Comprehensive SEO Guide to Increase Your SE Ranking

I wrote this guide to help the newbie's out and hopefully this will answer a lot of questions and cover enough topics! This took me a long time to put together but I hope that it helps out. The guide was too long for DP so I cut it into 2 sections. If you find this information useful feel free to show me some love ;D

Comprehensive SEO Guide to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
By: Jason Miller

Things that this article will cover which search engines use to determine your positioning are:

• Domain Maturity
• Anchor Texts
• HTML Attributes
• Site Popularity - Linking Strategies
• Title Tags and Headings
• Lists (Ordered and Unordered)
• Content Formatting (Bolding and Italics)
• Site Layout and Design
• Keywords
• Keyword Density
• Content & Content Placement
• Page Doctypes
• Geo-Targeting
• Meta Data
• Code Bloat Reduction
• XML Site Maps
• Website Log Analyzation
• 404 Error Handling
• Robots.txt
• BlackHat Techniques to Avoid

Domain Maturity

Search engines place high value on the age of domains and the length of registration for a domain name. The age of your site signifies to the search engines that you have some amount of stability and authority.

While at the other hand the length of the domain registration increases your trust to the search engines. The longer the registration the more likely you are to have a trustworthy site.

Domain maturity is often hard for new webmasters to overcome. So the trick to this, at least if you are planning to run multiple domains, is to incubate your domain. Since juggling the development of many new "QUALITY" websites is difficult we prefer to build one of two simple pages for each domain we plan on developing later, submit them to the major search engines, build a couple links in directories, and let the sites sit.

By doing this it will allow your sites to be indexed and increase in maturity while you focus on developing your other sites.

Anchor Texts

Anchor Texts are important for both on and off-page optimization. For on-page optimization it is recommended that you build a good site navigational structure that makes it not only easy for humans to navigate your pages, but search engine spiders as well.

Broken Anchor Texts can lower your search engine rankings so ensure you have no broken links on your website.

Make sure the links on your page are related to the content or theme of the page and website.

Good SEO practice when adding links on your page is to ensure that you use the keywords you are targeting for that page in the Anchor Text as well as in the title attribute. Even more important is if you make the anchor text/title match the title/h1 tag of the page the link is pointing to.

I.E -

<a href="www.xyz.com/blue-widgets-california" title=blue widgets california">Blue Widgets California</a>

HTML:

This example link would tell the search engine spiders that the page it is about to follow is about blue widgets in California!

Anchor Texts are also very important in off-page optimization. When creating backlinks through directories or article submissions make sure the link back to your site contains the keywords you are targeting, the above example is a good starting point for off-page link optimization.

HTML Attributes

Search engines pay close attention to descriptive attributes in HTML tags as this will tell them what the content on your page is about. Some very important attributes include:

summary=
alt=
title=

The summary attribute should be used in the first table tag on the page. This will let the seach engine know what the content is about in that table. Use the keyword you are targetting in the attribute.

Summary Tag Example:

<table summary="Blue Widgets California" width="100%" height="100%">

HTML:

The alt tab is extremely important to search engines since they cannot read a picture, it also helps people with vision impairments who may be viewing your site.

Alt Tag Example:

<img src="blue-widgets-california.jpg" alt="blue widgets">

HTML:

The last attribute that is very important which was discussed in the previous sub-heading was the title attribute. This tells spiders what the content on the page being linked to is about.

Title Tag Example:

<a href="blue-widgets-california.php" title="blue widgets california">Blue Widgets California</a>

HTML:

Site Popularity - Linking Strategies

Site Popularity is often used by search engines to determine your sites ranking. The more websites that link to you the more popular your site will be considered by search engines. However not all links are treated the same. Links coming from sites with related content are given higher weight than others

• Paid Links
• Reciprocal Links
• Directory Submission
• Article Submission
• Social Bookmarking
• Forum Signatures

Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links are not as effective for search engine rankings as they used to be but can be effective for driving traffic to your site, especially if the site you are linking to has a high volume of traffic.

On reciprocal link methodology that is effective is 3-way linking. A three way link structure would look as follows:

Site A ==> Site B ==> Site C ==> Site A

Directory Submission
Directory submission is still effective in generating backlinks to increase your sites popularity. Some of the top search engine directories to submit to are:

• www.dmoz.org
• www.searchsite.com
• dir.yahoo.com
• www.jayde.com

Paid Directories vs. Free Directores
While many people think Paid Directories are a scam, and most of them are for the price to page rank ratio, not all are a waste of time. Paid directory listings can be of benefit on a prominent directory as they general allow you more prominent positioning in the directory, and faster review time, all of which can generate residual traffic. Some factors to consider on paid directory submission are as follows:

• Age and PageRank of the Directory
• The PageRank of the page to be listed on
• Quantity of outgoing links are on the page to be listed on
• Are the links marked as rel=nofollow or obfuscated?
• Avoid Directories that Require Reciprocal Links

You want to choose reputable directories to submit your site to, this is generally done by verifying the age of the directory and the PageRank of the homepage. Poorly trafficked directories get shutdown daily, so by using the above method when choosing what directory to submit to you are less likely to waste your time submitting in vain.

The PageRank of the page you want your site to show up in the directory is of great importance. The higher the PageRank, the more weight will be passed to your site, and thus help increase your sites position.

Equally as important to the PageRank of the page is how many outgoing links are on the page. PageRank that is passed to the pages being linked to is diluted if there are too many outgoing links. Don't pay for a directory submission on a site that has more than 20 links on the page you are submitting to.

Lastly, NEVER pay for a directory submission if the links are marked as nofollow. You will not receive any increased positioning in the search engines for a nofollow link, or gain any PageRank. You can check a page to see if the links are nofollow by right-clicking the page and viewing the source. Then search for a outgoing URL that is currently listed on the page. If you see "rel=nofollow" in the anchor tag, then don't waste your time with the directory. Another thing to watch out for is sites that obfuscate the outgoing URL, rather than showing the true URL. You can check this by hovering over a hyperlink in the directory. If the URL displayed appears something like the example below, then it is obfuscated, and equally as worthless for search engine positioning.

Obfuscated URL Example:

http://www.exampledirectoryxyz.com/link.php?site=www.yoursite.com

HTML:

When submitting to a free directory it is just as important to consider the factors discussed above, but since you are not paying for the submission the only factor that should really be considered here is whether the page uses obfuscation of the rel=nofollow attribute. The only downside to most free directories is they are generally very low PageRank. Regardless they still help some as long as your anchor text is optimized for the keyword you are targeting.

An additional note about directory listings is don't waste your time with directories that require a reciprocal link. This will only reduce the rank of your website.

Finding Quality Directories to Generate Backlinks
The following are example search queries you can input into a search engine to find directories related to your niche. By using this method you can generate hundred or thousands of quality backlinks to your site.

• "Add link" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add a link" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add site" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add a site" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add your site" +"your keywords(s)"
• "Add URL" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add Website" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add a website" +"your keyword(s)"
• "Add your website" +"your keywords(s)"

Article Submission
Article submission is an excellent way to generate many quality backlinks to your website. How many backlinks you generate depends on how well written your article is and how original the subject is.

When submitting an article to an article directory ensure that your article has a resource box on the bottom that links back to your website, and used optimized anchor text that uses the keywords/keyphrases that you are targeting. Many webmasters with sites relating to the content of your article, will reproduce these articles on their own websites and keep the resource box intact thus giving you quality backlinks!

Top Article Directoryes (Ordered By PageRank):

• www.ezinearticles.com -- PageRank 6
• www.articlecity.com -- PageRank 6
• www.articledashboard.com -- PageRank 6
• www.buzzle.com -- PageRank 5
• www.articlesbase.com -- PageRank 4
• www.searchwarp.com -- PageRank 4
• www.amazines.com -- PageRank 3
• www.goarticles.com -- PageRank 3

In addition to having good PageRank these sites also have a fairly decent amount of traffic and gain you residual visitors. If you want your article to be picked up and gain lots of relevant backlinks start submitting your quality articles to these sites.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking can be a very lucrative source for traffic and quality backlinks. The below are sites that can help you generate more traffic and increased search engine ranking:

Social Networks
www.myspace.com, www.facebook.com, www.xanga.com
These websites contain a massive amount of users that share common interests with each other. You can successfully market your website to the right niche of people and generate a huge amount of backlinks by posting bulletins linking back to your website.

Video Sharing
www.youtube.com, www.streamme.tv
These sites contain user uploaded video content that are of interest to visitors. You can generate backlinks and extra traffic to your website by uploading interesting videos with a link to your site in the video.

Photo Sharing
www.flikr.com, www.photobucket.com
These sites allow people to share photos with other people with like interests. Groups exist for people to trade like photos. By including the URL in your photos you can generate more interest in your website and generate related backlinks.

Social News Sites
www.digg.com
These sites accept submissions of news articles and press releases. The more interesting and unique the submission the more users will "digg" your article. If your article lands on the front page for the section you submit to you will most likely gain a temporary traffic explosion, and can generate many quality backlinks.

Forum Signatures
Another great method for generating high quality one-way links to your website is using a forum signature with a link back to your website. Make sure the forum is related to your niche, and that your signature link contains the keywords that you are optimizing for.

Title Tags and Headings

The Title tag and Headings are very important to search engines. These tags account for a huge amount of weight on your page. The 3 most important tags that the search engines look for to determine what your pages content is about is the <TITLE> <H1> and <H2> tags.

The <TITLE> tag
Make sure that your keyword / keyphrase is displayed first in the title. Try to avoid more than 4 words as each word dilutes the value of the keyphrase.

The <H1> tag
The H1 tag is the second most important tag you should have on your page. Make sure that your H1 tag matches your pages title. This will place extra emphasis on the keyword/phrase that you are targeting! Think H1 looks big and ugly? You can change the appearance by using CSS so it does not look so hideous.

The <H2> tag
The H2 tag does not carry as much weight as the H1 tag but is equally as important to on-page optimization. It is recommended that you use a variant of your keyword/phrase in the H2 tag. For instance if your TITLE/H1 says "Blue Widgets California" try using a variation such as "California Widgets" in your H2 tag

 

Lists (Ordered and Unordered)

Search engines LOVE lists. Most search engines like Google consider the contents in a list to be very important to the content of the page. Therefore whenever possible try to include a list in our page containing your keywords. Generally I throw this list underneath my <H2> tag.

Example of an Optimized Unordered List:

<H2>Widgets in California</h2>
<ul>
<li>Blue Widgets</li>
<li>Red Widgets</li>
<li>Green Widgets</li>
<li>Black Widgets</li>
</ul>

HTML:

By doing this the spider can readily tell that your site is about widgets, and places extra importance on the phrases in the list.

Another great SEO tip is to put your sites navigational structure into an unordered list. This will give extra importance to your already optimized site links.

Example of an Optimized Site Navigational Structure within an Unordered List:

<ul>
<li><a href="blue-widgets-california" title="blue widgets california">Blue Widgets California</a></li>
<li><a href="red-widgets-california" title="red widgets california">Red Widgets California</a></li>
<li><a href="green-widgets-california" title="green widgets california">Green Widgets California</a></li>
</ul>

HTML:

Content Formatting (Bolding and Italics)

Search Engines also place extra importance on words that are placed in bold and italics. Be sure to bold and italicize keywords/phrases within the body of your content. This will ensure that search engines know what your pages content is about and increase the on-page optimization for that keyword.

HTML tags to use are:
<B><I><STRONG><EM>

<B> and <I> generally add more weight than the <STRONG> and <EM> tags.

Site Layout and Design

Site layout and design has a huge impact on your search engine rankings. Simply put the easier it is for the search engine to get to the content in your pages body the better your page will rank. As a general rule of thumb avoid making sites that are made completely in flash, as spiders cannot read the flash and tell what your site is about.

Another important factor to consider is whether you will design your page layout in tables or use DIV's and CSS.

Search engines read page content from left to right, so the basic site layout that tends to work best in generating high search engine positions is having a header at top with the page content in the body in a cell ot the left with the site navigational structure in a cell to the right of the content cell. Or simply have a header, with content table directly below it, and a footer table below the content table with the navigational structure below it.

Below are some examples of good site layouts that use tables that area search engine friendly.



When using DIV/CSS you have to worry less about this general layout structure becuase you can position DIV cells within CSS. As a general SEO rule of thumb you should put your DIV with the content of your page just below the <BODY> tag as it will be the first thing the spider reads when it searches your page.

Keywords

Keywords are very important to search engines, and what keywords you choose and how you use them will affect your position. As a general rule of thumb try to pick keywords that are not to broad, as it will be easier to rank for those keywords.

For instance, doing a search in Google for the keyword "widgets" currently returns 93,700,000 results. The chances of ranking #1 for this search term in a short amount of time will be extremely difficult.

By narrowing a keyword down more specifically we can capture a more focused and targeted audience. As an example I have focused the keyword widget down to "blue widgets in California". Google now returns a mere 208,000 results! It will be much easier to optimize and rank well for a keyword/phrase that is focused.

Keyword Density

Another method search engines use to determine what your page is about and how to rank your page is keyword density. Keyword density is how often your keyword/phrase appears on the page.

As a general SEO rule of thumb keep the keyword density on your page between 5%-9%. Anything above this will generally be considered keyword spamming and could get your site penalized.

A good free tool that allows you to calculate keyword density and has much more is WebCEO which can be downloaded at www.webceo.com

Content and Content Placement

Content is key in the world of SEO. Optimizing for search engine positions will mean nothing if your content is stale and unoriginal, or so laden with keywords that the user quickly clicks off your site. To increase user retention on your site, make sure your content is unique and interesting.

For SEO purposes make sure that your content is located as close to the <body> tag as possible. Also make sure that your keywords/phrases are mentioned at the very top of the pages beginning and ending.

Page Doctypes

Doctype tags are very important in SEO. The <!DOCTYPE> is the first tag that should be declared on a webpage. This tells the browser what HTML or XHTML version the document uses. This also reduces weird HTML quircks across browsers and platforms.

ALWAYS include a doctype in your HTML.

Example Doctypes

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> 

HTML:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

HTML:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> 

HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">  

HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">

HTML:

Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting can be a VERY powerful tool in gaining top search engine rankings. If your site is a regional or local site you can Geo-Target your site in several ways.

Method 1.)
The first method that can be employed to geo-target your website is write pages with your keywords and add a specific region/location to the keyword/phrase. For example lets say our business is located within San Jose California and we sell blue widgets. Simply optimizing for blue widgets would be too broad. Try picking keywords such as "blue widgets san jose." This will tell the search engines that your page is about blue widgets and that you are in San Jose! Keywords such as these will be less competitive and can net you a lot of highly optimized traffic.

Method 2.)
Google Webmaster Tools provides an option to set what region your site searches show up in. Use this tool to set the location of your website and your search engine position for local searches will improve.

Also ensure that you have a contact page on your website that lists an address and phone number. Search engines will also use this information to determine where you are located and serve your results accordingly.

Meta Data

Meta tags are not as important today as they once were. But they are still play a small role in search engine optimization. Always include meta tags in your website. Common mistakes that many novice webmasters make when using meta tags are including too little or too many keywords.

As a good SEO rule of thumb include your keyword/phrase at least twice in your meta description, but make it human readable as search engines such as Google use this to generate the description of your index listing.

Example of a Good Meta Description Tag

<meta name="description" content="Blue Widgets California. We provide you high quality Blue Widgets in California">

HTML:

In your meta keywords tag ensure that you use the keyword listed in your title and H1 tag, as well as variants of your keyword/phrase, use no more than 5 keywords.

Example of a Good Meta Keyword Tag

<meta name="keywords" content="blue widgets california, california widgets, blue widgets, widgets">

HTML:

Other important meta tags to include:

<META NAME="Author-Corporate" CONTENT="www.yoursitename.com">
<META NAME="Publisher" CONTENT=" www.yoursitename.com">
<META NAME="Classification" Content="YOUR MOST PROMINENT KEYWORD HERE">

HTML:

Code Bloat Reduction

Code bloat is a problem that you want to avoid when creating an optimized site. By reducing the amount of code that is on your page you can make your site download faster for search engine spiders and users. It will also make it easier for search engines to get to the content on your page as it will not have to parse through lines and lines of HTML/JavaScript code.

To reduce the amount of code on your page, make sure that you do the following:

• Use style sheets to take care of all page formatting
• Use DIV instead of TABLE for your site layout
• Call JavaScript code via an external file rather than putting it directly on the page.
• Convert unneeded code to JavaScript (such as forms) and include them as an external JavaScript File rather than straight HTML code in the document.

XML Sitemaps
Both Google and Yahoo now accept XML sitemaps of your site. This will help their search engine spiders know what pages are on your site and how to find them. This will help the likliness of those pages to get indexed.

The URLs to submit your sitemaps can be found at:

• Yahoo - siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
• Google - www.google.com/webmasters

Example sitemap.xml File:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> 
<url> 
<loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com/</loc> 
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> 
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq> 
<priority>0.8</priority> 
</url> 
</urlset>

HTML:

Website Log Analyzation

A good method to employ that will greatly increase your SEO efforts is to view your website logs to see how your visitors are getting to your pages. By reviewing the keywords that users are entering into search engines to get to your page you can better optimize those pages with those specific keywords/phrases to increase your rankings.

Google provides a great tool that will help you with this and can be found at:
analytics.google.com

404 Error Handling

Sometimes search engines can get hung up on your page or follow a link that does not exist. In order to keep the spider on the page and ensure that all our pages are indexed. It is a good idea to make sure that you modify your sites 404 error page to point to your sitemap. That way if there is a problem when crawling your site the bot can be redirected to a page rich with your sites URLs.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is very important as it tells what search engines can browse what on your site. Make sure that you place your robots.txt file in the root directory of your site.

For example lets say we want to disallow all robots from reading the CGI-BIN directory on our server we could accomplish this by adding the following lines to our robots.txt file.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

HTML:

The user-agent field can be populated with either a * denoting all robots. Or a specifically named robot, such as "googlebot." Be very careful when creating your robots.txt file as it is easy to make mistakes that can effect your search engine ranking dramatically.

BlackHat Techniques to Avoid

Now to the final section. We will cover methods that BlackHat webmasters use to increase their page ranking within search engines. It is recommended that you do not use these methods as they can lead to your site being de-listed from the search engines.

Content Shifting
This technique is not immediate grounds for a banning by the search engines, and is very effective in ranking websites, however if your competition finds out you employ this method you can risk a ban. Content shifting moves content out of the visible range of the page visitor but not the search engine spider.

Example of content shifting:

<style type="text/css">
	H1 { position: absolute; z-index: 10; visibility: visible; left: -1000px; top: -1000px;}
</style>
<h1>MAIN KEYWORDS HERE</h1>

HTML:

What this example does is allow the webmaster to shift the H1 tag 1000 pixels to the top right of the page which is out of the range of viewers.

Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the repeated use of a keyword over and over throughout the title, meta tags, and content of the page. Pages that are too keyword heavy are generally not indexed or banned all together. Keep your keyword density between 5%-9% for maximum optimization.

Cloaking
Another way BlackHat webmasters try to trick the search engines is by employing cloaking. With this method keyword rich pages are fed to the search engine spiders, and a different set of content is shown to the end user. This is a bad practice and should generally be avoided.

Conclusion

Search Engine optimization is a very lengthy and involved field of study. It is very tedious, yet can reap great results for your website. I hope that you found this resource useful, feel free to redistribute this content as long as you keep this conclusion box in tact. SEO San Jose is provided by PC Bytes.

 

good tips thanks

 

I was about to give you some credit for this article until I came across this and quite a few other "issues" in this article. Scale 1 thorugh 10 it's an easy 5 or 6, you didn't really mention anything unique or that hasn't been posted 100 other times in this forum. Actually many articles are somewhat the same as this one, please search the forums before posting the same thing just written differently.

 

Are you kidding?

 

Nice article with information but there are some confusions and i will be sending you PM with detail and i also want to ask you some thing.....

 

Great...simply great. This is pretty much all anyone needs to read to be successful with the SEO of their site.

 

great posts, many thanks.

 

SEO dealt in detail in a reader friendly manner

 

My Dear Friend

You have done good job but still you have missed out many things. I appreciate you effort but seo is not too short which ends here. This is the begining.

Cool Mate and Enjoy your Day

Dashanan Sharma

 

Nice post, Thanks for your effort.

 

Nice work dude, you have explained the ideas in such a decent way that every one can understand.

 

Very nice post for beginners
As others stated there are a few things you missed but if you had to write about everything you would still be there.

Also not sure what you mean about the other important meta tags, seem like a waste of time to me

"<META NAME="Author-Corporate" CONTENT="www.yoursitename.com">
<META NAME="Publisher" CONTENT=" www.yoursitename.com">
<META NAME="Classification" Content="YOUR MOST PROMINENT KEYWORD HERE">"

 

really good simple directions
I have tried a few already and will now wait for good Google rank in next few days (HaHa)

 

This is REALLY good, can somebody PDF this so i can use it as a kind of checklist so i dont have to come back every time to make sure i've done all this.
Thanks for this it's great just a few things lef tout but thats minor.

 

Ok i pdf'd it
Download link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DM6PQ0XW

 

lots to take in for a newbie webmaster trying to get some great SE traffic... thanks for the great info

 

Very good SEO tutorial mate.

 

This is pretty nice, thanks.

 

Nice post. Thanks a lot for your information.