It’s been a good while since I last posted any useful content, but it’s been a whirlwind of projects — early mornings and late nights. I have finally gotten a slight break in the action and will shortly add to the project base all the new and exciting editions to the World Wide Web. But for now a short document I put together focusing on the basics of SEO and some simple steps to take when building a site. Cheers!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
THE BASICS > Basic/Simple SEO Optimization Steps:
- Submit Website to Search Engines.
- Submit Site-Map to Search Engines and make accessible on the server.
- Meta Keywords and Descriptions:
- Meta Data is hidden from the user, but visible to the search engines
- Keywords: are words or phrases that are relevant to your website and search phrases that potential users would use to find your site.
- Description: more in depth and sentence based with keywords incorporated.
- Meta is still valuable, but search engines rely less on Meta Data than they have in the past.
- Page Titles: Relevant page titles for each page within your website.
- Keywords in the URL, ie. If the page was about Pet Grooming and the site is dogsrus.com, then you would want the page url to be something along the lines of http://dogsrus.com/pet-grooming/
- Alt Tags for Images: Alt tags are important because search engines can for the most part only parse text and images are not text. An Alt tag is basically a description or keywords about the image.
- Using h1 title tags and bold/italics for important and relevant text and keywords within your content.
- Analytics - Google Analytics is free and very robust.
- Update, update, update. Blogging, news updates and so forth help keep content fresh for users, but also for search engines.
THE COMPLEX > Not really complex, but more extensive.
- Content Strategy
- Keyword Strategy within Content
- Relating site content with page url with keywords with headings - making sure everything on each page is focused
- Internal Links: Links within your content that point to pages within your site. For instance: If you were writing a blog about an author, you would want to link the author’s name to their specific page, as well as any books or publications.
- Inbound Links: Links from other sites to your website. Inbound links are important and the more reputable inbound links the better. Often times this comes in the form of “link ex-changing.” Beyond just having a inbound link, optimal case would be that the inbound link is a set of keywords that relate to the page they are linked to.
- Content Silos: Logical extension of the unified internal link program. In other words, the overarching homepage has keyword links that link to increasingly specific content pages.
BEYOND SEO > Social Media Revolution and Web 2.0:
- Establishing social media networks, ie. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and so forth. Basically all social media networks that you are affiliated with can help boost the presence of your website. The obvious Facebook and Twitter stand out amongst the rest for the time being, but new applications and platforms will emerge.
- The obvious strong points of social media marketing are that you have direct access and contact with you customers and/or visitors, but Social Media is a commitment as well. You cannot create a profile and expect people to start following and friending you or participating.
- This a great article on the Social Media Integration with respect to Businesses: http://mashable.com/2010/01/11/social-media-integration/
- With social media, you do not want to sign up for every social site on the web if you are not going to have the time and resources to connect with each of those communities. It’s better to start small and build.
- Content Aggregation: Submitting content to sites such as Reddit and Digg give your blog posts the opportunity to reach more people and a greater audience, as well as they create inbound links to your site - which is SEO gravy.
maxwell Rowe
creativeLab
copyright 2010 / maxwell Rowe
