Basic SEO Tutorial
SEO Tutorial 1: SEO Strategy
SEO Tutorial 2: SEO Tips
In this SEO tutorial we have talked about keywords and the basic structure of your web site and how it can be optimized for search engines. Below are some more SEO tips and tools you could use to make sure you can move to the next step, submitting it to search engines and getting backlinks. These tools help you by analyzing your site and giving you feedback on any errors found with additional SEO tips.
- The Delorie Lynx Viewer shows you the text, which the search engines will see when they look at your site, this is called crawling. This is a good tool to check the content of your page to make sure it has all relevant information and keywords.
- The Delorie Lynx Viewer
- Aboutus.org is a simple SEO analysis site which gives you some good SEO feedback on any potential errors.
- Aboutus.org
- The Reaction Engine is a free tool to analyze the SEO performance of your site for any given key-phrase. It gives you some useful information, recommendations, and SEO tips on how you can improve your site.
- The Reaction Engine
- SEO Workers offer a free SEO tool that can provide you with good SEO tips by doing a comprehensive analysis of your website.
- SEO Workers
- Pear Analytics offers a free and simple SEO analysis tool which gives you useful information and SEO tips. They rate the difficulty level on fixing the SEO errors too.
- Pear Analytics
- Webconfs.com offers many great SEO tools and webmaster utilities, such as a backlink checker, keyword suggestions, and a keyword density checker.
- Webconfs.com
Some additional steps that need to be done for the search engines are creating or editing certain files. These files can be found in the root directory of your web server.
Files
- sitemap.xml file
- robots.txt file
- favicon.ico file
- .htaccess file
Sitemap.xml
It’s important to have a site map for your website, both a XML version and a static version. The static HTML version should contain links to every page on your site.
Robots.txt
It’s very important search engines spiders find your robots.txt file, it tells the search engine spiders what pages you want crawled and what pages you do not want crawled. It also can deny access to certain folders, files, or images on your site from being crawled by the spiders.
- Webmaster Tools: Robots.txt Generator
- Summary of creating a robots.txt file
- Comprehensive robots.txt file resource
Favicon.ico
A favicon.ico is not a crucial file for SEO but it will increase the CTR or click thru rate. This file is typically a 16 x 16 pixel image file which can be created with Photoshop or an online generator. The use of a favicon.ico file will also give you a better Google page-speed score.
You must link the icon inside the <head> tag of every page on your site.
Example:
<head> <title>Rhode Island Web Design | Freelance Developer // Pete's Web Portfolio - </title> <meta name="description" content="RI web designer and web developer, Peter can make a custom, professional website for you." /> <meta name="keywords" content="designer web design, RI web designer, Rhode Island web design, web developer, web development, web design, Providence, website designing, web designer developer, website developer, professional web design" /> <link href="/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" /> </head>
.htaccess
You can use this file to make sure you do not have two different versions of your website such as example.com and www.example.com. This is also called a 301 redirect error. This could cause your website to be penalized by search engines. You can access this file on your web server via any FTP program. Insert the following code and replace example with your domain name. Also make sure Rewrite engine is on.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
Submitting your site to search engines
You can use the tools listed at the top of the article to check your site for any errors again before submitting it. You may also way want to create a Google Analytics account if you do not already have one. Main search engines to submit your site to are Google, Bing / Yahoo, Dmoz, Ask, and Alexa. In addition to submitting your site to search engines it is also important to create as many links to your site as possible from other sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and other online sources.
To submit your website to Google you need a webmaster account. Then you can use the Google webmaster tools. Once you login you can submit your sitemap.xml file and URLs. To submit your sitemap go to Optimization, sitemaps. To submit URLs go to Health, Fetch as Google.
Bing
To submit your site to Bing, which also submits it to yahoo, create a windows live account if you do not have one, and use the Bing webmaster tools. Once you login you can submit your sitemap.xml file and URLs. To submit your sitemap go to configure my site, sitemaps. To submit URLs go to configure my site, Submit URLs.
DMOZ: The Open Directory Project
To submit your site to DMOZ, read this.
Alexa
Alexa is not a search engine but it is good to use, it is much like Google Webmaster tools, it keeps track of site rank, keywords, and Traffic.
Backlinks
The last and final step to get to the top of Google search is to have as many links as possible to your web page, from other web sites, online directories, forums, or blogs. The more links you have to your site the more times Google will crawl and index it. Also, make sure these links to you site are from a credible web sites with a high page rating or PR. PR is a number from 0 to 10, the higher the better because Google knows it is from a credible source.
Page Rank Tools
SEO requires some work because researching keywords and write good page content takes time. Hopefully these SEO tips give you a good understanding of the SEO process and will help getting you to the top of the search engines.
