Welcome to my version of what I would like to see as the: DigitalPoint SEO Frequently Asked Questions What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, its the process of optimising your website in terms of both on page SEO and off page SEO in order to get better Search Engine Rankings for some searched keywords / key phrases What are Keywords / Keyphrases These are the words that people type into a Search Engine, also known as queries. SEO's aim to rank their sites or their clients sites for these keywords and keyphrases so that they get more traffic to their websites I Rank no.1 So why Am I Not getting Traffic? Congratulations for getting that top spot in the SERP's, but, are you ranking for a keyword that gets searched for? If not then its not use having the ranking if nobody is looking for the reason you rank no.1. To get a good idea of search terms you can use the Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion tool completely free What does SERPs mean? SERP's Stands for Search Engine Results Pages How Can I Increase my PR First of all stop focusing on increasing your pagerank. If you have a quality website and build up backlinks then the pagerank is going to come naturally. Backlinks are a big factor or PR but there are many other factors. How Can I get PR / When does PR Change / Wheres my PR / Whats PR In terms of SEO, PR stands for Pagerank and is a measure created by Google to give people a small indication of a site. PR changes every 3-4 months in the Google Toolbar but the real PR Google uses changes all the time, we just dont get to see it for a while. If you feel like you should have PR check the links coming to your site, the age of your site and whether you are actually indexed in Google How Can I see if Im Indexed Type 'site:yoursite.com' into the Search Engine of your choice, and if your site appears then you are indexed. Remove the quotes and change yoursite.com to your actual domain How Can I see how many backlinks I have Go to the Search Engine of your choice and type 'link:yoursite.com'. Once again removing quotes and changing the domain. Remember Google only shows a fraction of the links it knows about so its probably better checking this in Yahoo Whats the difference between On & Off Page SEO Onpage SEO is more of the things you can control such as making sure you have: Unique title tags for all pages Headings in H1 / H2 Tags (preferably styled) Unique Content Good linking structure on your site A sitemap page on your site The Same version of URLs that point to the same page, i.e. yoursite.com and yoursite.com/index.html OffPage SEO is getting backlinks to your site, one big thing in Search Engine Rankings. There are many ways to get backlinks such as: Directory / Article Submissions Commenting on Blogs Forum Signatures Squidoo / Hub Pages Content Releasing free tools or website templates Doing something that gets people talking and linking (Linkbait) If theres any you would like to see added because they get asked here a lot then please let me know and Ill add to the list, or ask a Mod to edit if the time has ran out for me to edit it myself If theres any errors (we all make mistakes) let me know and Ill get it changed. I hope this helps some people
Thanks for the lead, Glen There are only two points that I would like to highlight here: 1. SEO also stands for Search Engine Optimizer (in Google's context): http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291 2. This sounds confusing... do you mean there are other factors other than backlinks that determine PR? You may just want to write that PR is determined by the quality of inbound links a page receives. Hope it helps
Yes, PR is not just made up from backlinks, other factors contribute to a sites Pagerank Thanks for the addition, Reps
Good solid explanation for newbies to SEO. The one thing people always forget is to be CREATIVE, not just follow the road others have laid.
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What im effectively meaning is that its not just XX amount of links will get XX amount of PR, theres different qualities about a backlink and what it will do to your pagerank For some reason Ive always thought that domain age was a factor in Pagerank from my own experiences having sites with no backlinks yet being 3 years old and PR 3. I guess that just goes to show you dont need to be focusing on pagerank, just let it follow as a byproduct of effots in building up your site Thanks for the kind words everyone! if you report it and ask the mods then theres a chance
Very true, i was just stating a way. Then can PM the mods if they want Please keep the thread on topic
Thank you for this post Glen. SEO is one thing that I haven't done much of and your post made it easy to understand and easy to implement. Jessica
True but there's other things that influence what PR you receive, like number of outbound links on your page etc. Good post, hopefully people use it.