sweets. This is
where you belong, within the real results. Also notice that in the
example we just talked about, the location in the keyword changed from
the front to the back. Even though you might yield some different
results in the listings by making this switch, both are correct
because of the Internet’s views on keywords. The Internet, as a whole,
defines keywords individually and then checks the words to each side
of the first checked or “indexed” keyword to create a keyword phrase.
So from here on out, you will not see me referring to keyword phrases
or even key words but to the amount of characters as a whole which you
should have in certain areas of your site. Meta tags would be the
natural progression from this example but we will cover that later on
so let’s just keep thinking about content.
Even if you have the greatest looking, award winning, top notch web
page on the planet, the internet doesn’t care. It doesn’t see all of
your great animation work, or your layout and location of your images,
it only see’s the “back end” or code view. For an example of this I
have included a small snippet of code from a googlebot crawl.
This is the front end for http://www.bluecubebilliards.com/. This web
site won a WorldWideWebAward.com’s Gold Award in 2008 for design
excellence. It looks very nice with all those pictures but here is
what search engines see.
<td valign="top"><a href="/food-and-drink.php"><img src="images/
BLUECUBE-site_29.gif" alt="Connecticut Pool Hall, CT billiards,
Connecticut Pool League, Pool Hall, Connecticut Bar and Lounge"
width="305" height="97" border="0" /></a></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top"><table width="100%" border="0"
cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="202"><a href="/book-a-party.php"><img
src="images/BLUECUBE-site_35.gif" alt="Connecticut Pool Hall, CT
billiards, Connecticut Pool League, Pool Hall, Connecticut Bar and
Lounge" width="202" height="164" border="0" /></a></td>
<td width="200"><a href="/private-room.php"><img
src="images/BLUECUBE-site_33.gif" alt="Connecticut Pool Hall, CT
billiards, Connecticut Pool League, Pool Hall, Connecticut Bar and
Lounge" width="200" height="166" border="0" /></a></td>
<td width="200"><a href="/pro-shop.php"><img
src="images/BLUECUBE-site_34.gif" alt="Connecticut Pool Hall, CT
billiards, Connecticut Pool League, Pool Hall, Connecticut Bar and
Lounge" width="200" height="165" border="0" /></a></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
This is what your web page looks like according to search engines,
hundreds of lines of code make up your markup for each and every one
of your pages. Which all this stuff to surf through, the search engine
robots use clues and keys to grab parts of your page and index it for
content matching. Some of these clues can be found at the top of your
code, they are also known as your meta tags and will be discussed in
depth at a later date, but just to show you what we are discussing,
here is another snippet of those.
<meta name="description" content="Orange Connecticut Pool Hall and Bar
located on the Post Road in Orange with Connecticut Pool Leagues" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Ct pool hall, Orange Connecticut Pool
Hall, Connecticut Bar, Orange Connecticut Bar, Pool Hall in
Connecticut, billiards ct, Connecticut pool hall," />
Make sure that you use as much relevant content per page as possible
and that your page is not all just images. Try to keep at least 250
words of good relevant content on each and every page. This number can
fluctuate but as a whole, it has served as a good guideline for basic
SEO starting points.
DO NOT KEYWORD STUFF!
Keyword stuffing is a process known in the industry of absolutely
flooding your body text with keywords. I have included an example
below:
Keyword: Arizona, Phoenix
Good Text: Our business XYZ is located in the Arizona, more
specifically, Phoenix Arizona, the capitol of our state.
Keyword Stuffed Text: Our Arizona business is located in Phoenix
Arizona, more specifically in Central Phoenix Arizona, the capitol of
Arizona.
As you can see, in the above examples, both sentences have relatively
the same content, but the first sentence is good use of keyword and
content and will NOT be penalized by search engines for over stuffing
and the second sentence may be punished. So if possible, try to avoid
using these flaky tactics and don’t worry about the instant
gratification of seeing your name at the top of the “Organic” search
results and take your time, process the text correctly and watch your
results grow to the top and stay there for a long time.
Does the location of the text make a difference?
Yes it does matter where the content is located. As I peruse some of
my Listing questions that get asked by my group members of a group I
moderate for on the ideas and fundamentals of SEO work, I get asked
this question a lot. Simply put, if you read a book in its entirety
and the first 300 pages were irrelevant dashes, dots and meaningless
words, but the last 40 pages were what the book was about and you
couldn’t skip to the back, you have to read every single page in
order, would you ever get to the content? I know I wouldn’t get past
page 2 and that’s the thinking of the spiders and bots which surf your
site daily as well. You see, there are billions of sites out there
which some get indexed annually, some by the minute and most somewhere
in-between. This is too much work for a spider or bot to search for
the content on a web site so most engineers and programmers have a
virtual timer built into a bot somewhere in the range of mille to nano
seconds. If the spider doesn’t find what it needs to properly index
you in that amount of time, it bounces (leaves) off of your site
either by an external link or a hard start, which backs the bot out of
your site to the previous site and it takes an external link from
there. So you see that it really does matter where the content is.
Now I’m not saying that you have to have all of your text on top of
your page, but there are very good ways to shorten the amount of code
between the top of your source page and the beginning of your content.
Tips
Enclose your .CSS or Cascading Style Sheets in an external file called
XYZSite.CSS and link to them from each page so you don’t have all that
code in the way. It doesn’t need to be there. A good example of
linking code is illustrated below. What looks shorter
Example 1
.main_logo {
background-image: url(../images/main/on_the_run_logo.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;}
.mid_graphic { background-image: url(../images/main/mid_graphic.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;}
.graybox { background-color: #CCCCCC;}
.bottom_nav_text { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #0000FF;
text-decoration: none;}
.small_white_text { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
color: #333333;
text-decoration: none;
}
.header_text { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 16px;
color: #FF6600;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
}
.mainbody_text { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: normal;
color: #333333;
text-decoration: none;
}
.header_blue { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 15px;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;
Etc……
Or Example 2,
<link href="css/ontherun.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
Now see the difference, you just cut a lot of space out of your index
page by allowing these other languages do their job and link to an
HTML document. By looking directly above at the link you can see that
it is Referencing a Text/CSS stylesheet located in the CSS folder with
a name of Ontherun.css.
1 line does it all, now you make a file called ontherun.css and pack
all the CSS you want into that small external file.
JAVA JAVA AND MORE JAVA
Java is another one of those huge code crunchers that keeps engines up
happy with the amount of time it takes to get past it. This is a
tricky one and one result may not work for all java depending on the
type of java being used, but there are two easy ways to package up all
of your java into a single external file and they are illustrated
below.
Java Package Type 1 Example: In the head of your document call the
external java file by the use of a simple Java Call Tag:
<script src="http://www.ontherunmassage.com/java/format.js" type="text/
javascript"></script>
This tells the page that before it loads on the body of the page
reference this .js file entitled format and found in the java folder
which I created and pull any active java codes being used.
As java evolves, you may be using different architecture for your java
and need to have it called after the body of the page is already
loaded, I have included an example of this below.
<script src="http://www.ontherunmassage.com/java/format.js" type="text/
javascript">
window.onload=function(){
if(!document.getElementById || !document.createElement){return;}
var newjs=document.createElement('script');
newjs.type='text/javascript';
newjs.src='http://ontherunmassage.com/java/format.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(newjs);
}
</script>
“Take all of your Java and CSS and get them out of your pages, the
internet will thank you for it.”
TITLE YOUR PAGE WITH FEELING
If you look at the top of any open navigation field in any web
browsers, you will see the Title of the page that you are viewing. So
since this is what search engines display as results in bolded font,
and your browsers display them on the top of their pages, do you think
the title of your pages are important?
Of course they are,
To correctly title a page is another aspect of how content is king. In
order to title a page correctly, keep in mind the following
guidelines.
1. Do not keep the same title on every single page within a site, what
works on your index page most likely will not carry over to the rest
of your site. Consider each page like its unique site with some
similar keywords, but different description and title tags.
2. Keep your titles accurate to what each page does.
3. Try to work in at least 1 of your major keywords somehow.
Example:
Title of the Contact us page –
Title = Contact Us
This title, although accurate for the page is missing additional
information that can be shared by the title tag of the page. A more
relevant contact us title for this web site might be:
Title = Contact information for the XYZcompany. Contact our
Professional staff today.
By simply keeping the idea of the site in mind, I have found a much
better approach to keeping the keywords relevant and even working in
the name of the company.
It may seem like a lot of work to go through every single web page you
already have and run a huge list of ideas through each page, but that
is why SEO firms charge a lot of money to do this work, it’s tedious.
KEYWORDS ARE ON MY MIND
Keywords are a tool that you need to understand in order to utilize.
Most search engines say don’t even bother adding a keyword Meta tag to
your page, but I still do it on every site I build maybe because of
habit, or a better reason might be, why not. Keywords are not designed
to drive traffic to your site; rather, keywords are designed to let
other sites know what your site is about. There are some guidelines
that I have put together over the years that have really helped my
keywords excel in rankings and they are listed below.
1. Be selective with keywords, not being to general or vague, but very
specific to products or services.
2. Don’t keyword Stuff (we already talked about that process)
3. Keep your keyword selection relatively small, 15-30 keywords;
remember earlier what I said about keyword phrases, 15 – 30 keywords.
That’s approximately 15 2 word phrases.
4. Don’t repeat excessively
example:
I live in Arizona so my keywords would NOT look like : Arizona SEO,
Arizona web design, Arizona this, Arizona that, Arizona Phoenix,
Arizona blah blah…
There is an over excessive amount of Arizona’s. The keywords are taken
individually, not as a group so having Arizona in front of all of them
is not only pointless, but may cause you some penalties with spiders
in the future.
A more relevant keyword list may be: Arizona search engine
optimization, phoenix AZ seo, web site design, html validation etc….
5. In body text, try not to group keywords together; get some other
content in-between them.
6. Always have your primary keywords as an inter-site link within your
page linking to another page within your site.
Search engines love to “search” your page and they do that by
following links within your page. If you have to many external links,
“links to other sites,” they can just miss most of your page all
together. A better idea is to try to keep the bot or spider on your
site as long as you can by the use of inter-site links to pages of
content. Simply put, the longer the spider is on your site, the more
of your site it sees.
Keeping the keywords in your body text is a great way to help populate
your site on the internet. But don’t over do it, at most keep up to 7
percent of your total body text keywords, no more than that is ever
good. You will come across a site that utilizes the old keyword
stuffing and hidden links and they may even be higher than you, but
eventually, there sites will drop off the listings and yours will
remain on top. Proper execution of SEO strategy is the best way to
stay on top. Think of it like a body, if a man eats properly and works
out every single day, his body may have almost an unending resource of
energy to use, but if he doesn’t work out and he drinks an energy
drink, he may feel that same high for a bit, but then it wears off, he
is left feeling worse than before he started the energy drink.
Remember that keywords need to change depending on the content in each
page on your site. If you have a merchant site and you have an entire
page devoted to cameras and camera products, work out your keywords
correctly. Now if you have another page that sells diapers, you can
sure agree that keywords about camera’s probably won’t help your
diaper sales any.
HTML A GO-GO
I know it may seem strange to read this and feel like you are jumping
from one area to another in web development and SEO strategy, but I
assure you, there is a reason for that. Because of the steps used to
develop a site, I have written this paper to coincide with development
to aid in the steps as you may be getting to them. Therefore HTML a Go-
Go is the next step.
Now that you are running down your code and looking at what you can
get rid of or link to an external file, or even figuring out how and
which keywords would be best for each page, I have to stop you dead in
your tracks and talk about HTML validation.
In a perfect world, there would be a short little man with very thick
glasses getting paid big bucks to surf the web from site to site and
literally go through each page of each site for content analysis and
ranking details.
But there isn’t this thinking and aware person on the other end, there
is a computer program that was designed to do these things using very
complex mathematical formulas. With this being said, I must bring up
HTML validation.
If you have a site which may look great on the page-view side, there
still may be many hidden problems such as cross-browser function
capability and nesting errors, improper tag placement etc...
If these little programs which most are called either a spider or a
bot for short, of their real 10 syllable names which describe the math
behind the little programs, can’t read your page, they have no other
choice but to back out and start going a different direction. In order
to battle this growing phenomenon of template sites, you can use a
little head work and make sure that your code, whatever type of HTML
you choose is correct and up to date. A great free validation tool is
located at the W3.org web site.
This site belongs to the World Wide Web Consortium and this group
knows their business when it comes to HTML. They offer great Free
tools for users most notably , the HTML validation tool. If you would
like to see what this can do, please type in your browser the
following address, check your existing index page and look at what
needs to happen simply to follow one of these many steps in SEO work.
http://validator.w3.org/
THE ART OF LINK EXCHANGE
More often than not, big expensive SEO firms always talk about setting
up 1 way back links to your site. A few years back this was much more
important that it is found to be today. Why the change from then to
now? The evolution of the internet has taken less consideration of
back links because of primary SEO companies. You see, if I, an SEO
firm, have control of 250 web sites at any given time, that means, I
can “theoretically” generate an instant 250 one way back links (one
way means they link to you and you do NOT reciprocate with having a
link back to them.) This was a profit center for many SEO firms with
big books of business, instant traffic was a few mouse clicks away and
this is also no longer the case.
Quality back links should still be taken seriously not for instant
gratification, but for long-term goals. Remember how those spiders can
bounce from site to site, well with 2-way back links otherwise known
as reciprocal link exchanging or just , link exchanging, you can re-
direct a bouncing spider or bot back to your site.
There are some downfalls;
Link exchanging used to be an open market. Exchange links with anyone
more visible on the internet and their site would most literally lift
you up to their level. This is no longer the case, now there are some
fundamental guidelines to follow in order to have a successful link
campaign.
1. If you are going to use a link exchange company to find and solicit
links for you, make sure their pages can be uploaded to your domain
i.e. XYZcompany.com, not just hosted on theirs otherwise you are just
paying them to help increase their web sites presence.
2. Make sure you only exchange links with other sites who are on the
right track towards visibility structure. Exchanging links with pages
that have little or no content or no Meta tags can actually hurt your
campaign so keep moving up as I always say.
3. Keep the links to text only and keep them brief. A good example of
a text link exchange for the XYZBakery.com web site would be :
XYZBakery.com – Baked goods including Coffee Cake for the Dallas Texas
Area.
4. Keep your links you exchange relevant with your site. Only exchange
links with other sites in your general business.
5. Keep the links off of your home page / Index page. You can have a
link to a Resources page or a Links page on all your pages, but no
actual external page links on your homepage, we want those spiders to
dig a hole into your domain before bouncing off of it.
6. Keep your link pages brief. Have several of them if needed but have
no more than 15-20 links per page. These sites you see with hundreds
of external links per page will get caught up in Bot Bouncing and
their pages may be blacklisted (not necessarily removed from engine,
but dropped in natural results) for Link Farming.
A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
With today’s large scope of content, we sometimes overlook the image.
What is an image on a web page, let’s take a look.
There are several ways to Nest (Include) an image on a web page and
probably the most common method is also one of the easiest ways. It is
known as the Image Source.
Image Source method to adding a picture to a field adds a picture by
loading it from an external location , much like your css and java by
now, and it is run by variables which give it the parameters to exist
in this page. An example is stated below.
On the front end, this is what you may see. <literal picture of image>
But the back end to this picture looks much different. Keep in mind
that the following code is all the search engines see, not the
colorful well thought out graphic on your screen.
<img src="http://www.globalpetinsurance.com/img/bg/tl_corner_logo.png"
alt="Welcome to Global Pet Insurance, Your online pet insurance
marketplace" width="81" height="87" />
Since we are going to all, hopefully, have images on our site and we
link them in as easily as possible which is probably the way shown
above, you must realize that there is more code which should contain
the text for our relevant site to become more visible. Fixing images
to be better suited for the internet is easy to do and the guidelines
for optimizing these images is below.
1. Please keep your pictures as small as possible in either
a .jpg .gif or .png format. .BMP formats can be used as well, but many
digital cameras that store their pictures in the .BMP format usually
give you a huge image which is not suitable for online viewing. When I
talk about the size of an image, you must realize that with the faster
internet speeds most people are taking home with them these days, they
can load a faster page, but also keep in mind that most images can be
“optimized” by an image program to look exactly the way they do on
paper on your screen but at a much reduced size. A good size for a
web image is in the 5kb to 30kb range.
2. Use ALT tags on every image you have on the page. An ALT tag or
ALTERNATE tag is what show’s up for those people who cannot display
your images for any number of reasons. This is another place where
relevant content can excel for your page. Because most of the top of
peoples pages are images, why not sneak a key word or two in there.
Using the image tag above, let us look at what I did.
<img src="http://www.globalpetinsurance.com/img/bg/tl_corner_logo.png"
alt="Welcome to Global Pet Insurance, Your online pet insurance
marketplace" width="81" height="87" />
Notice the use of the full URL in the Image Source reference (IMG
SRC=). I mean, most people who develop the pages just use a direct
inbound link to an image folder such as the following;
<img src=”images/logo.gif” />
While this works just fine, let’s make the bot see your full domain
again and again throughout the site without ever leaving your site.
<img src=http://www.globalpetinsurance.com/images/logo.gif />
Now you should always add the ALT tag for a brief description of what
that image is. Because it would be considered a logo image I have
included logo text.
<img src="http://www.globalpetinsurance.com/img/bg/tl_corner_logo.png"
alt="Welcome to Global Pet Insurance, Your online pet insurance
marketplace" width="81" height="87" />
I bet by now you can tell me what one of my main keywords for this web
page might be. If you just figured out that “Online Pet Insurance” is
one of my main keywords, you are very right. Not to brag, but you are
reading this information for one reason or another and to show you
some credentials, just do a Google search for just that, Online pet
insurance, and let me know where http://www.globalpetinsurance.com
show’s up.
INTER-SITE LINKING
If you have 250 words of content on your home page and you have
carefully hand crafted the keyword density and image alt tags to
represent accurately what they should, then you must look at your
linking throughout your site.
Image Links
Images are most commonly linked by the use of the <A> tag. It is a
nice little variable that allows us to put a text or image link almost
anywhere on the page. If you have picture links all over your page
such as a menu made of images, then you are losing a lot of potential
spider or bot time on your site and because of this, keyword
relevance.
Text links are the way to go, and if you can link your main keyword in
the text, even better. For example;
XYZBakery.com has a separate page for their coffee cakes that they
sell so on the home page there is this link
Coffee Cakes
This link is excellent, especially if they have an image above it of a
coffee cake and the image has an Alt tag that says, Coffee Cakes by
XYZbakery.com. You are making the spider or bot follow your link to
another page hopefully named CoffeeCakes.html using a text link that
says Coffee Cakes that is surrounded by an image that has an alt tag
of Coffee Cake in it.
That is a lot of keyword density as far as the spider or bot is
concerned, but it is all absolutely applicable to your page and the
content will be indexed fully.
Use this section to whatever degree you decide. I have somewhere
around 5 – 6 inter-site links spread throughout my body text of
relevant main keywords just to keep the spiders moving within my site.
The object is, for them to index as much as possible while they are on
your site and to get the general idea of your site is to truly succeed
at search engine optimization.
DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS
There are some great directories out there than can really help boost
your internet presence. Some are free and can provide you with a
quality relevant one-way back link to your site. These sites can be
used at your discretion, but keep in mind, doing to many submissions
at once can “turn off” a search engine from you for a while. They have
been programmed to notice these things like link farming and exclude
you from indexing. I have found that 2-5 submissions weekly is very
safe and even more if you know what you are doing. A lot of submission
time comes from finding good directories to submit your link to. There
are lists available online and because the validity of these lists is
sometimes questionable, I will not reference any 1 list as a
suggestion. Keep in mind these companies that offer to submit you to
1000’s of directories for 1 low price. Most of the companies own
hundreds if not thousands of domain names that have absolutely no
impact on the net and they just put your link up on those. Most
companies I have come across do not really link to many reputable
directories but rather their own versions which the internet may or
may not penalize you for.
HEADER TAGS
Header tags are very important because they tell the spiders and bots
what is important on your site. A header tag is just what it sounds
like, a header for a page, or important content that should have
special consideration about it.
There are several different header tags; they are the h1 tag or
largest bold very important tag then they go downhill in size and
importance from the h2-h7 tag. Proper use of the header tags in good
site design will help optimize the page even more for those pesky
spiders and bots.
Let’s look at the use of the h1 tag.
All of the header tags are simply a variable which is encased in a
<h1> </h1>.
For instance;
<h1>Our Coffee Cakes are the best that Dallas Texas has to offer</h1>
This text will appear bold and large. You can scale down the size
using ,CSS style sheets and format it how you wish; I have not seen
any negative effects come from using this method. The h1 tag should be
used on the line of the page that directly tells your viewers what the
page is about. This is also so when a spider or bot comes to your
page, it will automatically notice the tag and mark it as a header. If
you were looking to increase your visibility on the web, then having a
marked header isn’t a bad way to start.
Tip: I prefer to personally use <h3> tags when coding menu items. They
are important, especially for site navigation, but they do not
constitute a <h1> tag because they are not what the page is about.
WEB SUBMISSIONS
Many people try to force you to pay them to submit your web site to
search engines. Today’s search engines just feed off of each other’s
results. Submission to all the major search engines is free of charge
and can usually be found very easily by just going to that Search
Engine whether it is Google, Yahoo or MSN or others and typing in the
words submit ,”URL to (insert the engine)”. Find the domain from that
search engine to click on and be careful, there will be a huge number
of erroneous sites trying to get you to pay them for this service. It
is free for indexing. There is no need to submit your site to non-
English speaking web sites, they might index you anyway and if you try
to submit your site, other index’s that don’t support foreign
languages may drop you. That is why Google has a different site for
every language and country it support.
SEARCH ENGINE LOGIC
To better understand how and why search engines work the way they do,
consider this a crash course to the fundamental idea of a search
engine.
People have become so caught up in the idea of SEO, get to the top as
fast as possible, they have begun to trash what major companies have
tried long and hard to develop. For those people who thought the
internet was a fad and would be gone eventually, well funny enough,
they were right. The internet as it was originally thought of is far
becoming extinct and with the introduction of new Wi-Fi enabled
devices ranging from appliances to cars to homes, the internet as we
thought of it is being replaced by just “The Net”. I didn’t coin the
term, although I wish I did, but our lives are constantly becoming
more and more affected by the outcome of some search algorithm without
our conscious knowledge that it ever happened. As I spoke earlier in
this paper about the evolution of search engines, it has become
apparent that they are spending Billions of dollars just to keep up
with the amount of information being dumped on the Net every day.
Thanks to companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and of course Google, they
have had some very smart people coming up with ways to help filter out
the garbage and give us relevant searches for our queries. Through
this process we have seen a large shift in a global internet presence
to a much more localized internet presence. The use of Local results
is becoming more and more evident and some might guess that even
though millions of results are out there for just about any keyword we
put in, realistically only 5 or so really fit the request.
As the internet shifts and continues to speed through this
evolutionary process that would be somewhat the equivalent to our
existence on this planet from the dinosaur days to 50 years from now,
we have to ask, where is this going to end? Continuous growth is a
concept of Gigantism and will kill anything it encounters. Nothing can
grow forever in size and space and not grow itself out of existence. I
do see a shift from computer based searches to truly local and
specific based searches for many years to come. This must happen in
order to control the size of the content that is considered today’s
Internet. It is growing out of control and while right now, today in
fact, it seems like the best thing since sliced bread, I do see our
society putting way to much stock in it for something that if the
power died, would die with it. For such a big global system to have
such a simple OFF switch such as power would devastate our planet on a
global, ecological and ethical level for all.
THE WRAP-UP
Since you have made it this far in this paper, congratulations for
becoming familiar with the ideas and concepts involved in Search
Engine Optimization. Many of you will, at the very least, understand
why Search Engine Optimization firms charge as much as they do. The
work is difficult, sometimes confusing and always changing. What works
for your site may not apply to another site down the road and at what
point does your site need to be updated again. These are all questions
which I have not tackled because those types of questions were never
my intention when I wrote this paper to begin with. This was designed
to be just a brief glimpse into the way of thinking that you must
apply in order to succeed in the Optimization business.
I know that there are hundreds of aspects of SEO that I didn’t even
touch on, but as you grow your understanding of how the heart of the
internet beats, your surgical skills adapt to give you a third-person
view of what’s really going on in a web site.
Thank You,
Darren Sucato
AZEsites.com
by: Darren Sucato
Preface
The following article was created as a starting point for the type of
thinking and ideas that go into real SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
This article is absolutely packed full of general ideas and process’s
of how to start thinking about the complex algorithms which are
today’s search engines.
“This article will not guarantee any ranking increase for your web
site; rather, change the design of your layout to include search
engine friendly techniques to better help you be visible on the
internet.”
Unfortunately, this article will be very confusing at times so I will
do my best to speak as “user friendly” as possible. After years of
toying with techniques of optimization, a new language of HTML, JAVA
and PHP has developed and It becomes difficult to speak in Layman’s
terms.
So without wasting anymore of our time,
General SEO Starting Points
strategy of web site design
By Darren Sucato
Diving into this article, we are first assuming a few things:
This is not a ,How To create a web site, paper and there is an
understanding that basic web design has already been covered.
You already have a web site , of some sort, which you would like to
increase traffic to
And finally,
You have a web site that someone, if not you, have built and it’s
structure and design is not a template or pure PHP language markup.
HTML THE DINOSAUR
The title of this section was merely to get your attention. For those
of you out there who think that HTML is going away and is not much
used anymore, you can’t be more wrong.
As with all aspects of the internet, they are constantly evolving at a
fantastic rate into a more streamlined and improved version. In the
years past, it was easy to get to the top of the search engines
organic listings by simply following a formula that was put together
which raised the base value of your listings results, therefore,
raising the natural listings of your web page.
Today is a very different story, with new versions of HTML, DHTML,
XHTML and many others, it is a guessing game to properly format for
which ever language you choose from.
The point is,
HTML is still the most widely used and search engine friendly language
out there and will be for years to come. As other languages find way
to integrate into databases and use call functions for scripts, they
are all based around an HTML frame, or better defined as the ability
for other languages to integrate into HTML usually for database
reference or database inquiry techniques.
Time after time I have been asked the question whether or not the age
of the domain makes a difference in SEO work and the simple answer is,
maybe..
You see, the, registered on, date doesn’t really matter to search
engines, whether or not it’s been around for years doesn’t really
matter. What DOES matter is whether or not there has been a site up on
that domain and for how long.
Example:
Let’s say I have a domain name that I registered in 2005 named
OldDomain.com and I have a new domain which I registered in 2008 named
NewDomain.com. Now let’s assume I finally scraped up enough personal
time to properly develop a site for both domains and put them up the
exact same day, then according to the internet, they both have the
same amount of time to generate attention by other internet sources.
Now that same example except I had my personal blogs up on
OldDomain.com and it has been on the internet with hosting since 2005
and I still put up both new sites for Olddomain.com and NewDomain.com
at the same time.
This time, the Olddomain.com has years of simple back link progression
and I would gander that most if not all search engines have already
found it in some way or another.
Keywords and Content
There is no better definition for Search Engine Optimization other
than have relevant content on your page. Sure, there are many other
aspects to SEO work but none are more important than content.
Your keywords, are a combination of what your web site is absolutely
about, not what you want it to show up for, but what it is about.
For instance,
If you own a bakery, XYZBakedGoods.com, and you specialized in Coffee
cakes, then you probably want Coffee Cake to be in your keywords. But
remember to not be go generalized when choosing keywords. If you go to
the internet and type in the word bakery, I think you will see by the
listings, that getting to the top of that organically would not only
be difficult, but also you will find that people who are searching for
a bakery probably wouldn’t just type in bakery. So let’s dig a little
deeper. If you were a consumer searching for a coffee cake in your
city, maybe a better keyword would be Dallas Coffee Cakes. But Dallas
Texas is a big city and there are probably dozens of bakeries that
service the growing coffee cake industry. So let’s assume you need one
today, so this time you search for Dallas Coffee Cakes Ready Made, or
Coffee Cakes to Go Dallas. This time you see real relevant results
show up like Madeline’s Coffee Cakes and Sidney’s Sweets. This is
where you belong, within the real results. Also notice that in the
example we just talked about, the location in the keyword changed from
the front to the back. Even though you might yield some different
results in the listings by making this switch, both are correct
because of the Internet’s views on keywords. The Internet, as a whole,
defines keywords individually and then checks the words to each side
of the first checked or “indexed” keyword to create a keyword phrase.
So from here on out, you will not see me referring to keyword phrases
or even key words but to the amount of characters as a whole which you
should have in certain areas of your site. Meta tags would be the
natural progression from this example but we will cover that later on
so let’s just keep thinking about content.
Even if you have the greatest looking, award winning, top notch web
page on the planet, the internet doesn’t care. It doesn’t see all of
your great animation work, or your layout and location of your images,
it only see’s the “back end” or code view. For an example of this I
have included a small snippet of code from a googlebot crawl.
This is the front end for http://www.bluecubebilliards.com/. This web
site won a WorldWideWebAward.com’s Gold Award in 2008 for design
excellence. It looks very nice with all those pictures but here is
what search engines see.
<td valign="top"><a href="/food-and-drink.php"><img src="images/
BLUECUBE-site_29.gif" alt="Connecticut Pool Hall, CT billiards,
Connecticut Pool League, Pool Hall, Connecticut Bar and Lounge"
width="305" height="97" border="0" /></a></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top"><table width="100%" border="0"
cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="202"><a href="/book-a-party.php"><img
src="images/BLUECUBE-site_35.gif" alt="Connecticut Pool Hall, CT
billiards, Connecticut Pool League, Pool Hall, Connecticut Bar and
Lounge" width="202" height="164" border="0" /></a></td>
<td width="200"><a href="/private-room.php"><img
src="images/BLUECUBE-site_33.gif" alt="Connecticut Pool Hall, CT
billiards, Connecticut Pool League, Pool Hall, Connecticut Bar and
Lounge" width="200" height="166" border="0" /></a></td>
<td width="200"><a href="/pro-shop.php"><img
src="images/BLUECUBE-site_34.gif" alt="Connecticut Pool Hall, CT
billiards, Connecticut Pool League, Pool Hall, Connecticut Bar and
Lounge" width="200" height="165" border="0" /></a></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
This is what your web page looks like according to search engines,
hundreds of lines of code make up your markup for each and every one
of your pages. Which all this stuff to surf through, the search engine
robots use clues and keys to grab parts of your page and index it for
content matching. Some of these clues can be found at the top of your
code, they are also known as your meta tags and will be discussed in
depth at a later date, but just to show you what we are discussing,
here is another snippet of those.
<meta name="description" content="Orange Connecticut Pool Hall and Bar
located on the Post Road in Orange with Connecticut Pool Leagues" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Ct pool hall, Orange Connecticut Pool
Hall, Connecticut Bar, Orange Connecticut Bar, Pool Hall in
Connecticut, billiards ct, Connecticut pool hall," />
Make sure that you use as much relevant content per page as possible
and that your page is not all just images. Try to keep at least 250
words of good relevant content on each and every page. This number can
fluctuate but as a whole, it has served as a good guideline for basic
SEO starting points.
DO NOT KEYWORD STUFF!
Keyword stuffing is a process known in the industry of absolutely
flooding your body text with keywords. I have included an example
below:
Keyword: Arizona, Phoenix
Good Text: Our business XYZ is located in the Arizona, more
specifically, Phoenix Arizona, the capitol of our state.
Keyword Stuffed Text: Our Arizona business is located in Phoenix
Arizona, more specifically in Central Phoenix Arizona, the capitol of
Arizona.
As you can see, in the above examples, both sentences have relatively
the same content, but the first sentence is good use of keyword and
content and will NOT be penalized by search engines for over stuffing
and the second sentence may be punished. So if possible, try to avoid
using these flaky tactics and don’t worry about the instant
gratification of seeing your name at the top of the “Organic” search
results and take your time, process the text correctly and watch your
results grow to the top and stay there for a long time.
Does the location of the text make a difference?
Yes it does matter where the content is located. As I peruse some of
my Listing questions that get asked by my group members of a group I
moderate for on the ideas and fundamentals of SEO work, I get asked
this question a lot. Simply put, if you read a book in its entirety
and the first 300 pages were irrelevant dashes, dots and meaningless
words, but the last 40 pages were what the book was about and you
couldn’t skip to the back, you have to read every single page in
order, would you ever get to the content? I know I wouldn’t get past
page 2 and that’s the thinking of the spiders and bots which surf your
site daily as well. You see, there are billions of sites out there
which some get indexed annually, some by the minute and most somewhere
in-between. This is too much work for a spider or bot to search for
the content on a web site so most engineers and programmers have a
virtual timer built into a bot somewhere in the range of mille to nano
seconds. If the spider doesn’t find what it needs to properly index
you in that amount of time, it bounces (leaves) off of your site
either by an external link or a hard start, which backs the bot out of
your site to the previous site and it takes an external link from
there. So you see that it really does matter where the content is.
Now I’m not saying that you have to have all of your text on top of
your page, but there are very good ways to shorten the amount of code
between the top of your source page and the beginning of your content.
Tips
Enclose your .CSS or Cascading Style Sheets in an external file called
XYZSite.CSS and link to them from each page so you don’t have all that
code in the way. It doesn’t need to be there. A good example of
linking code is illustrated below. What looks shorter
Example 1
.main_logo {
background-image: url(../images/main/on_the_run_logo.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;}
.mid_graphic { background-image: url(../images/main/mid_graphic.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;}
.graybox { background-color: #CCCCCC;}
.bottom_nav_text { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #0000FF;
text-decoration: none;}
.small_white_text { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
color: #333333;
text-decoration: none;
}
.header_text { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 16px;
color: #FF6600;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
}
.mainbody_text { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: normal;
color: #333333;
text-decoration: none;
}
.header_blue { font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 15px;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;
Etc……
Or Example 2,
<link href="css/ontherun.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
Now see the difference, you just cut a lot of space out of your index
page by allowing these other languages do their job and link to an
HTML document. By looking directly above at the link you can see that
it is Referencing a Text/CSS stylesheet located in the CSS folder with
a name of Ontherun.css.
1 line does it all, now you make a file called ontherun.css and pack
all the CSS you want into that small external file.
JAVA JAVA AND MORE JAVA
Java is another one of those huge code crunchers that keeps engines up
happy with the amount of time it takes to get past it. This is a
tricky one and one result may not work for all java depending on the
type of java being used, but there are two easy ways to package up all
of your java into a single external file and they are illustrated
below.
Java Package Type 1 Example: In the head of your document call the
external java file by the use of a simple Java Call Tag:
<script src="http://www.ontherunmassage.com/java/format.js" type="text/
javascript"></script>
This tells the page that before it loads on the body of the page
reference this .js file entitled format and found in the java folder
which I created and pull any active java codes being used.
As java evolves, you may be using different architecture for your java
and need to have it called after the body of the page is already
loaded, I have included an example of this below.
<script src="http://www.ontherunmassage.com/java/format.js" type="text/
javascript">
window.onload=function(){
if(!document.getElementById || !document.createElement){return;}
var newjs=document.createElement('script');
newjs.type='text/javascript';
newjs.src='http://ontherunmassage.com/java/format.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(newjs);
}
</script>
“Take all of your Java and CSS and get them out of your pages, the
internet will thank you for it.”
TITLE YOUR PAGE WITH FEELING
If you look at the top of any open navigation field in any web
browsers, you will see the Title of the page that you are viewing. So
since this is what search engines display as results in bolded font,
and your browsers display them on the top of their pages, do you think
the title of your pages are important?
Of course they are,
To correctly title a page is another aspect of how content is king. In
order to title a page correctly, keep in mind the following
guidelines.
1. Do not keep the same title on every single page within a site, what
works on your index page most likely will not carry over to the rest
of your site. Consider each page like its unique site with some
similar keywords, but different description and title tags.
2. Keep your titles accurate to what each page does.
3. Try to work in at least 1 of your major keywords somehow.
Example:
Title of the Contact us page –
Title = Contact Us
This title, although accurate for the page is missing additional
information that can be shared by the title tag of the page. A more
relevant contact us title for this web site might be:
Title = Contact information for the XYZcompany. Contact our
Professional staff today.
By simply keeping the idea of the site in mind, I have found a much
better approach to keeping the keywords relevant and even working in
the name of the company.
It may seem like a lot of work to go through every single web page you
already have and run a huge list of ideas through each page, but that
is why SEO firms charge a lot of money to do this work, it’s tedious.
KEYWORDS ARE ON MY MIND
Keywords are a tool that you need to understand in order to utilize.
Most search engines say don’t even bother adding a keyword Meta tag to
your page, but I still do it on every site I build maybe because of
habit, or a better reason might be, why not. Keywords are not designed
to drive traffic to your site; rather, keywords are designed to let
other sites know what your site is about. There are some guidelines
that I have put together over the years that have really helped my
keywords excel in rankings and they are listed below.
1. Be selective with keywords, not being to general or vague, but very
specific to products or services.
2. Don’t keyword Stuff (we already talked about that process)
3. Keep your keyword selection relatively small, 15-30 keywords;
remember earlier what I said about keyword phrases, 15 – 30 keywords.
That’s approximately 15 2 word phrases.
4. Don’t repeat excessively
example:
I live in Arizona so my keywords would NOT look like : Arizona SEO,
Arizona web design, Arizona this, Arizona that, Arizona Phoenix,
Arizona blah blah…
There is an over excessive amount of Arizona’s. The keywords are taken
individually, not as a group so having Arizona in front of all of them
is not only pointless, but may cause you some penalties with spiders
in the future.
A more relevant keyword list may be: Arizona search engine
optimization, phoenix AZ seo, web site design, html validation etc….
5. In body text, try not to group keywords together; get some other
content in-between them.
6. Always have your primary keywords as an inter-site link within your
page linking to another page within your site.
Search engines love to “search” your page and they do that by
following links within your page. If you have to many external links,
“links to other sites,” they can just miss most of your page all
together. A better idea is to try to keep the bot or spider on your
site as long as you can by the use of inter-site links to pages of
content. Simply put, the longer the spider is on your site, the more
of your site it sees.
Keeping the keywords in your body text is a great way to help populate
your site on the internet. But don’t over do it, at most keep up to 7
percent of your total body text keywords, no more than that is ever
good. You will come across a site that utilizes the old keyword
stuffing and hidden links and they may even be higher than you, but
eventually, there sites will drop off the listings and yours will
remain on top. Proper execution of SEO strategy is the best way to
stay on top. Think of it like a body, if a man eats properly and works
out every single day, his body may have almost an unending resource of
energy to use, but if he doesn’t work out and he drinks an energy
drink, he may feel that same high for a bit, but then it wears off, he
is left feeling worse than before he started the energy drink.
Remember that keywords need to change depending on the content in each
page on your site. If you have a merchant site and you have an entire
page devoted to cameras and camera products, work out your keywords
correctly. Now if you have another page that sells diapers, you can
sure agree that keywords about camera’s probably won’t help your
diaper sales any.
HTML A GO-GO
I know it may seem strange to read this and feel like you are jumping
from one area to another in web development and SEO strategy, but I
assure you, there is a reason for that. Because of the steps used to
develop a site, I have written this paper to coincide with development
to aid in the steps as you may be getting to them. Therefore HTML a Go-
Go is the next step.
Now that you are running down your code and looking at what you can
get rid of or link to an external file, or even figuring out how and
which keywords would be best for each page, I have to stop you dead in
your tracks and talk about HTML validation.
In a perfect world, there would be a short little man with very thick
glasses getting paid big bucks to surf the web from site to site and
literally go through each page of each site for content analysis and
ranking details.
But there isn’t this thinking and aware person on the other end, there
is a computer program that was designed to do these things using very
complex mathematical formulas. With this being said, I must bring up
HTML validation.
If you have a site which may look great on the page-view side, there
still may be many hidden problems such as cross-browser function
capability and nesting errors, improper tag placement etc...
If these little programs which most are called either a spider or a
bot for short, of their real 10 syllable names which describe the math
behind the little programs, can’t read your page, they have no other
choice but to back out and start going a different direction. In order
to battle this growing phenomenon of template sites, you can use a
little head work and make sure that your code, whatever type of HTML
you choose is correct and up to date. A great free validation tool is
located at the W3.org web site.
This site belongs to the World Wide Web Consortium and this group
knows their business when it comes to HTML. They offer great Free
tools for users most notably , the HTML validation tool. If you would
like to see what this can do, please type in your browser the
following address, check your existing index page and look at what
needs to happen simply to follow one of these many steps in SEO work.
http://validator.w3.org/
THE ART OF LINK EXCHANGE
More often than not, big expensive SEO firms always talk about setting
up 1 way back links to your site. A few years back this was much more
important that it is found to be today. Why the change from then to
now? The evolution of the internet has taken less consideration of
back links because of primary SEO companies. You see, if I, an SEO
firm, have control of 250 web sites at any given time, that means, I
can “theoretically” generate an instant 250 one way back links (one
way means they link to you and you do NOT reciprocate with having a
link back to them.) This was a profit center for many SEO firms with
big books of business, instant traffic was a few mouse clicks away and
this is also no longer the case.
Quality back links should still be taken seriously not for instant
gratification, but for long-term goals. Remember how those spiders can
bounce from site to site, well with 2-way back links otherwise known
as reciprocal link exchanging or just , link exchanging, you can re-
direct a bouncing spider or bot back to your site.
There are some downfalls;
Link exchanging used to be an open market. Exchange links with anyone
more visible on the internet and their site would most literally lift
you up to their level. This is no longer the case, now there are some
fundamental guidelines to follow in order to have a successful link
campaign.
1. If you are going to use a link exchange company to find and solicit
links for you, make sure their pages can be uploaded to your domain
i.e. XYZcompany.com, not just hosted on theirs otherwise you are just
paying them to help increase their web sites presence.
2. Make sure you only exchange links with other sites who are on the
right track towards visibility structure. Exchanging links with pages
that have little or no content or no Meta tags can actually hurt your
campaign so keep moving up as I always say.
3. Keep the links to text only and keep them brief. A good example of
a text link exchange for the XYZBakery.com web site would be :
XYZBakery.com – Baked goods including Coffee Cake for the Dallas Texas
Area.
4. Keep your links you exchange relevant with your site. Only exchange
links with other sites in your general business.
5. Keep the links off of your home page / Index page. You can have a
link to a Resources page or a Links page on all your pages, but no
actual external page links on your homepage, we want those spiders to
dig a hole into your domain before bouncing off of it.
6. Keep your link pages brief. Have several of them if needed but have
no more than 15-20 links per page. These sites you see with hundreds
of external links per page will get caught up in Bot Bouncing and
their pages may be blacklisted (not necessarily removed from engine,
but dropped in natural results) for Link Farming.
A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
With today’s large scope of content, we sometimes overlook the image.
What is an image on a web page, let’s take a look.
There are several ways to Nest (Include) an image on a web page and
probably the most common method is also one of the easiest ways. It is
known as the Image Source.
Image Source method to adding a picture to a field adds a picture by
loading it from an external location , much like your css and java by
now, and it is run by variables which give it the parameters to exist
in this page. An example is stated below.
On the front end, this is what you may see. <literal picture of image>
But the back end to this picture looks much different. Keep in mind
that the following code is all the search engines see, not the
colorful well thought out graphic on your screen.
<img src="http://www.globalpetinsurance.com/img/bg/tl_corner_logo.png"
alt="Welcome to Global Pet Insurance, Your online pet insurance
marketplace" width="81" height="87" />
Since we are going to all, hopefully, have images on our site and we
link them in as easily as possible which is probably the way shown
above, you must realize that there is more code which should contain
the text for our relevant site to become more visible. Fixing images
to be better suited for the internet is easy to do and the guidelines
for optimizing these images is below.
1. Please keep your pictures as small as possible in either
a .jpg .gif or .png format. .BMP formats can be used as well, but many
digital cameras that store their pictures in the .BMP format usually
give you a huge image which is not suitable for online viewing. When I
talk about the size of an image, you must realize that with the faster
internet speeds most people are taking home with them these days, they
can load a faster page, but also keep in mind that most images can be
“optimized” by an image program to look exactly the way they do on
paper on your screen but at a much reduced size. A good size for a
web image is in the 5kb to 30kb range.
2. Use ALT tags on every image you have on the page. An ALT tag or
ALTERNATE tag is what show’s up for those people who cannot display
your images for any number of reasons. This is another place where
relevant content can excel for your page. Because most of the top of
peoples pages are images, why not sneak a key word or two in there.
Using the image tag above, let us look at what I did.
<img src="http://www.globalpetinsurance.com/img/bg/tl_corner_logo.png"
alt="Welcome to Global Pet Insurance, Your online pet insurance
marketplace" width="81" height="87" />
Notice the use of the full URL in the Image Source reference (IMG
SRC=). I mean, most people who develop the pages just use a direct
inbound link to an image folder such as the following;
<img src=”images/logo.gif” />
While this works just fine, let’s make the bot see your full domain
again and again throughout the site without ever leaving your site.
<img src=http://www.globalpetinsurance.com/images/logo.gif />
Now you should always add the ALT tag for a brief description of what
that image is. Because it would be considered a logo image I have
included logo text.
<img src="http://www.globalpetinsurance.com/img/bg/tl_corner_logo.png"
alt="Welcome to Global Pet Insurance, Your online pet insurance
marketplace" width="81" height="87" />
I bet by now you can tell me what one of my main keywords for this web
page might be. If you just figured out that “Online Pet Insurance” is
one of my main keywords, you are very right. Not to brag, but you are
reading this information for one reason or another and to show you
some credentials, just do a Google search for just that, Online pet
insurance, and let me know where http://www.globalpetinsurance.com
show’s up.
INTER-SITE LINKING
If you have 250 words of content on your home page and you have
carefully hand crafted the keyword density and image alt tags to
represent accurately what they should, then you must look at your
linking throughout your site.
Image Links
Images are most commonly linked by the use of the <A> tag. It is a
nice little variable that allows us to put a text or image link almost
anywhere on the page. If you have picture links all over your page
such as a menu made of images, then you are losing a lot of potential
spider or bot time on your site and because of this, keyword
relevance.
Text links are the way to go, and if you can link your main keyword in
the text, even better. For example;
XYZBakery.com has a separate page for their coffee cakes that they
sell so on the home page there is this link
Coffee Cakes
This link is excellent, especially if they have an image above it of a
coffee cake and the image has an Alt tag that says, Coffee Cakes by
XYZbakery.com. You are making the spider or bot follow your link to
another page hopefully named CoffeeCakes.html using a text link that
says Coffee Cakes that is surrounded by an image that has an alt tag
of Coffee Cake in it.
That is a lot of keyword density as far as the spider or bot is
concerned, but it is all absolutely applicable to your page and the
content will be indexed fully.
Use this section to whatever degree you decide. I have somewhere
around 5 – 6 inter-site links spread throughout my body text of
relevant main keywords just to keep the spiders moving within my site.
The object is, for them to index as much as possible while they are on
your site and to get the general idea of your site is to truly succeed
at search engine optimization.
DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS
There are some great directories out there than can really help boost
your internet presence. Some are free and can provide you with a
quality relevant one-way back link to your site. These sites can be
used at your discretion, but keep in mind, doing to many submissions
at once can “turn off” a search engine from you for a while. They have
been programmed to notice these things like link farming and exclude
you from indexing. I have found that 2-5 submissions weekly is very
safe and even more if you know what you are doing. A lot of submission
time comes from finding good directories to submit your link to. There
are lists available online and because the validity of these lists is
sometimes questionable, I will not reference any 1 list as a
suggestion. Keep in mind these companies that offer to submit you to
1000’s of directories for 1 low price. Most of the companies own
hundreds if not thousands of domain names that have absolutely no
impact on the net and they just put your link up on those. Most
companies I have come across do not really link to many reputable
directories but rather their own versions which the internet may or
may not penalize you for.
HEADER TAGS
Header tags are very important because they tell the spiders and bots
what is important on your site. A header tag is just what it sounds
like, a header for a page, or important content that should have
special consideration about it.
There are several different header tags; they are the h1 tag or
largest bold very important tag then they go downhill in size and
importance from the h2-h7 tag. Proper use of the header tags in good
site design will help optimize the page even more for those pesky
spiders and bots.
Let’s look at the use of the h1 tag.
All of the header tags are simply a variable which is encased in a
<h1> </h1>.
For instance;
<h1>Our Coffee Cakes are the best that Dallas Texas has to offer</h1>
This text will appear bold and large. You can scale down the size
using ,CSS style sheets and format it how you wish; I have not seen
any negative effects come from using this method. The h1 tag should be
used on the line of the page that directly tells your viewers what the
page is about. This is also so when a spider or bot comes to your
page, it will automatically notice the tag and mark it as a header. If
you were looking to increase your visibility on the web, then having a
marked header isn’t a bad way to start.
Tip: I prefer to personally use <h3> tags when coding menu items. They
are important, especially for site navigation, but they do not
constitute a <h1> tag because they are not what the page is about.
WEB SUBMISSIONS
Many people try to force you to pay them to submit your web site to
search engines. Today’s search engines just feed off of each other’s
results. Submission to all the major search engines is free of charge
and can usually be found very easily by just going to that Search
Engine whether it is Google, Yahoo or MSN or others and typing in the
words submit ,”URL to (insert the engine)”. Find the domain from that
search engine to click on and be careful, there will be a huge number
of erroneous sites trying to get you to pay them for this service. It
is free for indexing. There is no need to submit your site to non-
English speaking web sites, they might index you anyway and if you try
to submit your site, other index’s that don’t support foreign
languages may drop you. That is why Google has a different site for
every language and country it support.
SEARCH ENGINE LOGIC
To better understand how and why search engines work the way they do,
consider this a crash course to the fundamental idea of a search
engine.
People have become so caught up in the idea of SEO, get to the top as
fast as possible, they have begun to trash what major companies have
tried long and hard to develop. For those people who thought the
internet was a fad and would be gone eventually, well funny enough,
they were right. The internet as it was originally thought of is far
becoming extinct and with the introduction of new Wi-Fi enabled
devices ranging from appliances to cars to homes, the internet as we
thought of it is being replaced by just “The Net”. I didn’t coin the
term, although I wish I did, but our lives are constantly becoming
more and more affected by the outcome of some search algorithm without
our conscious knowledge that it ever happened. As I spoke earlier in
this paper about the evolution of search engines, it has become
apparent that they are spending Billions of dollars just to keep up
with the amount of information being dumped on the Net every day.
Thanks to companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and of course Google, they
have had some very smart people coming up with ways to help filter out
the garbage and give us relevant searches for our queries. Through
this process we have seen a large shift in a global internet presence
to a much more localized internet presence. The use of Local results
is becoming more and more evident and some might guess that even
though millions of results are out there for just about any keyword we
put in, realistically only 5 or so really fit the request.
As the internet shifts and continues to speed through this
evolutionary process that would be somewhat the equivalent to our
existence on this planet from the dinosaur days to 50 years from now,
we have to ask, where is this going to end? Continuous growth is a
concept of Gigantism and will kill anything it encounters. Nothing can
grow forever in size and space and not grow itself out of existence. I
do see a shift from computer based searches to truly local and
specific based searches for many years to come. This must happen in
order to control the size of the content that is considered today’s
Internet. It is growing out of control and while right now, today in
fact, it seems like the best thing since sliced bread, I do see our
society putting way to much stock in it for something that if the
power died, would die with it. For such a big global system to have
such a simple OFF switch such as power would devastate our planet on a
global, ecological and ethical level for all.
THE WRAP-UP
Since you have made it this far in this paper, congratulations for
becoming familiar with the ideas and concepts involved in Search
Engine Optimization. Many of you will, at the very least, understand
why Search Engine Optimization firms charge as much as they do. The
work is difficult, sometimes confusing and always changing. What works
for your site may not apply to another site down the road and at what
point does your site need to be updated again. These are all questions
which I have not tackled because those types of questions were never
my intention when I wrote this paper to begin with. This was designed
to be just a brief glimpse into the way of thinking that you must
apply in order to succeed in the Optimization business.
I know that there are hundreds of aspects of SEO that I didn’t even
touch on, but as you grow your understanding of how the heart of the
internet beats, your surgical skills adapt to give you a third-person
view of what’s really going on in a web site.
Thank You,
Darren Sucato
AZEsites.com
Venice
Aug 16, 2018, 11:02:48 AM8/16/18
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