Beginner’s 5-Minute Guide to SEO:

seo is Search Engine Optimization.

You want to reach the number one spot on Google (and Yahoo and Live, but we’ll just say Google, because it’s easier). By using the correct keywords in all your alt tags, title tags, h tags, class names, image names, meta tags, etc. That is called on-site optimization.

Off-site seo

Off-site optimization consists of getting other quality sites to link to you. Each link must have relevant link text, and it helps if the site has a high PR (pagerank) and a small number of outbound links. Traditionally, people would hoard PR by getting tons of websites to link back to them, but by refusing to place links on their own site (they were afraid of what we call “pagerank bleed”. But anymore, I don’t believe pagerank bleed is something that anyone should concern themselves with. The use of “nofollow” on external links is becoming worthless, and after boiling everything down to its elements, the bottom line is to give out links to sites only if you think your human audience would find value on a given website.

You want to avoid buying backlinks.  The general consensus is, if you create quality content, you will get links naturally.  In the beginning of the Internet days, before Google, webmasters would put links of to pages that were of interest.  Then the search engines started using inbound links as popularity votes, and it became high school all over again.  Now we are out of college, and more mature, and the best way to go about things is to link to sites you personally like, because they are interesting and you have something in common, not because you are getting something out of it (in other words, don’t buy links, don’t join reciprocal link farms, and don’t sell links! Targeted advertising is one thing–but paying $100 to have your link displayed on 100,000 completely unrelated spammy sites will not do you any good!  Don’t do it!

What’s our mantra, class?

content is king.

Think of it this way. You build a site, and it starts with no PR. Then Google rolls out an update 3 months later and they saw that you have 15 quality sites linking to you, and your site has 50 really good articles, and a good mix of relevant inbound and outbound links. You might skip PR 0 and PR 1 and be blessed with a PR 2. Very few sites have a PR 10. Pagerank is not something to obsess over, more of a general guide to see how important Google thinks your site is. The theory is that a high PR page will get more traffic because it will be listed higher in the SERPs. (SEARCH ENGINE RESULT PAGES) but don’t waste energy worrying about PR when you could instead be writing an article or making a video!

White hat, Black hat…

That’s some Bad Hat, Harry!

There are tons of ways to increase your SERP position. But it is a very competitive field. That’s where black hat and white hat come in, they are terms that describe the ethics used by the seo experts. If you use tricks that are designed to fool the search engines, using spammy tactics, that is black hat. Quality honest seo consultants use white hat methods, like article submission, social bookmarking, and manual submission to quality directories like DMOZ.

I hope this hasn’t confused you too much. It just all kind of spilled out. If you are interested in the 30 Day Challenge, for your promoting your website, it’s a really awesome free course that covers all of this stuff and shows you how to make your first dollar online. My mom is doing it, which shows how accessible it is to beginners. Stop by our google group for Team Rockstar if ya want to join the discussion. My brother and I started it to help our friends and family who want to learn this stuff, and who are going to take part in this year’s 30 Day Challenge.

Oh it’s free too? Of course. Ed Dale’s cheesy slogan is “There’s no charge for awesomeness!”

Chris
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Step One: Create some great content on your site.   For an example of great content, keep reading my blogs.  Why?  Because I will be linking to OTHER great content.  Ha, and you thought I was patting myself on the back, dintcha?

Step Two: Bookmark, bookmark, bookmark. If you don’t already have accounts on Digg, Fark, Furl, del.icio.us, Propeller, Mixx, Yigg, Reddit, and every other bookmarking site in existence, get them.  It will be incredibly tedious setting them all up, but after that four or five hour trek is complete, and you autosave your passwords, and drag your bookmarklets to the browser toolbar, you will be on the fast lane to success. There are at least a couple hundred bookmarking sites to choose from these days; for a few of the popular ones, look to the bottom of this article.

A quick note about social bookmarking: it used to be a great tool for seo.  The importance of bookmarking in terms of backlink building has decreased a little bit over the past two years, but it is still a good practice to get into, because you will get traffic.  Even though you might not get tons of diggs, if you just get a few, and one person likes your stuff enough to link to it from HIS or HER site, then you will get a backlink indirectly from a living breathing human, who liked your content.  And when you have a chance to network with other living humans, it is a good thing.

Bookmark other people’s content, link to them, leave them comments and shouts, and they will remember you.

Step three: leave comments on blogs that relate to your content. Yes, you have heard this idea before, and it’s time consuming.  And you have heard that a lot of blogs insert the rel=”nofollow” into all links to keep from passing along any PR juice to your site.  But now, remember that you want to write content for humans. You want to network on social bookmarking sites with humans.  And you want to get traffic from humans.  So who cares if the link has “nofollow” attached to it?  Over the long haul you will find plenty of “dofollow” links.  Don’t discriminate, grab them all.

Still not convinced? Ok, well here is a trick to find other blogs that are HUNGRY for your comments, and DOFOLLOW.  Use the “Do Follow Diver” search box over at our friends’ site, and just type in your niche keywords.  It’s easy, it’s fun.  Why is it fun?  Because the blog owners you will find here actually respond, they are waiting for you, and they are happy to link back to your site.

Just be respectful and make sure your comments are relevant, not spammy.

If you bookmark one of YOUR blog articles and one of someone else’s each day, AND leave a comment with your link on ONE blog each day, your traffic will pick up.  Make it fun, and don’t do too much at once.  You will see results faster than you think.

Steps 4 and 5: Forums and Article Directories, coming in the next entry.

Time for me to make some pasta.  See you soon.

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Have you ever wondered just how Google got to be a PageRank 10 site?

Just kidding, it’s pretty obvious.

But seriously, how do I make the jump from a PR3 to a PR4?  I have been sitting at PR3, not moving up or down, for what seems like forever.  Really it’s only been a couple of months, but we Americans are SO impatient, aren’t we? If I was cool I would have said Yanks, not Americans, but let’s get to the point:

BACKLINKS ARE THE NEW BLACK!

So it’s not a new trend, but the importance of it is huge.  You can’t compete unless you make link building an active  part of your seo Dance Moves repertoire.

Inbound links and backlinks are the same thing, if you weren’t sure.  It’s okay to ask questions, this blog is not aimed at the experts.  The experts don’t need seo blogs.

So although the practice of getting backlinks to increase your PageRank is not new, the importance of it is SO GREAT that it still merits being called the new black.

I would venture to say that IF your domain is young, and IF you do not have the luxury of having your primary keyword phrase in your domain, the fastest and best way to build your authority is by getting other sites to link to you.

Think of it this way: all other factors being equal, if two web pages are equal in terms of keyword density and onsite optimization, then the best tiebreaker is in OFFSITE optimization.

So although it can be tedious, although it is probably going to be your least favorite aspect of seo, it is still one of the smartest things to focus on.

The next article will be a list of creative ways to get those inbound links from high PR sites, and we aren’t going to send out a single desparate email to any webmaster, begging for a repicrocal link exchange!

I will make link building fun, if it kills me!

Comments are welcome, it’s getting lonely in this elevator shaft.

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First of all, SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page.  The ideal spot is number one.  Google puts ten sites on each page, so in order to get listed on the first SERP for a given keyword, you must be in the top ten sites ranked for that keyword.  Here are, basically, the most important things to focus on:

1. Domain age. A 5 year old domain has an advantage over a domain name that you bought last week. It already carries some authority. But it’s not a HUGE deal. There are often sites in the top ten (coveted spot) that are new. They optimized well in other areas, obviously.
2. Keywords in domain name. This helps a great deal. For example, if my main keyword phrase is “pound dog rescue“, then the ideal domain name is pounddogrescue.com, with no hyphens.  Don’t waste your money on a .info domain.  Only buy the .org, .net, .us, .me names if 1) the .com version is not available, and 2) it makes sense for your site (as in, don’t get a .org if you are not an organization–it just doesn’t look good).
3. Keywords used in other strategic spots.  If you are using Firefox, go to your site and hit CTRL+U.  This will bring up your source code for the site.  You should notice <title> tags, <h1> and <h2> tags, <img> tags, <meta> tags, and each of these is a good spot to use your keyword phrase.  Don’t just use your primary keyword phrase, but switch things up every now and then, without being spammy.  For example, in the <img> tag, include some alt text, with the word “logo” or “graphic” at the end.  The reason for alt text is to tell someone who can’t see the picture, what it is a picture of!  This comes in handy for text-only browsers, as well as broken images (the text will appear if the image doesn’t load).  So use alt text to your advantage, but remember to create your site to be useful for people, don’t just stuff keywords everywhere tastelessly.
4. Inbound links.  Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of seo; link building campaigns can be costly and time consuming.  But the more inbound links you have (in other words, other websites who are linking TO your page), the better.  Again, this is not going to be the sole determining factor, as sometimes the number one site has less inbound links than the other top ten sites for your keyword, but it is still a HUGE help, when other sites link to yours.  It helps build your authority, in your chosen niche.
5. Relevant link TEXT. Just because you’ve got inbound links, doesn’t mean your work is done.  You need to make sure the anchor tags linking to you are also using your keywords.  Don’t use the same link text for every inbound link.  Use a variety, and again, don’t get spammy.  The fewer words, the more weight each word will carry.

Each of these points can be analyzed further.  This is meant as a rough starting point to open up questions and discussion.  For example, meta tags for description and keywords (SEE #3 above) have really become less important in Google’s eyes, but they are still used by many other search engines to determine how to rank your pages.  Or we could start an entire discussion on whether or not to waste your time with reciprocal linking.  My opinion: if you truly find a site to be valuable, then link to it.  If not, then don’t.   As long as your content is strong, you won’t have to beg people for links, they will link to you naturally.

What are YOUR thoughts?

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I’ve chosen some keywords–Now what?

You need to add those keywords to the site’s copy (the written text content) as much as you can, without going overboard, at a keyword density of about 4-5% (a good rule of thumb is to use your keywords once every paragraph or two, so you don’t get flagged for spamming).  This is why your Articles section needs to be developed further: articles on the topic that will be seen as valuable, unique content, informative to your reader, and not just a bunch of fluff.  Even if (especially if) you are selling something in an e-Commerce store, you will want to provide as much valuable content as you can on the topic of your site, as a way to improve your Page Rank.

In addition to using your keywords on the actual page, you will also want to give each page its own meta tags for keywords and for the description.  To do this, insert the following somewhere between the and tags in the html source:

(Note:  The above example says up to 80 characters for the title, but it’s probably a better idea to cap it at 60.  Google has been said to only read the first 58 characters)

There have been changes in the way each search engine treats the meta tags in terms of how much weight they will carry, but it is always good to include them.  For example, Google doesn’t pay much attention anymore to the keywords in the meta tags due to certain sites abusing this technique, but there are other search engines that will still use them in determining how to rank your site.  Interestingly, the fewer keywords you include, the more weight each one will carry.  A good title, description, and relevant keywords are necessary for each page in your site, so make sure you give each page unique meta tags!
Even after doing all of the above, there is never any guarantee that you will be able to reach the first page of the SERP’s for your chosen keyword phrases, because competition is fierce; also, once you are on the first page, there is no guarantee that you will stay there, because Google is always changing their algorithms and your position will change according to their whim.

There are companies that charge anywhere from $50 a month to $2000 a month just for search engine optimization services, and although I am going to soon offer seo services, it is not yet cost effective for me to do this on a large scale. However,  I do all my web design work with seo in mind from the start, making a list of your keywords and building your site from an seo perspective using alt tags, meta tags, link titles, and keywords in the articles and other content items… However, link-building, manual directory submission, article writing, PPC campaigns, and other traffic building techniques are very time-consuming and must be looked at as a long-term campaign in order to be effective.  If you want me to refer you to some affordable seo professionals, just shoot me an email and I will get you in touch with some friends in the industry.

What about sitemaps and tracking?

One last thing that I will mention in this article: we will need to add a sitemap, using a sitemap generator, and add it to your Google Webmaster Tools profile, and also set up Google Analytics or some other traffic-monitoring script (we have also used StatCounter a lot in the past, but Google Analytics is what most clients prefer).  If you don’t have a Google Webmaster Tools account, go get one–it’s free and very valuable.  Once you are set up, go to the dashboard, add your site, verify that you are the owner (either by placing the special meta tag in your header of the index file or by placing the special html file in the root folder on your web server. Then go to this site and create a free sitemap (up to 500 URLs) and save it in the root folder (this is probably public_html, but it may differ depending on who your web host is).  Next, go back to your GWT dashboard and add the sitemap to the site by typing in the exact url (for example, mine is http://webovator.com/sitemap.xml  — you don’t have to type in the public_html here!)

Voila! You now have a sitemap added to your site profile in GWT, and the Googlebot will be crawling you soon!
Now to keep track of your traffic, use Google Analytics. Notice this will NOT increase your PR or your SERP positioning, at all. What it WILL do, is allow you to see where your visitors are coming from, so that you can fine-tune your keywords, once you are already indexed. All you have to do is just copy the javascript snippet provided and paste it into the bottom of your source code on each page that you want to monitor (or if you are using a CMS, it can be inserted via php include…but that’s a whole other show)…so until next time, good luck with your projects, and hit me up if you need any help or have any questions that I might be able to address, possibly in a future article.

What To Do Next:

• Keep track of the Search Queries people are using to find you.
• Sprinkle those search queries throughout your copy and in the meta tags
• Use those exact keywords as a query in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and find out which of your competitors are in the top spot for those searches.
• Go to your competitors’ Web sites and view their source code; what do they have in their meta tags?  How many times do they use those keywords per page?
• Take what you can from competitors and try to improve upon it.  Add better content, and each time you add new content, create and submit a new sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
• Rinse and Repeat.

For more ideas on how to pass up your competitors in the Search Engine Results Pages, check out the next article, called seo Spy Tactics.

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