Basic SEO Tutorial
SEO Tutorial 1: SEO Strategy
SEO Tutorial 2: SEO Tips
This SEO tutorial, or Search engine optimization tutorial, is about how to get high search engine rank. The better your web page ranks in the search engines, the more traffic you will get to your website. Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google, and getting good placement in the SERP or Search Engine Result Pages is the key. If you follow these simple instructions you will be well on your way to the top.
Keyword Research
The heart of SEO is using the right the keywords to optimize your web page. Some things to look for during keyword research is medium or low competition, searches between 2000-50000, a low-medium to low-high CPC or Cost per click, and the total number of sites Google finds with the keyword you are researching. There is a formula you can use to find keyword effectiveness, called the KEI (Keyword effectiveness index). The higher KEI, the better the keyword is.
KEI = Searches / Total number of Sites
Tools for Keyword Research
The Title Tag
The most important factor in SEO is the title tag, it summarizes the content of the page and it should match what someone is searching for. It should not be a sentence but a series of keywords, words that indicate what is on the page and what will be searched.
- Should be 60 characters max
- Should be 3 to 5 keyword phrases
- Use dividers, such as the pipe “|” to separate phrases
- Each page must be unique
- Avoid using any Stop words
- Most important keywords should go first
Example:
<title>RI Computer Repair | Web Design Services // Shimmer Technologies</title>
Meta Description Tag
The second factor is the meta description tag, the description search engines use to describe your web page. A good description clearly describes the purpose of the page; it can increase the CTR or click thru rate. Make sure you use your keyword in the meta description twice for better SEO results. Also be sure you have complete sentences, meta descriptions are made for humans not search engines.
- Should be a max of 30 words in length
- Should be no more than 149 characters
- Most important information should go first
- Use your keyword twice in the description
Example:
<meta name="description" content="If you need affordable RI computer repair services call Shimmer Technologies. RI computer repair and web design services for you." />
Meta Keyword Tag
The third factor is meta keywords, the meta keywords provide additional text for crawler-based search engines (we will get into this later). None of the major crawler-based search engines provide support for this tag, so don’t go crazy over keywords.
- Should 5 to 10 keywords or phrases
- Should be separated by “, “
- keywords should be found in page content too
- most important keywords should be first
Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="RI computer repair, affordable computer services, web design services RI, Rhode Island computer services, laptop repair, virus removal services" />
Heading Tags
The fourth factor are the heading tags, each page of your site should have only one <h1> tag the search engine will examine when crawling your site. The heading structure of a web site tells the search engines which content on your site is most important, this is very important for SEO.
- H1: post / page title
- H2’s and H3’s: subheadings and sub-subheadings
- H4: your blog’s name, and possibly related widgets
- H5: same as above: sidebars etc.
Page Content
The fifth factor is page content; each page of your site should have at least 300 words of descriptive content. The keywords in the meta keyword tag should occur most frequently on your page.
- The words in the first <p> tag of your page are very important for search engines
- The words in the <h2> and <h3> tags, and the rest of the words on the page
- The anchor words in your <a> tags
- The last words in the footer are very important too
Image ALT attribute
The sixth factor is the alt attribute for images. If you have a large number of images on your web site this is very important
Navigation
The last factor is proper navigation so search engine spiders (we will get into this later) can find every page on your site. This is critical for proper indexing. You should also include a HTML sitemap with links to every page on your website.
Part 2 of this SEO Tutorial will be all about the search engines.