I created this thread because I see a lot of people posting "I'm new to SEO what should I do". So here it is, I have put together the basics of SEO for SEO beginners. This should give you a good head-start for your SEO campaign. You should do a lot of additional research on Google or any other information source you have about what I am going to talk about. Remember that all this is basic information and if you wish to get deeper information, you will have to make some kind of research To start off your SEO campaign, you will need to have done a proper on-page optimization (look this up on Google for more information). This consists of : The <head> tag Title Tag: Include your main keywords for which you wish to be ranked for in the title tag. Don't spam your title tag, put 2 - 3 keywords or key phrases in it. Separate them with hyphens (-). Meta Keywords: Don't break your head with this one, I would tell you not to include them because they are useless. A lot of people won't agree with me because it is said that minor search engines still use them for rankings. But who cares about minor search engines, they represent 6% of all searches performed world wide. The other 94% do not use them at all. Meta Description: This tag has no ranking weight what so ever, however it shouldn't be ignored because it is the first description a user will get of your website. Keep it short and precise because Google only displays 160 characters. It is important to be appealing with your description tag because it could greatly increase you click through rate. Meta Robots: You should use this tag if you wish to give certain restrictions to the search engine such as not indexing your web page or not to follow any links on your web page. The URL Keyword Placement: Make sure that you place you keywords the closest possible to your domain name. Try getting rid of any subfolders that are useless. Remember that order has weight so the closer the keyword to the domain name the more weight it will have. URL Length: Try having a short URL. The shorter the URL the better. Search engines seem to work better with short and precise URLs then longer ones with letters and numbers all mixed up together. Word Separators: Separate all your keywords in your URL with hyphens (-). Search engines seem to like and understand hyphens much better than underscores or commas. Actually hyphens are known by search engines as word separators. The <body> tag Unique Content: Your body should always contain content that is unique. NEVER EVER copy another websites content. This is something called duplicate content and it is the worst thing you could do to your website. If a search engine realizes that your website contains duplicate content (which is very easily done nowadays) he will put your website in the banned list of the search engines database and you will never show up as SERPs anymore. Keyword Repetition: Repeating a few times your keywords throughout your page is very good. Remember, I said keyword repetition not keyword spamming. Don't over do it. Another thing is don't listen to this so called "keyword density" it doesn't exist anymore. Just stay as natural as possible. Use a variation of keywords or even a combination of keywords or key phrases in your content. <h1>,<h2>,<h3>: Use the <h1> tag only once per web page. Place it at the top of your web page and include your main keywords or key phrases in it. Since the <h1> tag has the most weight, you should use it only once per page and place it at the highest point possible in your web page. As for the <h2> tag it should be used for sub headers, and the <h3> for sub-sub headers. Anything lower than <h3> isn't worth using because it has no more weight. Images: Optimizing images is very simple. Save the image file name as keywords that can describe what is on the image. Add a title to your image also containing keywords. Add an alt tag to your image containing keywords that describe your image. Once your on-page optimization is done, you have completed about 20% of your SEO campaign. The biggest part now comes to Link Building. This represents 80% of your SEO campaign. This part you really need to make a thorough research because it is the most important part of SEO. A proper link building campaign is what could make you or break you! I can't give you all the information you need to know because it is way too long! I mean there is so much information to this section that I can't even remember all of it from the top of my head, I would have to sit down and think for a few hours. Before telling you how to create a good link building campaign, I will explain you the basics of link building. Again you must do a deeper research about what I am about to write. For link building, it is important to get a large amount of inbound links. Inbound links are links that are pointing to you. Tell yourself that every link you get pointing to you is like a vote in your favor so it logical that the most links your get pointing to you, the more votes you have in your favor. Now in a link you have a thing called an anchor text. This is the clickable part of the link. The anchor text should always be the keywords for which you wish to get high ranked. Having a properly optimized anchor text will tell the search engine that not only am I voting for this website, I am voting for him in this category. Link Building Social bookmarking: Create yourself an account with every social network you could think of. Yes Facebook is a good one also and is one of the most important. Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, and much more are great examples of other social networks that you should subscribe to. Once that is done give updates to your followers/friends about your company/business such as what new products you have to offer what new things will be brought to your company and so on. Press Releases: When launching a new product or new website, it is important to do a press releases because it will give it a very big web visibility. Usually, press release firms are associated with big online news companies such as Msn News, Yahoo News, and so on. In your press release you should include 2 - 3 links pointing to your website and those links should have properly optimized anchor texts. Article Submission: Submitting articles is very important because it will give you a name on the web and it will increase your inbound links quantity. Your article should always contain 2 - 3 links pointing to your website and even here you should properly optimize your anchor texts. Another good thing about article submission is that if your article is well written and attracts a lot of people, it could get picked up by other users and posted on their website. This will increase your total amount of links since it got posted on another website with those 2 - 3 inbound links. Blog Commenting: Commenting on blogs is important as well because it will also give you a name on the world wide web. Forums: Being active in forums is very important! Make sure to subscribe yourself to well known forums that have a big daily amount of traffic just like this one. Offer your help for free to anybody in need. This will also give you a name in that specific forum. Obviously cultivate yourself a bit before starting to help others. Another good thing of doing that is, if you look at my signature, it is a clickable link. So for everything I post, I get an inbound link for "Search Engine Optimization" and "Ask A SEO Question". It is important that you put a signature when you're allowed to in forums because they count as inbound links. This is all I could think of for now. If anything comes up in my head I will edit this post but like I told you earlier you will have to do some research because we can't answer all of your questions. We could and don't mind helping you out, but we can't do the whole work for you. It is your responsibility to do deep researches on the world of SEO. It is only by doing that that you will learn everything you need to know about SEO. I hope that I gave you a good head-start, if you have any other questions, feel free to ask.
There are two type of Optimization: On-page and Off-page. On-page is the editing and adding of meta tags to the site pages while Off-page is all about link building. In my opinion, on-page is the foundation of the site's seo then followed by off-page.
Blog Posting forum participate & posting directory submission. is also main strategy of link building
Domain name - Create a website URL by using simple and catchy keywords in your Domain name. For Example if you are planning to make a website about weight loss, try to use weight loss keyword in your website URL. This will help search engines to crawl your website fast.
Nice intro to SEO and basic steps to improve the site. I should mention that its important to optimize everything as best you can including content and making sure not to keyword saturate.
Very informative post.But here i want to say only that please avoid meta "keyword" tag from your list.Because it is no more suggested by search engines.Actually it gives the list of your main keywords,which can be easily search by your competitors.Any way choice is yours.
If you read carefully what I wrote about Meta Keywords, I specifically said not to include them because they are a waste of time. The truth about Meta Keywords is that 10 years ago, they were the main way to rank a website. People would just spam that tag and get ranked first for something that they weren't even promoting. SERPs started to be irrelevant to search queries. It was basically a race to who had written the keyword the most times. Eventually, this techniques caught the attention of search engines and today, it is completely useless for rankings. I personally do not include them anymore.
The Meta Robots tag is basically to give certain restrictions to the search engine. Let's say you wish your page to get indexed in the search engine database but you don't want to search engine to follow any links that are on the web page. You would do that in the Meta Robots tag. It would look a something like this: <html> <head> <title>...</title> <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW"> </head> By using the above tag, you are telling the search engine not to follow any links on your webpage but to index your webpage in its database. Here are a few other functions that the Meta Robots tag has: NoArchive: The search engine won't save your web page in its archive NoSnippet: The search engine won't take a snippet to match what he thinks is the best description of your webpage. He will display whatever has been written in the Meta Description tag. NoImageIndex: The search engine won't index any images on your webpage. NoIndex: The search engine won't index your webpage in its database NoFollow: The search engine won't follow any links on that webpage. There are a few other tags to the Meta Robots but these are the main ones and most frequently used ones. You could even specify which robot you wish not to index your webpage. Simply instead of writing "robots" in the meta name, write the name of the robot you wish to give restrictions to. For example, if you wish to block Google, write "googlebot". You could find the name of all the robots of all the different search engines on Google. *note: you do not need to specify to the search engine that you wish him to "follow" links on your webpage, "index" your webpage, "snippet" the best description for your webpage. The search engine does that by default.
that is a good guide, but facebook, twitter and those social networks, do not help to appear in google. due to nofollow label
Actually, Facebook and Twitter do help your rankings in search engine. They help you get better results in SERPs. It has been confirmed by Google and Bing that Twitter and Facebook influence your SEO rankings. You could read more about it here. Here is an article confirming that Facebook & Twitter influence your rankings. This article was written by Danny Sullivan (editor-in-chief of the website SearchEngineLand.com).
the best SEO tips which are the most important as i see is the keyword density adjustment and the proper backlinking with the proper keywords
I do not agree. Keyword density is pretty much diluted. Search engines don't calculate the keyword density anymore. It isn't because you repeated your keyword 10x instead of 30x that you will get a better ranking. The key is to repeat your keywords as many times needed in your content. As long as you remain natural and your content looks clean your good. Remember that your writing for people mainly, not search engines. A text that is stuffed with keywords is usually heavy and boring to read. Search engines are able to make the difference between a natural looking text that has a few keyword repetitions and variations from a text that is just stuffed with keywords and is keyword spamming. Search engines are a lot smarter than we think they are. As long as you keep that in mind and your content looks good and natural, you should be good. Keyword density used to be important but nowadays it's pretty much useless.
nice post keep posting , I will add:- Vaild CSS and HTML, Add contact details at bottom of page for quick Geo SEO.
Thanks for the great advice. Would you recommend doing these techniques for a month or so and then stopping or continuing for a long time?
For the link building part, never stop creating links. You should always keep on creating inbound links to your website because remember that you are not the only one fighting for that keyword. As for the on-page optimization, it is a one-time thing, unless the search trend changes. You should always keep yourself updated about your keywords search trend.
The Meta Robots tag is basically to give certain restrictions to the search engine. Let's say you wish your page to get indexed in the search engine database but you don't want to search engine to follow any links that are on the web page. You would do that in the Meta Robots tag. It would look a something like this: <html> <head> <title>...</title> <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW"> </head> By using the above tag, you are telling the search engine not to follow any links on your webpage but to index your webpage in its database. Here are a few other functions that the Meta Robots tag has: NoArchive: The search engine won't save your web page in its archive NoSnippet: The search engine won't take a snippet to match what he thinks is the best description of your webpage. He will display whatever has been written in the Meta Description tag. NoImageIndex: The search engine won't index any images on your webpage. NoIndex: The search engine won't index your webpage in its database NoFollow: The search engine won't follow any links on that webpage. There are a few other tags to the Meta Robots but these are the main ones and most frequently used ones. You could even specify which robot you wish not to index your webpage. Simply instead of writing "robots" in the meta name, write the name of the robot you wish to give restrictions to. For example, if you wish to block Google, write "googlebot". You could find the name of all the robots of all the different search engines on Google. *note: you do not need to specify to the search engine that you wish him to "follow" links on your webpage, "index" your webpage, "snippet" the best description for your webpage. The search engine does that by default.
Not bad as a starting point for beginners. I am missing some additional basic advice though, such as the use of the "alt" attribute for images, or using the keyword name as a page name...