SEO for beginners

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SEO for beginners

• By Marcus Sykes
• www.websterwebdesign.co.uk
• marcus_at_websterwebdesign.co.uk

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Overview

• Introduction to SEO
• Short description of SEO in general
• Basic overview of HTML and CSS
• This will only serve to highlight the uses of
  these languages for SEO
• SEO techniques
• Ways in which we implement SEO
• Viewing and measuring results
• How to maintain your SEO campaign

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Introduction to SEO

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) involves
  altering website code, content, and presence in
  order to increase rankings in search engines
• At least half a billion searches are made
  worldwide on a daily basis
• If you are ranked at the top of a search engine,
  you are essentially running a free marketing
  campaign.

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Introduction to SEOWhich search engine?

• There are some main players which you must always
  consider optimising for, namely Google, Yahoo,
  MSN, AOL, and AskJeeves
• Although Google makes up for almost half of
  worldwide searches, it is not always a good
  tactic to relate your site prominence only on
  Google
• If half a billion searches are made per day, this
  means that over 250,000,000 are made on other
  Search Engines
• Each search engine searches the web and ranks
  sites differently, so when you may be at the top
  of one search engine, you might not even be
  listed on another one

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Introduction to SEOSearch Engine Statistics

• Search engine market shares in November 2005 for
  searches in the USA

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Introduction to SEOHow a search engine works

• Search engines use programs called spiders, or
  bots, to search the internet and document their
  findings.
• Spiders firstly go to a webpage and analyse it
• Goes through the HTML code and categorises the
  most important words (keywords) in the document.
• It then moves on to any pages that linked from
  the current page.
• This is one way how search engines find new
  pages.
• It also visits pages that may not be linked by
  other pages, but were submitted by search
  engines.

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Introduction to SEOWhat a search engine sees

• Spiders do not see a page like humans do, as it
  cannot describe an image, or tell you how pretty
  a site looks
• Instead, it looks at the HTML code and structures
  it to make sense.
• Using a text browser, or disabling images and CSS
  are a good way of seeing your site through a
  search engines eyes.

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Introduction to SEOWhat a search engine sees
(cont.)
www.ialc.org without CSS and Images
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Introduction to SEOWhat a search engine sees
(cont.)
www.ialc.org WITH CSS and Images
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Crash Course in HTML/CSS

• (X)HTML is used to describe the data that is on
  your page
• CSS is used to format HTML and make it look more
  presentable.
• Web standards are continuously trying to separate
  content from presentation
• Previously, HTML was used for both content and
  presentation.
• Latest Versions of the languages
• XHTML 1.1
• CSS 3

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Crash Course in HTML/CSSHTML Basics

• HTML uses lttagsgt to describe data
• Data is usually enclosed in these tags
• lttaggtDatalt/taggt
• lttag attributedata /gt
• Tags can be images, paragraphs, titles, tables,
  and more
• Browsers render these tags differently on your
  screen.
• There is a tendency to depend on these tags also
  for formatting, e.g. using tables to keep
  non-tabular data
• Not Good!

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Crash Course in HTML/CSSHTML Basics (cont.)

• Every HTML document has some mandatory elements
• lt!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C ...
  ml1-transitional.dtd"gt
• lthtml xmlns"http//www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"gt
• ltheadgt
• ltmeta /gt Extra information about the
  document
• lttitlegtDocument Titlelt/titlegt
• lt/headgt
• ltbodygt
• Page Content
• lt/bodygt
• lt/htmlgt

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Crash Course in HTML/CSSHTML Basics (cont.)

• Here are some basic tags important to SEO
• lth1gtlt/h1gt , lth2gtlt/h2gt , lth3gtlt/h3gt ,
• Header tags Makes text large and bold
• ltimg srclocation of pic altalternate textgt
• Image tags note the alternate text for SEs
• lta hreflink URL titlelink titlegtlinklt/agt
• Link tags - Browsers makes the text inside a link
• ltbgtBold Textlt/bgt
• Not recommended, but is said to help in SEO

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Crash Course in HTML/CSSCSS Basics

• CSS can make a simple HTML page look completely
  different.
• CSS has little or no impact on SEO
• You can make a site look like whatever you want
  without losing SE rankings
• CSS code can be placed within an HTML document,
  or in a separate file
• If you use a separate file, you can use it for
  every page
• This makes updating the way your site looks very
  easily, because you only need to update one file.

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SEO TechniquesKeywords

• Keywords are the words on a webpage that best
  describe that page
• Keyword selection is the most important step to
  effective SEO
• The keywords you use will be the phrases where
  you want to be highly ranked on SEs
• Time and research should go into selecting the
  appropriate keywords before doing any SEO
• What are the words one would use to find your
  site?

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SEO TechniquesKeywords (cont.)

• Continuation on how search engines work
• When a spider goes through a webpage, it
  determines the weight of frequently used words in
  the document, and considers them the most
  important in the document.
• The more you use a word in important places, the
  more search engines give importance to it.
• The words with highest weight are more likely to
  bring up your web page when used as a search term.

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SEO TechniquesKeywords (cont.)

• You must decide whether to focus on less
  frequently used keywords (niche) or compete for
  the commonly used ones.
• Here are some tools you can use to see which
  keywords are searched for frequently
• Google Suggest (beta) (free)
• http//www.google.com/webhp?complete1hlen
• Google adwords
• Offers a free keyword tool with its adwords
  services
• WordTracker (paid)
• www.wordtracker.com

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SEO TechniquesMeta Tags

• Meta tags are used to provide a description of
  the page, and a list of main keywords it uses.
• There is a debate over whether to cram loads of
  keywords into these tags, or just select the most
  important ones.
• Search engines are getting smarter everyday, so
  they may penalise you for cramming
• Some search engines reportedly dont even look at
  the meta tags (e.g. Google)

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SEO TechniquesTitle Tag

• The text in this tag shows up on the top of your
  browser window.
• Quite important to include keywords here, as the
  title will give a general summary for what your
  page is about.
• Most search engines see this tag as an important
  tag for categorising what type of site you have.

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SEO TechniquesAnchor Tags

• One of the most important tags you must use for
  SEO.
• Spiders use these to crawl your site, so you must
  have links to pages throughout your site.
• Other sites that link to yours will send spiders
  your way also.
• Google (and others) use anchor tags to rank your
  site in many ways
• Firstly, text in anchor tags are given a lot of
  importance.
• If other sites link to you, this must mean your
  site is popular, and so you increase in rankings.
• The most popular sites would, in theory, be
  linked to by many websites throughout the
  internet.

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SEO TechniquesAnchor Tags (cont.)

• Since anchor tags are so important, it is vital
  that you include keywords in these tags
• SEs think the words to describe a link should
  give a good indication of what that page is
  about.
• This is one reason why it is good to have a
  navigation bar that uses links to all your sites.
• Better that you use words, not images
• Try and use ltagt tags, and not image maps, flash,
  etc.
• A sitemap is also an effective way of tying your
  site up if you link all your pages to this site
  map.

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SEO TechniquesAnchor Tags (cont.)

• Here is an example of why a sitemap is effective

This is a website with a site map.
Sitemap
This is a website without a site map.
Page 4
Page 1
Page 1 and 2 can now reach page 3 in many ways
Page 1 and 2 can only reach page 3 via page 4
Page 2
Page 3
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SEO TechniquesText and Content

• Throughout your page you will need to use
  keywords in order to rank well for that word
• The most important places of your content to put
  keywords are in the headers, at the beginning,
  and the end of paragraphs.
• It is importance to balance the overuse of
  keywords for the sake of SEO and keeping the text
  relevant, readable, and informative
• There is no point in having a highly ranked page
  if it provides no information to a user, as they
  will leave your site immediately

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SEO TechniquesH1, H2, H3, etc. Tags

• These tags are considered by search engines to be
  a description of your page.
• Very important to put in some keywords there.
• It is always a good idea to structure your
  content so that it contains these tags at
  beginning of paragraphs, tables, sections, etc.
• It is quite logical that a search engine gets the
  overview of a paragraph from a header tag
• We know what this slide is about by looking at
  the title of the slide

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SEO TechniquesImages

• Images are not read by search engines, and so you
  should avoid using too many images on your site
• Many sites use images for fancy fonts, when they
  contain keywords that are never read by a search
  engine
• Always use an alt attribute when including an
  image
• This gives a spider a description of the image,
  and also doubles as making your site accessible
  to blind people.

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SEO TechniquesCode Structure

• It is important to look at your HTML code and see
  the structure of it.
• Some pages have too much code, and too little
  content
• Some code makes it so that content is found at
  the bottom of the page.
• Pages that use tables for layout are notorious
  for doing this.
• Make sure that keywords are found at the top of
  your source code as well as on the actual web
  page
• Remember, SEs dont see pages like we do, they
  only see our HTML code.

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SEO TechniquesUpdate your site regularly

• Sites that are updated regularly are spidered and
  indexed more frequently by SEs
• Sites that change often are considered by SEs as
  sites that provide current information, and must
  therefore (although not always) provide up to
  date information
• This would provide a more relevant set of results
  than providing a user with pages that were made
  10 years ago
• News Items are a great way of including a regular
  changing page.

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SEO TechniquesDynamic Code

• Dynamic code can make updating your site very
  easy
• Also useful for creating pages on the fly
• E.g. A shopping cart with items you want to buy
• SEs do not always look favourably on pages with
  dynamic data
• These pages usually have a ? after the page name
  and are followed by data
• You have to regularly update your site if you
  want to do well with dynamic pages
• E.g. Forums

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SEO TechniquesInbound Links

• As said before, links from other sites are very
  important.
• Google will no list your site if its not found on
  an other webpage listed by them
• Methods to get links on other pages
• Link Exchange (free)
• Paid Advertising
• Google Adwords
• Overture
• Specific Websites

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Measuring Results

• Once you have started your SEO campaign, you need
  to measure your results and make sure you are
  improving on SE Rankings
• When you first make changes, SEs may take up to
  about four weeks to scan your site for changes.
• There are millions of web pages for them to
  crawl, and so it takes time for them to get to
  you.

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Measuring ResultsReasons for no improvements

• Sometimes, you may not notice an improvement in
  your rankings
• This can be due to many reasons as many factors
  affect your SE rankings
• Competition may be doing better
• Marketing
• More linking from other sites
• Better SEO
• Bad choice of keywords
• Too much competition
• Etc.

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Measuring ResultsStatistics Monitoring

• You can view statistics of visitors to your site.
• Onestat (paid)
• Google Analytics (free)
• StatCounter (free)
• You can see what engines are used more to find
  your site
• You can also see which keywords are used to find
  your site, which helps with keyword research
• This can help you target particular search
  engines and accommodate their searching methods.

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Measuring ResultsSEO software

• SEO software can be used to scan many SEs for
  phrases of your choice and produce visual results
  of how your website is doing.
• Much faster than doing this manually
• You can run regular searches and monitor your
  positioning easily and efficiently
• Some SEO software can also help you scan you
  pages and make suggestions for improvements.

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Measuring ResultsSEO software (cont.)

• SEO tools
• WebPosition Gold
• Advanced Web Ranking

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Resources

• Links to further SEO resources
• www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox.html
• www.searchenginewatch.com
• www.w3schools.com
• www.search-engine-war.co.uk