10 Basic SEO Techniques Every Webmaster Should Know
Now, it’s easier than ever to have websites up and running. You can just setup a blog at blogger.com for free. Or you can spend some $20 to buy a domain name, get a cheap web hosting and install free ready-made scripts like Wordpress, phpbb, oscommerce, joomla, etc. Some web hosting sites even made the script installations as easy as one-click-install.
Many aspiring webmasters create new sites without even knowing HTML, let alone search engine techniques. They get AdSense account and paste on AdSense code, waiting with high hope for the quick money to pour in. But day by day, the earning is really just enough to cover the hosting fee, or even less than that. So, they start to get frustated.
Most quit after some time. Some worse, they “fall into the dark side”, employing black hat techniques or hiring less-than-honorable search engine optimizer firms.
The rest stay on, determined to learn, and improve. Soon, they found out something about called search engine optimisation.
Here I will try to describe some basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in a simple, easy-to-understand way.
Optimizing a website for search engine means you design a website so that search engines (like Google, Yahoo, MSN) can easily find the pages and include them in the search result. Thus, it will increase the number of visitors coming to your site. Objective of search engine optimization is to have your pages displayed highest possible in the search engine result for your choice of search phrases.
These are 10 basic search engine optimization methods I think every webmaster ought to know. See if the tools you use to create your webpages (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc…) allow you to do these. If not, it is time to learn some basic HTML.
1) Page title
Title is important. Place important keywords on your page title, and try to have different one for each page. I’ve seen sites with same title for every pages. While it gives stronger branding for the site name, that’s something I can do without rather than sacrificing my sub-pages traffic.
Limit your page title to 80 characters the most. Shorter page title means higher importance on each word.
Tag:
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2) Keyword and description meta-tags
These two popular meta-tags used to be most useful search engine optimization techniques, until they are abused by the search engine spammers. Even then, they are still holding some importance today, specially the description meta-tags.
Meta description tag is used by some search engine in displaying the result page, and by other search engines to determine the relevance of your page.
Limit your page description to 200 characters the most. Put a descriptive, gramatically correct, meaningful sentence for best result.
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Some proclaim that keyword tag is dead. Apparently not so. Yahoo webmaster guidelines lists using keyword tag as a way to help improving search engine ranking.
Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.
Even then, if you have to make a choice between creating good keyword tag and developing useful content – our next point – , go with the latter. Limit the keyword to 300 characters.
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3) Body text
Next to a good title, this is the next most important on-page optimization you can do to bring more visitors to your website.
Most important thing you must remember here is this: you should write for your users first, search engine second. Write in natural, easy to understand language. The reason here is that if you write just for search engine, even if you can rank high up, the visitors will close your page as soon as they find out that your site contain just junks.
Besides, search engines now increasingly use some kind of artificial intelligence to analyze websites before indexing. You don’t want to caught off-handed using some useless texts.
First write some useful contents just as you would write offline magazine articles. Then, only after that, you can do some small tweaking to empasize certain parts, and make some changes to the word choices.
Generally, it is thought that keyword density plays some importance to seach engines. Keyword density refers to number of appearance of your keywords relative to overall page. No agreement on the optimum number though. Some believes the keywords should be around 3% compared to the overall page. Some believes the number should be higher, aroung 8-10%. Whatever it is, just try to include some of these keywords on your page, and make sure the page is still read well naturally. If it is not, take them out.
Then there are HTML tags you can use to emphasize importance of certain words. The most commons are bold, italics, and headers.
header 1
header 2
header 3
bold or strong
italics or emphasis
And, of course, you should use text instead of graphics or flash. Search engines can’t read what is written on your beautifully crafted picture. If you want them be indexed and found by search engines, use text.
If you must use some images, use your keywords on the file name, and always use the ALT tag.
Major search engines have developed some ability to read text in flash files, but to play it safe, avoid flash banners, buttons or page contents. Flash is great for embedded movies, not for any other use.
4) Regular content
SEO or not, this is important. Regularly updated content will draw visitors and search engine alike. But don’t put content just for the sake of it. Contents copied from other site, for instance, not only doesn’t help in search engine ranking, but can even get you penalized.
Write original, useful contents that make your visitors want to come back and recommend to their friends. You will get repeat visitors that way, regardless of search engine traffic. Good contents will also get link from other webmasters, and this will greatly help in your search engine ranking (read next point).
Blogs are very easy to set-up and is a good avenue to create new contents to your site. Major blogging software, like Wordpress, supports RSS by default. By using RSS reader software, your visitors can then choose to be to be notified about new contents on your site.
Creating contents regularly rather than pump in many articles at one go has many benefits. Firstly, your visitors know that everytime they go to your site, they will see new content instead of the same old ones. This will make them want to visit more often. Same thing to search engine crawlers. If everytime the crawler couldn’t find new content, it provides little incentive for them to come back regularly. Thus, your new pages will not get indexed as fast as you want it to be.
Additionally, if you pump in a lot of contents at once, the search engines may think that you are trying to spam. This can result in being penalized.
