Which Is Best? Absolute Or Relative URLS?

This is another one of those areas in SEO or website development that you
shouldn’t be concerned about. My advice would be to keep it consistent.
I prefer absolute urls. That’s just a preference. Google doesn’t care so neither
do I, really. I have just gotten into the habit of using absolute urls.
Relative just means relative to the document the link is on. Move that page to
another site and it won’t work. With an absolute URL, it would work.

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Keywords In Bold Or Italic

As I mentioned in the ALT Tag seo tip, some seo proclaim putting your
keywords in bold or putting your keywords in italics is a benefit in terms of
search engine optimizing a page – as if they are working their way through a
check list.
It’s impossible to test this, and I think these days, Google might be using this
to identify what to derank a site for, not promote it in SERPS.
I use bold or italics these days specifically for users. Only if it’s natural or this
is really what I want to emphasise!
Don’t tell Google what to sandbox you for that easily!

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Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF)

Clean URLS (or search engine friendly urls) are just that – easy to read,
simple. You do not need clean urls in a site architecture for Google to
spider a site successfully (Update 23/9/08 – apparently confirmed by
Google), although I do use clean urls as a default these days, and have done
so for years.
The thinking is that you might get a boost in Google SERPS if your URLS are
clean – because you are using keywords in the actual page name instead of a
parameter or ID number. Google might reward the page some sort of
relevance because of the actual file / page name.
Google does reward pages with keywords in the url, and they can also form
part of a link to your site if shared in a forum, for instance.
Sometimes I will remove the stop-words from a url and leave the important
keywords as the page title because a lot of forums garble a url to shorten it.
It should be remembered it is thought although Googlebot can crawl sites with
dynamic URLs, it is assumed by many webmasters there is a greater risk that
it will give up if the urls are deemed not important and contain multiple
variables and session IDs (theory).
As standard, I use clean URLS where possible on new sites these days, and
try to keep the URLS as simple as possible and do not obsess about it. That’s
my aim at all times when I seo – simplicity.
Be aware though – Google does look at keywords in the URL even in a
granular level.

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What is Alt Tags?

NOTE: Alt Tags are counted by Google (and Bing), but I would be
careful over-optimizing them. I’ve seen a lot of websites penalized for over-optimising invisible elements on a page.
ALT tags are very important and I think a very rewarding area to get right. I
always put the main keyword in an ALT once when addressing a page.
Don’t optimise your ALT tags (or rather, attributes) JUST for Google!
Use ALT tags (or rather, ALT Attributes) for descriptive text that helps visitors
– and keep them unique where possible, like you do with your titles and meta
descriptions.
Don’t obsess. Don’t optimise your ALT tags just for Google – do it for humans,
for accessibility and usability. If you are interested, I ran a simple test using
ALT attributes to determine how many words I could use in IMAGE ALT text
that Google would pick up.
And remember – even if, like me most days, you can’t be bothered with all the
image ALT tags on your page, at least use a blank ALT (or NULL value) so
people with screen readers can enjoy your page.
Update 17/11/08 – Picked This Up At SERoundtable about Alt Tags:
JohnMu from Google: alt attribute should be used to describe the image. So
if you have an image of a big blue pineapple chair you should use the alt tag
that best describes it, which is alt=”big blue pineapple chair.” title
attribute should be used when the image is a hyperlink to a specific page.
The title attribute should contain information about what will happen when you
click on the image. For example, if the image will get larger, it should read
something like, title=”View a larger version of the big blue pineapple chair
image.”
Barry continues with a quote:
As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate
on the information provided in the “alt” attribute. Feel free to supplement the
“alt” attribute with “title” and other attributes if they provide value to your users!
So for example, if you have an image of a puppy (these seem popular at the
moment) playing with a ball, you could use something like “My puppy Betsy
playing with a bowling ball” as the alt-attribute for the image. If you also have a
link around the image, pointing a large version of the same photo, you could
use “View this image in high-resolution” as the title attribute for the link.

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Redirect Non WWW To WWW

Simply put, http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/ can be treated by Google as a
different url than http://hobo-web.co.uk/ even though it’s the same page, and it
can get even more complicated.
It’s thought PageRank and Google Juice can be diluted if Google gets
confused about your URLS and speaking simply you don’t want this PR
diluted (in seo theory).
That’s why many, including myself, redirect non-www to www (or vice versa) if
the site is on a linux / apache server (in the htaccess file –
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hobo-web.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
Basically you are redirecting all the Google juice to one url.
Do you need to do this? Of course not. As standard these days, I
do however. It keeps it simple, when optimising for Google.
It should be noted, it’s incredibly important not to mix the two types of
www/non-www on site when linking your own internal pages!
Google can handle most sites no problem even without this measure being
taken, and it’s certainly no magic bullet implementing this canonicalization fix.
Note Google asks you which canonical version one to pick in Google
Webmaster Tools.

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Link Out To Related Sites

I am old school. I regularly link out to other quality relevant pages on other
websites where possible and where a human would find it valuable.
I don’t link out to other sites from homepage. I want all the PR residing in
the home page to be shared only with my internal pages. I don’t link out to
other sites from my category pages either, for the same reason.
I link to other relevant sites (a deep link where possible) from individual
pages and I do it often, usually. I don’t worry about link equity or PR
leak because I control it on a page to page level.
This works for me, it allows me to share the link equity I have with other sites
while ensuring it is not at the expense of pages on my own domain. It may
even help get me into a ‘neighbourhood’ of relevant sites, especially when
some of those start linking back to my site.
Linking out to other sites, especially using a blog also helps tell others that
might be interested in your content that your page is ‘here’. Try it.
Generally I won’t link out to sites using the exact keyword /phrase I am
targeting, but I will be considerate, and usually try and link out to a site using
keywords these bloggers / site owners would appreciate.

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Internal Links To Relevant Pages

I silo any relevance or trust mainly though links in text content and secondary
menu systems and between pages that are relevant in context to one another.
I don’t worry about perfect silo’ing techniques any more, and don’t worry about
whether or not I should link to one category from another, as I think the ‘boost’
many proclaim is minimal on the size of sites I manage.
Sometimes I will ensure 10 pages link to 1 page in a theme, and not
reciprocate this link. Other times, I will. It depends on the PR google juice I
have to play with and again, if it feels right in the circumstance to do so, or the
size of the site and how deep I am in the structure.
There’s no set method I find works for every site, other than to link to related
internal pages often and where appropriate – it’s where I find some
creativity.
Be careful overdoing internal linking.

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What is Keyword Density?

The short answer to this is – no. There is no one-size-fits-all keyword density,
no optimal percentage. I do not subscribe to the idea that there are a certain
percentage of keywords per 1000 words of text to get a page to number 1 in
Google. Search engines are not that easy although the key to success in
many fields is simple seo.
I write natural page copy where possible always focused on the keyterms – I
never calculate density in order to identify the best % – there are way too
many other things to work on. Hey, I have looked, a long time ago. If it looks
natural, it’s ok with me. Normally I will try and get related terms in the page,
and if I have 5 paragraphs, I might have the keyword in 4 or 5 of those as long
as it doesn’t look like I stuffed them in there.
I think optimal keyword density is a bit of a myth these days, although there
are many who disagree.

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Google SEO: How Many Words & Keywords?

I get asked this all the time –
How much text do you put on a page to rank for a certain keyword?
Well, as in so much of SEO theory and strategy, there is no optimal amount
of text per page.
Instead of thinking about the quantity of the text, you should think more about
the quality of the content on the page. Optimise this with searcher intent in
mind. Well, that’s how I do it.
I don’t subscribe that you need a minimum amount of words or text to rank in
Google. I have seen pages with 50 words out rank pages with 100, 250, 500
or 1000 words. Then again I have seen pages with no text rank on nothing but
inbound links or other ‘strategy’. In 2012, Google is a lot better at hiding away
those pages, though.
At the moment, I prefer long pages and a lot of text, still focused on a few
related keywords and keyphrases to a page. Useful for long tail keyphrases
and easier to explore related terms.
Every site is different. Some pages, for example, can get away with 50 words
because of a good link profile and the domain it is hosted on. For me, the
important thing is to make a page relevant to a user’s search query.
I don’t care how many words I achieve this with and often I need to
experiment on a site I am unfamiliar with. After a while, you get an idea how
much text you need to use to get a page on a certain domain into Google.
One thing to note – the more text you add to the page, as long as it is unique,
keyword rich and relevant, the more that page will be rewarded with more
visitors from Google.
There is no optimal number of words on a page for placement in Google.
Every website – every page – is different from what I can see. Don’t worry too
much about word count if your content is original and informative. Google will
probably reward you on some level – at some point – if there is lots of unique
text on all your pages.
  Character Counter Tool 

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H1-H6: Headers

I can’t find any definitive proof online that says you need to use Heading Tags
(H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) or that they improve rankings in Google, and I have
seen pages do well in Google without them – but I do use them, especially the
H1 tag on the page. For me it’s another piece of a perfect page, in the
traditional sense, and I try to build a site for Google and humans.
<h1>The Hobo SEO Company, Scotland</h1>
I still generally only use one <h1> heading tag in my keyword targeted
pages – I believe this is the way the W3C intended it be used – and ensure
they appear at the top of a page and written with my main keywords or
keyword phrases incorporated. I have never experienced any problems using
CSS to control the appearance of the heading tags making them larger or
smaller.
I use as many H2 – H6 as is necessary depending on the size of the page, but
generally I use H1, H2 & H3. You can see here how to use header tags
properly.
How many words in the H1 Tag? As many as I think is sensible – as short and
snappy as possible usually. Aaron Wall at SEOBook recommends not making
your h1 tags the exact same as your page titles, although I personally have
never seen a problem with this on a quality site. I also discovered Google will
use your Header tags as page titles at some level if your title element is
malformed.
As always be sure to make your heading tags highly relevant to the content on
that page and not too spammy, either.

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Google SEO: Robots Meta Tag

OK – So I’ve theorised about the Title Element, the Meta Description Tag and
the pointless Meta Keywords Tag. Next:
The Robots Meta Tag;
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />
I could use the above meta tag to tell Google to index the page but not
to follow any links on the page, if for some reason; I did not want the page to
appear in Google search results.
By default, Googlebot will index a page and follow links to it. So there’s no
need to tag pages with content values of INDEX or FOLLOW. GOOGLE
There are various instructions you can make use of in your Robots Meta Tag,
but remember Google by default WILL index and follow links, so you have NO
need to include that as a command – you can leave the robots meta out
completely – and probably should if you don’t have a clue.
Googlebot understands any combination of lowercase and
uppercase. GOOGLE.
Valid values for Robots Meta Tag ”CONTENT” attribute are: “INDEX“, “NOINDEX“,
“FOLLOW“, “NOFOLLOW“. Pretty self-explanatory.
Examples:
  META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”
  META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”
  META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”
  META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”
  META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOSNIPPET”
  Google will understand the following and interprets the following robots
meta tag values:
  NOINDEX - prevents the page from being included in the index.
  NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page. (Note
that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents
Googlebot from following an individual link.)
  NOARCHIVE - prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the
search results.
  NOSNIPPET - prevents a description from appearing below the page in the
search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.
  NOODP - blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being
used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.
  NONE - equivalent to “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”.

Robots META Tag Quick Reference

Terms  Googlebot  Slurp  MSNBot  Teoma
NoIndex  YES  YES  YES  YES
NoFollow  YES  YES  YES  YES
NoArchive  YES  YES  YES  YES
NoSnippet  YES  NO  NO  NO
NoODP  YES  YES  YES  NO
NoYDIR  NO  YES  NO  NO
NoImageIndex  YES  NO  NO  NO
NoTranslate  YES  NO  NO  NO
Unavailable_After  YES  NO  NO  NO
I’ve included the robots meta tag in my tutorial as this is one of only a few
meta tags / html head elements I focus on when it comes to Google (and
Bing) seo. At a page level – it is quite powerful.
1.  Title Element – Important – Unique
2.  Meta Description (optional but advisable in most cases) – Unique
3.  Robots Meta Tag (optional) – Be Careful
4.  Canonical Meta Tag (optional – recommended) – Be Vigilant
If you are interested in using methods like on-page robots instructions and the
robots.txt file to control which pages get indexed by Google and how Google
treats them, Sebastian knows a lot more than me

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Meta Description

Like the title element and unlike the meta keywords tag, this one is important,
both from a human and search engine perspective.
<meta name="Description" content="Get your site on the first page of Google,
Yahoo and Bing too, using simple seo. Call us on 0845 094 0839. A company
based in Scotland." />
Forget whether or not to put your keyword in it, make it relevant to a searcher
and write it for humans, not search engines. If you want to have this 20 word
snippet which accurately describes the page you have optimised for one or
two keyword phrases when people use Google to search, make sure the
keyword is in there.
I must say, I normally do include the keyword in the description as this usually
gets it in your serp snippet, but I think it would be a fair guess to think more
trusted sites would benefit more from any boost a keyword in the meta
description tag might have, than an untrusted site would.
Google looks at the description but there is debate whether it actually uses the
description tag to rank sites. I think they might at some level, but again, a very
weak signal. I certainly don’t know of an example that clearly shows a meta
description helping a page rank.
Sometimes, I will ask a question with my titles, and answer it in the
description, sometimes I will just give a hint;
It’s also very important in my opinion to have unique title tags and unique
meta descriptions on every page on your site. It’s a preference of mine, but I
don’t generally autogenerate descriptions with my cms of choice either –
normally I’ll elect to remove the tag entirely before I do this, and my pages still
do well (and Google generally pulls a decent snippet out on its own which you
can then go back and optimise for serps. There are times when I do
autogenerate descriptions and that’s when I can still make them unique to the
page using some sort of server-side php.
Tin Foil Hat Time
Sometimes I think if your titles are spammy, your keywords are spammy, and
your meta description is spammy, Google might stop right there – even they
probably will want to save bandwidth at some time. Putting a keyword in the
description won’t take a crap site to number 1 or raise you 50 spots in a
competitive niche – so why optimise for a search engine when you can
optimise for a human? – I think that is much more valuable, especially if you
are in the mix already – that is – on page one for your keyword.
So, the meta description tag is important in Google, Yahoo and Bing and
every other engine listing – very important to get it right. Make it for humans.
Oh and by the way – Google seems to truncate anything over @156
characters in the meta description, although this may actually be limited by
pixel width in 2013.

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Meta Keywords Best Practice

A Bastian of crap and unethical search engine optimisation companies – the
meta-keywords tag. How many crap seo companies mention cleaning and
optimising this tag in their presentations? Companies that waste time on these
waste clients’ money.
<meta name="Keywords" content="seo, search engine optimisation,
optimization">
I have one piece of advice with the meta keyword tag, which like the title tag,
goes in the head section of your web page, forget about them.
If you are relying on meta-keyword optimisation to rank for terms, you’re dead
in the water. From what I see, Google + Bing ignores meta keywords - or at
least places no weight in them to rank pages. Yahoo may read them, but
really, a seo has more important things to worry about than this nonsense.
What about other search engines that use them? Hang on while I submit my
site to those 75,000 engines first [sarcasm!]. Yes, 10 years ago search
engines liked looking at your meta-keywords. I’ve seen OPs in forums ponder
which is the best way to write these tags – with commas, with spaces, limiting
to how many characters. Forget about meta-keyword tags – they are a
pointless waste of time and bandwidth. Could probably save a rain-forest with
the bandwidth costs we save if everybody removed their keyword tags?
Tin Foil Hat Time
So you have a new site….. you fill your home page meta tags with the 20
keywords you want to rank for – hey, that’s what optimisation is all about, isn’t
it? You’ve just told Google by the third line of text what to sandbox you for and
wasn’t meta name=”Keywords” originally for words that weren’t actually on the
page that would help classify the document? Sometimes competitors might
use the information in your keywords to determine what you are trying to rank
for, too….
If everybody removed them and stopped abusing meta keywords Google
would probably start looking at them but that’s the way of things in search
engines. I Ignore them. Not even a ‘second order’ effect, in my opinion.

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Page Title Tag Best Practice

<title>What Is The Best Title Tag For Google?</title>
The page title tag (or HTML Title Element) is arguably the most important on
page seo factor. Keywords in page titles can HELP your pages rank higher in
Google results pages (SERPS). The page title is also often used by Google as
the title of a search snippet link in search engine results pages.
For me, a perfect title tag in Google is dependent on a number of factors;
1.  The page title is highly relevant to the page it refers to; it will probably be
displayed in a web browsers window title bar, and the clickable search snippet
link in Google, Bing & other search engines. The title is the “crown” of a keyword
targeted article with most important keyword phrase featuring AT LEAST ONCE,
as all search engines place a lot of weight in what words are contained within this
html element.
2.  Google displays as many characters as it can fit into “a block element
that’s 512px wide and doesn’t exceed 1 line of text”. So – THERE IS NO
AMOUNT OF CHARACTERS any seo can lay down as exact best
practice to GUARANTEE your title will display, in full in Google, at
least. Ultimately – only the characters and words you use will determine if
your entire page title will be seen in a Google search snippet. Google used
to count 70 characters in a title – but not in 2012. If you want to ENSURE your full
title tag shows in Google SERPS, stick to about 65 characters. I have seen ‘up -to’
69 characters in 2012 – but as I said – it depends on the characters you use.
3.  Google will INDEX perhaps 1000s of characters in a title… but no-one knows
exactly how many characters or words Google will actually count AS a TITLE
when determining relevance for ranking purposes. It is a very hard thing to try to
isolate accurately. I have had ranking success with longer titles – much
longer titles – Google certainly reads ALL the words in your page title (unless you
are spamming it silly, of course).
4.  You can probably fit up to 12 words that will be counted as part of a page title,
and consider using your important keywords in the first 8 words.
5.  Some page titles do better with a call to action – one which reflects exactly a
searcher’s intent (e.g. to learn something, or buy something, or hire something.
Remember this is your hook in search engines, if Google chooses to use your
page title in its search snippet, and there is now a lot of competing pages out
there!
6.  When optimising a title, you are looking to rank for as many terms as
possible, without keyword stuffing your title. Often, the best bet is to optimise for
a particular phrase (or phrases) – and take a more long-tail approach. Yes – that
does mean more pages on your site – that’s the reality in 2012. Content. Content.
Content.
7.  The perfect title tag on a page is unique to other pages on the site. In light of
Google Panda, an algorithm that looks for a ‘quality’ in sites, you REALLY need
to make your page titles UNIQUE, and minimise any duplication, especially on
larger sites.
8.  I like to make sure my keywords feature as early as possible in a title tag but the
important thing is to have important keywords and key phrases in your page title
tag SOMEWHERE.
9.  For me, when SEO is more important than branding, the company name goes at
the end of the tag, and I use a variety of dividers to  separate as no one way
performs best. If you have a recognisable brand – then there is an argument for
putting this at the front of titles.
10.  I like to think I write titles for search engines AND humans.
11.  Know that Google tweaks everything regularly – why not what the perfect title
keys off? So MIX it up…
12.  Don’t obsess! Natural is probably better, and will only get better as engines
evolve. As I said – these days – I optimise for key-phrases, rather than just
keywords.
13.  Generally speaking, the more domain trust/authority your SITE has in Google, the
easier it is for a new page to rank for something. So bear that in mind. There is
only so much you can do with your page titles – your websites rankings in Google
are a LOT more to do with OFFSITE factors than ONSITE ones.
14.  Also bear in mind, in 2012, the html title element you choose for your page, may
not be what Google chooses to include in your SERP snippet. The search snippet
title and description is very much QUERY dependant these days. Google often
chooses what it thinks is the most relevant title for your search snippet, and it
can use information from your page, or in links to that page, to create a
very different SERP snippet title.
15.  Click through rate is something that is likely measured by Google when ranking
pages (Bing say they use it too, and they now power Yahoo), so it is really worth
considering whether you are best optimising your page titles for click-through rate
or optimising for more search engine rankings.
16.  Google has been recorded recently discussing an ‘over-optimisation’ penalty. I
would imagine keyword stuffing your page titles could be one area they look at.
17.  Remember….think ‘keyword phrase‘ rather than ‘keyword‘, ‘keyword‘
,’keyword‘… but think UNIQUE keywords when dealing with single pages. That is
– how many single unique keywords can you include on the page relevant to your
main keyword phrase you are optimising for.

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What is Keyword Research? How to use Keywords?

The first step in any seo campaign is to do some keyword research. There are
many tools on the web to help with basic keyword research (including the
free Google Keyword Research Tool and SEMRUSH). You can use these
tools to quickly identify opportunities to get more traffic:
Example Keyword                    Search Volume
seo tutorial for beginners              1900

seo tutorials                                 1600

seo tutorial pdf                             1000
how to seo a website                      880
seo tutorial step by step                720
how to seo your website                720
google seo tutorial                        320
best seo tutorial for novices           260
free seo tutorial                             210
free seo tutorials                           210
on page seo tutorial                       170
seo tutorials for beginners              170
all in one seo tutorial                     170
seo tutorial video                         140
how to seo website                      140
seo tutorial in urdu                         110
how to seo my website                  110
seo tutorial download                    91
joomla seo tutorial                         91
online seo tutorial                           91
seo tutorial in bangla                      91
seo tutorial free                             73
optimizare seo tutorial                    73
best seo tutorial                             58
basic seo tutorial                           58
bing seo tutorial                             58
step by step seo tutorial                46
beginners seo tutorial course        46
seo tutorial google                       46

Getting a site to the top of Google eventually comes down to your text content
on a page and external & internal link profile. Altogether, Google uses this
analysis to determine whether your no1 in Google or number 32, or de-indexed. There’s no magic bullet.
At any one time, your site is under some sort of filters designed to keep spam
sites out and deliver relevant results to human visitors. One filter may be
kicking in keeping a page down in the serps, while another filter is pushing
another page up. You might have poor content but excellent incoming links, or
vice versa.
Try and identify the reasons Google doesn’t link a particular page.
  Too few quality incoming links?
  Too many incoming links?
  No keyword rich text?
  Linking out to irrelevant sites?
  Too many ads?
  Affiliate links on every page of your site, found on a thousand other
websites?
Whatever, identify issues and fix them. Get on the wrong side of Google and
your site might well be MANUALLY reviewed – so seo your site as if, one day,
you will be getting that review.
The key to successful seo, I think, is persuading Google that your page is
most relevant to any given search query. You do this by good unique keyword
rich text content and getting “quality” links to that page. Next time your
developing a page, consider what looks spammy to you is probably spammy
to Google. Ask yourself which pages on your site are really necessary. Which
links are necessary? Which pages are getting the “juice” or “heat“. Which
pages would you ignore?
You can help a site along in any number of ways (including making sure your
page titles and meta tags are unique) but be careful. Obvious evidence of
‘rank modifying’ is dangerous.
I prefer simple seo techniques, and ones that can be measured in some way. I
don’t want to just rank for competitive terms, I want to understand the
reason why I rank for these terms; At Hobo we try to build sites for humans
AND search engines. Make a site relevant to both for success in organic
listings and you might not ever need to get into the techy side of SEO like
redirects and URL rewriting. Of course, to beat the competition in an industry
where it’s difficult to attract quality links, you have to get more “technical”
sometimes.
There are no hard and fast rules to long term seo success, other than
developing quality websites with quality content and quality links pointing to it.
You need to mix it up and learn from experience. Remember there are
exceptions to nearly every rule, and you probably have little chance
determining exactly why you rank in search engines. I’ve been doing it for over
10 years and everyday I’m trying to better understand Google, to learn more
and learn from others’ experiences. It’s important not to obsess about the
minute seo specifics unless you really have the time to do so!
THERE IS USUALLY SOMETHING MORE VALUABLE TO SPEND THAT
TIME ON.
There are some things that are apparent though.
  Don’t build a site in Flash
  Don’t build a site with Website Frames
  Don’t go mad generating thousands of back links
  Don’t hide lots of text from visitors but show to Google
  KISS – Keep it simple, stupid.

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What is SEO Basics?

If you are just starting out in seo, don’t think you can fool Google about  everything all
the time. Google has probably seen your tactics before. So, it’s best to keep it simple.
GET RELEVANT. GET REPUTABLE. If you are just starting out – you may as well
learn how to do it within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines first.
Don’t expect stellar results without a lot of work, and don’t expect them too fast.
Expecting too much too fast might get you in trouble.
1.  You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing natural or free listings
(SERPS). It’s common for the major search engines to find your website pretty
easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so much easier if your
website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content (via XML
sitemaps for instance).
2.  To stay in Google and other search engines, you really should consider and
largely abide by search engine rules and guidelines for inclusion. With
experience, and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules can be bent, and
which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be avoided.
3.  Google ranks websites by the number and quality of incoming links to a site from
other websites (amongst hundreds of other metrics). Generally speaking, a link
from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page
the link points to. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can
become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Rankings are HUGELY
affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page is on.
4.  I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with ORIGINAL
COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t found before. It
indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start. So – make sure each of your pages has
content you have written specifically for that page – and you won’t need to jump
through hoops to get it ranking.
5.  If you have original quality content on a site, you a lso have a chance of
generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is found on other websites,
you will find it hard to get links, and it probably will not rank very well as Google
favours diversity in its results. If you have decent original content on your site,
you can let authority websites, those with online business authority, know about
it, and they might link to you – this is called a quality backlink.
6.  Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be
ignored by search engines (the attribute nofollow effectively cancels out a link, for
instance)
7.  Search engines can also find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can
also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted my site to a
search engine in the last 10 years – you probably don’t need to do that.
8.  Google spiders a link to your home page, finds your site, and crawls and indexes
the home page of your site, and will come back to spider the rest of your we bsite
if all your pages are linked together (in almost any way).
9.  Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms
until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google – I think this depends
on the quality of the incoming links. Sometimes your site will rank high for a while
then disappear for months. This is called the “honeymoon period”.
10.  Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site – and
this classification can have a DRASTIC effect on your rankings – it’s important for
Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do you want to
classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a domain holding page, or a
small business website with a real purpose? Ensure you don’t confuse Google by
being explicit with all the signals you can – to show on your website you are a
real business, and your INTENT is genuine. NOTE – If a page exists only to
make money from Google’s free traffic – Google calls this spam.
11.  To rank for specific keyword searches, you generally need to have the words on
your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) – ultimately it is
all dependent on the competition for the term you are targeting) or in links
pointing to your page/site.
12.  As a result of other quality sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain
amount of PageRank that is shared with all the internal pages that make up your
website that will in future help determine where this page ranks.
13.  Yes, you need to build links to your site to acquire more Google Juice. Google is
a links based search engine – it does not quite understand ‘good’ content – but it
does understand ‘popular’ content.
14.  When you have Google Juice or Heat, try and spread it throughout your site by
ensuring all your pages are linked together
15.  I think your external links to other sites should probably be on your single pages,
the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the
higher pages in your site (the home page, your category pages).It’s not JUST a
numbers game, though. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could
be all you need. Of course, the more “trusted” links you build, the more trust
Google will have in your site. It’s pretty clear that you need MULTIPLE trusted
links from MULTIPLE trusted websites to get the most from Google.
16.  Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with keywords in it – not,
for instance, in blogrolls or sitewide links. Try to ensure the links are not obviously
“machine generated” i.e. site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from
pages that in turn, have a lot of links to them.
17.  Internally, consider linking to your other pages by linking to them within text – I
usually only do this when it is relevant – and recently, I’ll link to relevant pages
when the keyword is in the title elements of both pages. I don’t really go in for
auto-generating links at all. Google has penalised sites for using particular auto
link plugins, for instance.
18.  Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all
search engines when you want to feature for specific key-terms. i.e. “seo
scotland” as opposed to http://www.hobo-web.co.uk or “click here“.
19.  I think the anchor text links in internal navigation is still valuable – but keep it
natural. Google needs links to find your pages. Don’t underestimate the value of
a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for
instance how many words Google counts in a link, but don’t overdo it.
20.  Search engines like Google ‘spider’ or ‘crawl’ your entire site by following all the
links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your
pages. Google will crawl and index your pages, and within a few days normally,
begin to return your pages in search results (SERPS)
21.  After a while, Google will know about your pages, and keep the ones it deems
‘useful’ – pages with original content, or pages with a lot of links to them. Ideally
you will have unique pages, with unique page titles and unique page
descriptions if you deem to use the latter – most search engines don’t use the
meta description when actually ranking your page for specific keyword searches
if not relevant –  I don’t worry about meta keywords these days.
22.  Google chews over your site, analysing text content and links
23.  If you have a lot of duplicate crap found on other websites Google knows about,
Google will ignore your page. If your site has spammy signals. Google will
penalise it.
24.  You don’t need to keyword stuff your text and look dyslexic to beat the
competition. Generally it’s good to have keywords in links, page titles and text
content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density. Keyword
stuffing is a tricky business.
25.  I prefer to make sure I have as many UNIQUE relevant  words on the page.
26.  If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too  – but again, it
depends on the site in question. Who you link to, or HOW you link to, REALLY
DOES MATTER – I expect Google to use your linking practices as a potential
means by which to classify your site. Affiliate sites for example don’t do well in
Google these days without some good quality backlinks.
27.  Many SEOs think who you actually link out to (and who links to you) helps
determine a topical community of sites in any field, or a hub of authority. Quite
simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but
at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as
search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages, but I
have never really seen any granular ranking benefit (for the page in question)
from linking out.
28.  Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” – in Google’s
opinion. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site, but again.
I usually err on the safe side – I go for massive diversity in my links – to make
them look more natural. Actually, I go for natural links in 2013 full stop.  Google
can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and
individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary”.
29.  Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and who you link to.
30.  Google decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can
help Google by linking to your important pages.
31.  It is of paramount importance you spread all that Google juice to your sales
keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site
pages, so Google does not “demote” starved pages into its reserves, or
“supplementals”.
32.  Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and via
the template navigation on the site.
33.  Focus on RELEVANCE first. Then get REPUTABLE. The key to ranking in
Google is actually pretty simple.
34.  Every few months Google changes it’s algorithm to punish sloppy optimisation or
industrial manipulation. Google Panda and Google Penguin are two such
updates, but the important thing is to understand Google changes it’s algorithms
to control its listings pages. The art of SEO is to rank high without tripping these
algorithms – and that is tricky! 

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What is SEO?

There are a lot of definitions of SEO (Search engine optimisation) but let’s
face it, SEO in 2013 is about getting free traffic from Google, the most popular
search engine in the world.
SEO is about KEYWORDS and LINKS. It’s about RELEVANCE and
REPUTATION.
Search engine optimisation is about a web page being relevant enough for a
query, and being trusted enough to rank for it. It’s about ranking for popular
keywords for the long term, on merit. You can play by ‘white hat’ rules laid
down by Google, or you can choose to ignore those and go ‘black hat’ – a
‘spammer’. But MOST SEO TACTICS still work, for some time, on some level,
for a period of time, depending on who’s doing them, and how it’s deployed.
Whichever route you take, know that if Google catches you trying to “modify
your rank”, then they will class you a spammer, and your site will be penalised
(you won’t rank for important keywords). Google does not want you to try and
modify your rank. They would prefer you paid PPC to do that. The problem is
– traffic from SEO is valuable. VERY valuable. And FREE, once you’ve
pleased Google enough.
In 2013, you need to be aware that what works to improve your rank can also
get you penalised (faster, and a lot more noticeably). In particular, Google is
currently waging war on unnatural links and manipulative tactics if it detects
them.

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