Beginners Guide To SEO

by Christopher Creswick
C Initiatives

While SEO is vastly becoming the most sought after profession in the online world there are still many aspects that can be carried out by the average website owner with little if no knowledge of SEO. Search engine algorithms are designed to extract basic information from websites in order to determine their relevance for certain key phrases or words (search terms-keywords). Arank is then given and a position is awarded within the index of the search engine. Now, while most SEO professionals will try to overwhelm you with technical nonsense to deter you from attempting it yourself, the means of achieving rankings within search engines is very possible without a professional.

Content

Content is probably the most important aspect of you website not only for SEO purposes but also for converting your visitors into customers or subscribers. Good content is imperative in all situations and can go a long way if revised and displayed in a direct and informative manner. Relevance is the next part, although informative content is good it has no SEO worth unless it is relevant to the keywords you wish to rank for. As opposed to spamming your keywords within your content, try to make your content explain your keywords, although search engines are programmes they are evolving all the time and good grammar and relevant content can be an important factor in determining your websites worth.

When it comes to inserting keywords in your content, spamming them continuously will do you no good, search engines like Google and Bing are able find websites that use keywords in excess and deduct preference and can be penalised and in some cases banned and removed from the web index tarnishing your rank for a very long time. As a rule, I tend to keep keyword density to around 2% for example a 100 word text piece will contain my keywords no more than 2 times. This shows that your site values these keywords but also allows for other keywords and content to make up the rest of your content.

Meta Data

A search engine analyses your website by sending out a robot to scan/crawl your websites source code. These are usually referred to as spiders/robots. They are programmed to look at your content and meta data that is stored within your websites code. Meta data is a way of informing web browsers and search engines of certain information about your website i.e page titles, descriptions, keywords and alt tags.Always ensure that your meta data is well by placing keyword rich descriptions and page titles. The keyword data is now obsolete for most search engines but may still give you some preference so it is wise to make use of this tag also.

If your site is static you can edit the meta data by simply editing each pages html code. Make sure the title tag is always the first of your meta data. If your website is ran by a CMS(Content Management System) such as Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress there are built-in features that allow you to change your meta data. Leaving your meta data blank will serve you no use so ensure that it is filled and descriptive for each page of your website.

Sitemaps

Making sure your sitemap is up to date will also serve as a good benefit. Sitemaps give search engines a full map of all the links you wish to have included in their web indexes. With the world wide web growing larger every day search engines can take time to get back to crawling your site so by submitting your sitemap directly to the search engineyou lower this time considerably which ensures that the search engine has an up to date version of your website. It is best to only re submit your sitemap when you have made changes to your website.

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Article submitted Tuesday, April 19, 2011 & read 7 times.

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