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We're often asked by friends for a basic introduction to SEO in
order for them to gain more search engine hits for their personal
or small business sites. In this short article we'll try and explain
the basics which should help attract hits from all of the major
engines (Google,
Yahoo!, MSN,
etc.).
This topic is constantly changing, with the search engines
constantly tweaking their algorithms to provide the sites/pages
they believe the user most want to see. However, hopefully you'll
find this basic guide useful - but if you're embarking on a major
project then consider taking professional advice
There are three importants factors:
- Page Content
- Inbound Links
- Monitoring
Page Content
The most important factor is having pages
which are search engine friendly. So try to avoid errors in
your HTML and try and keep your pages from growing too large.
Obviously you'll be out to capture hits for certain key words
and phrases - write these down, you'll be needing them soon.
Page Title
The title of the page should be relatively short and accuratley
describe the page content. If possible try and include some
keywords. For example:
<title>Wilson's Tackle - Quality Fishing Equipment</title>
Metatags
Although their importance appears to be much less than it
used to be, these should still be completed on each page.
Ideally these should be targetted to the specific page, although
this may be difficult on large sites.
<meta name="description" content="Purveyors
of quality fishing equipment at great prices">
<meta name="keywords" content="fishing
equipment, angling, rods, tackle, hooks">
Body Content
Within the body of your page, try and use many of your key
words as phrases. Although it's then tempting to stuff your
content with these phrases, remember it's important that the
piece should still read naturally. Within your text you may
wish to break it up with headers and sub-headers. For theser
the <h1>, <h2>, <h3> style tages should
be used - the first only once, at the top of the page. It's
important to use key words here as some engines place greated
emphasis on these titles.
Inbound Links
The existance of links from other websites to your own is
essential for gaining more traffic. At the obvious level,
users visiting the other site may well follow the link to
your site. However, often their greatest benefit is how they're
interpreted by the search engines - It's how the engine's
robot programs find your site in the first place and also
considered an endorsement of your site by the other site.
Checking for Inbound Links
You can often query the search engines for what they consider
to be the more important pages linking to your page. The syntax
for this depends on the search engine, but the following works
for the majority:
link:http://www.bbc.co.uk
Aquiring Links
The most successful method of gaining links, is to write excellent
content which other web-writers will consider an authority
piece and link to you as such. From an optimisation perspective,
this is great because it's free, doesn't necessitate you creating
reciprocal links and tends to attract links from similarly
themed pages. If you're finding this article useful, then
feel free to link to it by including the following HTML in
one of your pages....
<a href="http://www.kilrymont.com/seo-introduction.html">SEO
Introduction</a>
If you're struggling to attract such natural links, then
the following are generally acceptable methods of gaining
more.
Apply to have your site listed in appropriate directiories,
e.g. www.dmoz.org
Consider advertising on a popular on topic site. Be careful
here though, as sites which blatently sell links for SEO
purposes are often penalised by the engines
Contact other websites with similarly themed sites and
ask for a reciprocal link
Although it's tempting to gain as many links as possible,
there are some links which may actually harm your rankings.
The most common 'bad link' are from link farms which efectively
spam the engines with low-value links - the engines often
hit-back by penalising sites which take part in such schemes.
Monitoring
Finally, although you may be aware of increased traffic to your
site through an increasing hit count, it's important to monitor
exactly what sort of traffic you're attracting. The ability to tell
where these hits are coming from and terms they're using in search
engines is often particularly valuable - allowing you to see how
changing site factors has influenced your traffic.
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