Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide For Beginners
I know, I know, "Oh, god, not another one!" is probably what you’re thinking. I can’t blame you though, there are literally hundreds of thousands of websites and articles about SEO and SEM out there, why would this one be any different?
To be honest, I can’t really answer that question, but I can give some incite into what I personally have experienced when it comes to developing websites. SEO is something any developer should be thinking about before they even make a website, your client shouldn’t even have to ask you to do this. Eventually, you’ll fall into a habit of thinking in terms of SEO, and it won’t be such a daunting task.
What exactly is SEO anyways? I guess for most people it would be fiddling around with the meta tags and then submitting your website to as many search engines and directories as possible. And in a way, they would be right, because that’s how things used to work. But now we have all these fancy algorithms and rules that force us to reconsider how we optimize a website.
Where Do I Start?
Surprisingly, the first step towards successful SEO is quite simple, and something that I shouldn’t have to tell anyone. You must produce valid code, whether that be HTML, XHTML, XML, or CSS. This is not only important from a usability standpoint, but it’s the search engines that have to sift through your code, and they are, after all, the major focus of SEO.
The second step is an extension of producing valid code. You need to use XHTML markup as it was intended. You can start by always including the structural XHTML elements, which include the following tags:
<html><head><title><body>
Not only does this apply to structural XHTML elements, but it applies to CSS as well. Let’s look at a very basic structure for a moment:
<div id="wrap">
<div id="header">
<div id="logo"></div>
</div>
<div id="navbar">
<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
<li>Item 3</li>
<li>Item 4</li>
<li>Item 5</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="content">
<h1>Title</h1>
<p> ... </p>
<h2>Sub-Heading</h2>
<p> ... </p>
</div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</div>
A lot of people who are new to CSS have trouble thinking like this. They like to label and position everything, thinking in terms of a table and table cells, or rather, a layout, and not in terms of structure. Think of the CSS Zen Garden. Every single design in there uses the exact same structure. When it all boils down, this is how a search engine is looking at your website.
Keyword Research
Once you come up with the structure for your website, and you know that everything is validating as it should be, you need to start thinking about the content. Well, I guess you would have already thought about the content or you wouldn’t be making this site! But you know what I mean. I think the best way to explain this would be to give you a little "case study" of sorts:
Let’s say I have a website, and I want to write an article on dog grooming. The first thing I should do is head to one of the three major search engines and type in dog grooming. Start looking at the titles of the results that come up. Here are some common terms I see coming up:
- dog
- groomer
- grooming
- guide
- resource
- tips
Alright, now keep those terms in the back of your mind, or better yet, jot them down! Now we’re going to do a little more "professional" research. Let’s head over to either Google’s keyword generator or Overture’s keyword selector. We’re going to perform the same search we did in the actual search engine and look for dog grooming. Here are the top ten results that came up:
- dog grooming los angeles
- dog dummy grooming pet
- dog grooming supply
- book breed dog grooming guide
- dog grooming school
- beginner breed dog grooming
- dog grooming chicago
- mobile dog grooming
- the all breed dog grooming guide
- all breed dog grooming
Judging by the results, we can get a feel as to what people are looking for. I see two trends on what people are looking for:
- Dog grooming places for specific locations.
- Dog grooming guides for beginners.
And those trends should make sense once you consider the first search we did, where the majority of the results that came up were guides and resources for beginners. You might have noticed another trend though, people were looking for general grooming tips for all breeds. Of course, if you had a website completely devoted to dog grooming, I’m sure you would want tips for specific breeds, but this information is very useful.
Ok, so now we have all of this information, but what do we do with it? We’re going to use those keywords and keyphrases throughout our document, both the structural elements and the actual content of the page. I’ll continue to use the "case study" example, and let’s say this is for DogGrooming.com. Our page is going to look something like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>A Beginner's Guide: Dog Grooming Tips</title>
<meta name="keywords"
content="dog grooming,beginner dog grooming,dog grooming guide" />
<meta name="description"
content="A beginner's guide full of dog grooming tips for all breeds of dogs." />
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
<h1>A Beginner's Guide: Dog Grooming Tips</h1>
<p></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
I should note, I don’t indent and format my XHTML like this, it’s done for the sake of this article and because of the width restrictions. I only start indenting when I get to tags between the <body> tags. Regardless, you’re looking at a very basic page right now. The title of the page matches the title of the article, and we used the keyword phrases in the meta tags. I’m not going to write actual content for the article, but those keywords and phrases we researched should be peppered throughout the article. We’ll talk more about the content in the next section.
Content Is King
Words to live by right there. People come to your website for one reason, and one reason only: content. As a designer, it’s sometimes hard to grasp this concept because we appreciate the value of a well-designed website, and sometimes put so much emphasis on this that we miss the mark on content. Granted, design is very important, but content is, and always will be, king.
There are certain things you should keep in mind when writing your content, and I’m not talking about the quality of the content, but what kind of markup you use. You need to use the keywords and keyphrases throughout your markup, so let’s talk about some of the basic tags that should be utilized.
Visually Appealing Markup
This kind of markup is very important, both for your visitors and for search engines. Visually appealing markup would include the following tags, listed in the order of the amount of weight given to terms in these tags by search engines:
<h1> ... <h6><strong>, <b><em>, <i>
Make sure you highlight your major keyword or phrase in two out of the three tags above. Search engines put more weight into these words, especially the heading tags.
The second place where you should have keywords would be what we will call hidden markup, or markup that your visitors would not see unless they were viewing your source code. This would include the following attributes of <img> and <a> tags:
titlealt
These would be the attributes that, when a visitor places their mouse over a link or image, a tooltip pops up showing more information. Here’s an example for both elements:
<img src="/img/grooming/brush.jpg" alt="Dog Grooming Brush" />
<a href="/a-beginners-guide-dog-grooming-tips/"
title="A Beginner's Guide: Dog Grooming Tips">dog grooming guide</a>
You can see that our keywords are not only in the title and alt attributes, but in the href and src attributes as well. Also, the actual text for the link uses our keywords, and it is different than the title attribute. Not highly important, but something I would like to point out. We’ll talk more about using keywords in your URLs later, since that is a topic that deals with forward-thinking and organization.
Since we’re on the topic of URLs, just a quick tip: whenever you have an external link, or a link that goes to website other than your own, make sure you apply the rel attribute, and depending on what DOCTYPE you are using, the target attribute as well. Here is an example:
<a href="http://www.google.com"
title="Google.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google</a>
The rel="nofollow" indicates that the external link should not be given any additional weight or ranking by search engine robots. However, if you fully endorse an external link, then by all means leave out this attribute.
Make Friends With Search Engines
The last part of this guide is going to deal with things you should avoid doing when it comes to SEO. This is going to apply both to your markup and how you design a website.
Avoid Splash Pages!
Splash pages are dead. They died a long time ago. Do not, I repeat, do not use splash pages. A splash page is like a teaser to your actual website. They’re usually a large image or Flash animation. Splash pages scream to your visitors, "Hey, I’m a complete fucking moron, here’s 30 seconds of your life you’ll never get back."
The real problem with splash pages—besides making you wait or forcing you to click a link to get to where you actually wanted to go in the first place—is that they lack keyword- or keyphrase-rich content. This is the first page a search engine robot sees! Use this to your advantage, and don’t blow it on a silly, outdated splash page.
Reference CSS & JavaScript Externally
Your visitors don’t see this, but search engines sure as hell do. Your best bet is to externally reference CSS or JavaScript in a separate file, but if you don’t feel like doing that, you can always comment out the actual code like so:
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
...
//-->
</script>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
...
-->
</style>
Don’t Trick The Search Engine Robots!
Don’t try to trick the search engine robots by putting keywords and keyphrases in hidden layers, or overloading your alt and title attributes with keywords. The same goes for your <meta> tags as well. The robots are pretty smart, they’ve learned, and continue to do so, most of the tricks out there.
When a robot goes to your page, they look at everything. They see nothing but text, and after they have all your content, they basically put it in to a tag cloud. Keywords found in elements that are given more weight, like <h1> tags, are also factored in to the equation. After they figure out all of that, they then do density and relevancy tests to see how the rest of your content relates to these major, weighted keywords and keyphrases. There’s more to it, but that’s the general jist of things.
Use Text Instead Of Graphics
What this means is, don’t make the title of your articles and your navigation elements images. Instead, use text. Search engines can’t see images. Not only that, it’s easier for text-based browsers, people with disabilities, and those still on slower connections, to access your site. Images are perfectly fine to use, don’t get me wrong, but if you can style an article title by putting it in an <h1> tag and giving it a background image by using CSS, then do this instead.
Create A Sitemap For Search Engines (And Visitors)
I use multiple sitemaps on my websites, and though I’m not linking to the one for visitors at the time of writing this article, it’s something you should always do. Here are the four sitemaps I use for this website:
Why so many sitemaps? Well the HTML one is obvious, that one is for actual visitors. You can use an XML or RSS sitemap for your visitors too, assuming you apply a stylesheet to it so it’s readable. The XML sitemap is used for Google’s sitemap tool for webmasters. The RSS sitemap is used for Yahoo! Site Explorer, which is a new service that Yahoo! put out for webmasters that’s similar to the one Google offers. The text-based one used to be used by Yahoo! until their new service came about, but I still make one anyways. You can also submit an XML or RSS feed to Microsoft’s search engines, and there are plenty of other social websites that allow you to submit feeds too.
And here’s a great time-saver, so you don’t actually have to create a sitemap. Download phpSitemapNG and install it on your website. It will create all of the sitemaps I listed above, and it saves your settings so you can exclude certain files. A very valuable tool.
Create A Robots File
Creating a robots.txt file or use the robots <meta> tag to include or exclude directories and/or files. I’m not going to dive into this subject, but if you want to know more about this feature, check out this robots website.
Avoid Dynamic URLs
Dynamic URLs were a fad a couple years back. And I admit, I fell victim to doing this. It was almost as if we wanted to show everyone that we were using a programming language to create dynamic content. Not only are dynamic URLs ugly, but they’re hard to remember and search engines typically avoid them. Besides, it’s just one more place where you can utilize keywords.
This isn’t a topic that I’m going to get into in this article, since it is such a detailed topic that it requires its own article, but I will definately talk about this in the near future. What I will do is go over some basic examples.
One thing you need to consider when developing a website is organization. Let’s talk about our dog grooming website for a moment, and let’s say we have three different dog grooming guides: beginner, intermediate, and advance. If I were to break this down, I would want the URLs to look something like this:
/guides/grooming/a-beginners-guide-dog-grooming-tips/
/guides/grooming/an-intermediate-guide-dog-grooming-tips/
/guides/grooming/an-advanced-guide-dog-grooming-tips/
Well, I probably wouldn’t do it exactly like that, but you can see where I’m going with this. Plenty of sites are doing this now, and if you don’t know how to do this, you better start learning. Sites like this are usually database-driven, meaning they’re dynamic, and they’re using mod_rewrite to output the URL in a pretty fashion. Like I said though, more on that later, and I’ll be updating this article to reflect the new one when it’s ready.
Don’t Be A SEO Tweaker
You know those informercials put out by Ron Popeil, where he uses that famous catchphrase, "Set it, and forget it!"? The same theory applies here. You’ll never know what works if you are constantly playing around with your content and markup. SEO isn’t an overnight thing, it takes time, patience, and lots of data analysis. In future SEO articles, we will talk more about using analytics programs to monitor your website, and how to figure out what you need to change, but for now, just stick with the basics of this article and you’ll be on the right path.
Hopefully you can use this information to help you start optimizing future websites. If you do this when you create a website, you’ll find that the majority of the work is done, and the only thing you need to focus on is analyzing the results. It’s much easier to start now than it is to go back over a website. Enjoy!
SEO Agency :Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical for top search engine rankings. Provide good content for your users and use ethical SEO strategies.
November 27th, 2006 at 02:55 pm
[…] Original post by Kyle and software by Elliott Back Filed under SEO by searchmb Permalink • Print • Email • Comment […]
December 8th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Sitebases, the next protocol after Sitemaps
It can save the time and press for the search engine, also for the websites.
It can bring new search engine that named Search Engin 2.0.
Using Sitebase protocol, will save 95% bandwidth above. It is anthother sample for long tail thery.
In this protoco…
December 11th, 2006 at 09:45 pm
Although obviously I applaud your take on accessible website design (”You must produce valid code”) there is no quantitative or qualitative prove valid code improves seo. It should be best practice, however.
December 12th, 2006 at 02:50 pm
I am looking for someone that can give me a hand with mod_rewrite for WordPress. Or any
tools or articles that someone may know of that can help me in SEOing my WordPress blog.
Please any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
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December 19th, 2006 at 03:57 pm
New adsense policy from Google. Worth a look
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December 19th, 2006 at 04:15 pm
I’ve heard both sides of the story when it comes to images next to your ads. Some people have them, have even asked Google about their site, and still continue to run them. Others have had the exact opposite happen.
It’s a very fine line, that’s for sure, and I think the key is staying somewhere on the line and placing images, that in context, can’t be associated with the ads. For example, I don’t think the images next to my ads imply a product.
January 10th, 2007 at 05:49 am
[…] Finally, remember that SEO is more art than science. For additional reading, if you are a fluent coder SEO Guide for Beginners may be helpful (but don’t be fooled, it’s really not that basic) and Optimizing Your Blog for Search Engines is an article that talks about Section 508 and 301 redirect and sitemaps which will keep you busy with more techy details. […]
January 25th, 2007 at 08:19 am
Good article, it is easy to understand, a basic list of seo practices and a good resource for seo beginners.
February 12th, 2007 at 06:46 pm
A good article but I think you could mention more specifically about the use of the meta-description SOLEY for human visitors.
April 18th, 2007 at 02:14 pm
Nice article. Remember Title is a key element for SEs. Then content - if it’s good for humans, it’s good for SEs as well. Do check your spelling - nothing is more off-putting than seeing stuff like when you mean (first paragraph of the article)
April 18th, 2007 at 02:15 pm
… like INCITE when you mean INSIGHT …
April 30th, 2007 at 05:28 pm
I honestly don’t think meta keywords/description have much, if any, impact on your rankings or SEO. The last couple of sites I’ve done, I leave this off completely now. Hasn’t hurt anything, just saved me work actually.
May 5th, 2007 at 04:05 am
Hi,
I have few keywords which i want those keywords to be in top positions in google.de, i have done directory submission ,article submission and quality link exchange as well but still my keywords are not in top positions in google.de so plz let me know new methods how to achieve this with in one month.
your views,suggestions,ideas are most welcome.
October 25th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
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November 10th, 2007 at 07:17 pm
I wanted to thank you for the time that you put into this guide. I have just been getting in to the working on search engine optimization and I have been running into some road blocks along the way. I have been trying to teach myself through trial and error. I know it is not the best way to learn something, but it was all I had for a time. Then I found your site and it was exactly what I was looking for. It was set up in a way that helped out me as a beginner just getting into SEO which is what I needed. It helped me learn some stuff that I should have known before I got any deeper into it than I was. I am working on getting all the way through your guide and make use of all that you have on here. Do you have any other guides that go deeper into it?
November 21st, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Well written in simple manner to be understandable by any beginner. thanks for sharing this article.
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