This is part two of our official, authorized, and approved SEO Tutorial. Hopefully, you've already read part one -- The SEO Tutorial: Introduction -- and thus, you now know two things:
- Although good SEO can bring you traffic, it is far from a set of magic tricks to get you on the first page of Google.
- It is important for you to know who your potential audience is, and from that, formulate the important keywords and phrases you want to aim your SEO towards.
1. Your website name/title/subtitle should be concrete, focused, and branded.
The title of your website is important for two primary reasons. First, search engines regard the title of your website (i.e. the words that show up in your browsers title bar as you surf) as a strong indicator of what that site/page is about. In fact, when you search for any keyword at Google, if that keyword is in the title of a returned result, Google bolds it to make it stand out. Second, your website title is important because more often than not, this is the phrase that people will use to link to you (and as we'll discuss in part three of this series, linking is everything.) So what makes a good website title? Well, you want to have a unique name that people will remember, but at the same time, you want to utilize great keywords. And overall, the title should be clear, concrete, focused, and branded. Using this site as an example, let's look at some possible titles:
- Wake Up Later - Memorable name, but says nothing about what the site or the page is about.
- Freelance Blog and Passive Income - Nice phrase incorporating keywords we like, but too generic and unassociated with any branding. If this site title showed up in Google, I'd be thinking "lousy spam site."
- Wake Up Later: Freelance Blogging, Making Online Money, Passive Income Tips, and Free Flash for Freelancers - Way too long and spammy looking. It says "Look Google! I'm trying to stuff keywords into my title! I must be important!" Keep your main website title around 6-8 words.
- Wake Up Later: A Blog about Freelancing - Not bad. But we only got one focused keyword in there (freelancing) and furthermore, the gerund "freelancing" is weaker than it's root word "freelance." Also, it's the last word in the phrase -- we already had to use our first three words on branding, no need to waste three more.
- Wake Up Later: Freelance Blog + Passive Income - A solid title (and thus, why we've used it :-). It declares the memorable brand and gives two clear and focused keyword phrases. All in 7 words too.
As a side, your URLs can be very helpful in SEO as well, especially when the "searched for" phrases match words in your URL; at the same time though, you don't necessarily want spammy looking sites like "www.freelance-blog-income.com". But if you can get something in the middle, like GoFreelance.com or TheFreelanceAgenda.com, go for it.
2. Content should be focused. Content should be diverse. Content should be unique. Content should be informational.
Search engines are pretty smart. You're not going to trick them into giving you good rankings for "css design" if your website is primarily about freelancing or xml standards or Ruby on Rails. So as much as you can, focus on your website's primary area of expertise. Make the search engine think you are the authority on the topic at hand because you have so much information about it. At the same time, diversify you content so that it doesn't look like your site just recycles the same content over and over. Again, with this site as an example, almost every article relates to freelancing or online income. And yet, there are thousands of topics that can be spawned from these, even roaming in areas like SEO, AdSense, and Flash. Let the search engines know you have a primary focus and yet, have lots of content in multiple areas surrounding the primary ones. Also, this should go without saying, but make sure your content is unique and informational. As search engines get smarter, the quality of their results also increases. This means that if you're not writing unique content that is highly informational, you will be left behind. There was a time when lousy sites could manipulate their way to the top, but that day is nearly gone (especially when some engines like Mahalo are now handpicking their results).
3. Make it easy for the search engines.
The term SEO describes exactly what you are doing -- optimizing a site for the search engines. In essence, this means you are making the site as easy to "figure out" for the search engines as possible. So w that in mind, you really ought to:
- Use a sensible and descriptive internal link strategy - It might be nice to have your menu use some nifty rollovers or even be Flash-driven, but does this make it easier for search engines who at their basic levels like text and simple links? On this site, although the top menu is an image menu, the footer contains a text menu to all the same main pages. Furthermore, the links on the side are simple, descriptive, and ensure that all content on this site is two clicks away.
- Keep the site architecture clean - If you notice the URL of all the postings here, you'll see that the URL filenames that is descriptive and related to the post and its keywords. Furthermore, all the postings are in categories that are their own directories. Take for example the URL from a post last month: http://www.wakeuplater.com/freelance-resources/terms-and-conditions-for-freelancing.aspx . Without even seeing the actual page, the URL describes exactly what the page is all about. (Note that creating an architecture like this for a dynamic site requires knowledge of URL rewriting so you might have to do some homework. Also, avoid going more than three levels deep in your directory structure.)
- Keep the source code clean - Unfortunately, since so many people use Dreamweaver, they have little control over the actual source code. But if you hand code or if you feel comfortable with the source code in a program like Dreamweaver, then you can (a) cut out extraneous code, and (b) make sure your source code is CSS-driven and full of content (and not javascript code)
- Fill in the blanks - Sure, meta-tags aren't what they used to be, but you should still have a somewhat unique Title tag, Description tag, and Keywords tag for every page.
- Leave no dead ends - Make sure all pages are accessible and that there are no dead links on your site. Nothing says "I don't really care about my site quality" like a number of dead links. And yes, there are programs out there that will find any dead links and make this step easier for you (we will examine such helpful programs in part four).
4. Do the little things.
There is no shortage of "must-do" SEO checklists on the web. In fact, if you're willing to pay five grand for a SEO consultant, you will certainly receive a checklist with directives and suggestions for your site. Many of these are covered in the previous three points, but there are many other things probably worth doing. Most of these are rather easy to implement, so you might as well do them:
- Use H1, H2, and H3 tags for your page titles and when proper, bold important points that use important keywords.
- Use ALT tags on all your images.
- Use CSS positioning to get primary content near the top of your source code and take out extraneous line breaks in your code.
- Keep your javascript and css in external files.
- Avoid URLs with querystrings. Use URL rewriting if possible.
- Avoid duplicate content.
- Use older established domains (practically speaking, register your domain earlier than later.)
- Avoid linking to low quality or spammy sites
- Avoid overuse of keywords. Use natural writing with a mind towards your keywords, not artificial keyword stuffing.
Hopefully, you can implement many of these things rather easily. You're now ready for part three -- the most vital part of SEO and one that has been the cause of many headaches and conflicts, successes and wealth. Part three, of course, is Link Building.
Community Comments
