Search Engine Optimization - SEO Articles for Beginners

Search Engine Optimization

The following articles are meant to aid in the understanding of the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). The articles may also be re-published on other websites, newsletters, e-zines, or in print magazines as long as the authors are given appropriate credit and re-print guidelines are followed.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a website promotion strategy, the goal of which is to get your site to appear at the top of search engine results under keywords or phrases appropriate to your business. For example a site that sells CDs online will want to be found in major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista and AOL under key phrases such as "online CDs," "buy CDs," or "CDs for sale."Below are examples of three major search engines and the types of search results that are attainable through search engine optimization. (Click on any of the images below to view the images in full size.)

Keyword Analysis & Meta Tags

Keyword Analysis - Article and guide on proper keyword analysis. Keyword analysis is the process of determining which search words and phrases are most likely to bring the greatest ROI.

Intro to Meta Tag Optimization - Introduction to Meta Tags with detailed descriptions, and tips on how to properly optimize the title, description, keywords and robots tags.

Advanced Meta tags - Guide to advanced Meta Tags covering HTTP-EQUIV tags, obscure tags, headers, character sets and content types.

Search Engine Optimization Tips

• Use Keyword Rich Anchor Text
• Use ALT Tags
• Use Heading Tags
• Use Bold and Italics
• Use Correct File Names
• Keywords in URL

Keyword Analysis

Definition
Keyword analysis also known as keyword research, keyword analysis utilizes a variety of search engine data to determine which search words and phrases are most likely to bring the greatest ROI to a given website.
A proper Keyword Analysis is always the first step to a solid search engine marketing campaign. The purpose of the analysis is to determine under which search terms your website should be marketed. There are several factors to consider during the keyword analysis process.

Keyword Phraseology
Are people more likely to search in singular or plural? Will they type in first-person verbs (i.e. buy) or verb participles (i.e. buying)? Do they tend to put nouns in front of adjectives and verbs, or verbs in front of nouns and adjectives? Will people search in full sentences or by single words? To find the best keywords for a website it's important to know exactly what people are typing into the search engines. This is the study of keyword phraseology.
A common beginners misconception is that search engines will provide the same results for similar keyword phrases such as: "buy online roses" and" buy roses online." This is absolutely not true. In fact, if you go to Google or Yahoo and try these two searches, you will see that the results are quite different. Obviously, as you build your online marketing campaign it would benefit you to know which term is searched for more.
Part of a good keyword analysis is to carefully determine the exact variations of keywords that are most beneficial to your site.

Keyword Popularity
Keyword Popularity refers to how often a keyword or phrase is searched for. Although certainly important, beginning search engine optimizers often put too much weight on this factor during keyword analysis. Targetedness of a keyword is much more important in keyword selection for almost all industries.
There are several tools that can help you determine a keyword's popularity. The Google and Overture tools are the most popular free tools, and are included on our SEO resources web page. Espotting also has a free tool to determine keyword popularity. All of these resources test only a limited section of searches on the Internet to determine their keyword popularities. They also ignore word order and the difference between plural and singular words in their listings. Anyone serious about keyword analysis will subscribe to WordTracker. WordTracker is not free, but is, predictably, much more accurate than the free services.

Intro to Meta Tag Optimization

An HTML document contains three sections. The first is a Document Declaration Statement which tells the requesting agent what version of HTML the web page is using. The second is the HEAD element which contains the TITLE and META Tags. The HEAD section is meant to give requesting agents general information about the web page. The third section is the body, which is what is translated by your browser into a viewable web page.

Today, there are only a few META tags that are worth your optimizing. Luckily, the list is short:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords
• Robots

The Title Tag

A Title should be informative about the web page content. It should be understandable outside of context. For example, "Introduction" is not a good page Title, but "Introduction to Search Engines" is a good Title. Important: The Title of a page appears as the link to your site in search engine results. Make it something your customers will be likely to click on!

The Description Tag

The description is the second most important element of the HEAD section. Although it is most often not used to determine search engine rankings, the Meta description is sometimes used as the description under your link in search engine results. A good web page description can mean the difference between someone clicking on your link or skimming down to your next competitor.

The Keyword Tag

Keywords have been so badly abused, that many search engine optimizers have declared them dead. Still, even if only a few search engines still use the keyword META tag, every lit bit helps. Keep them short and sweet. Don't repeat a keyword more than twice (some say don't ever repeat a keyword), and don't overstuff your keyword META tags. A good keyword tag has 5-20 well-chosen, succinct phrases that may or may not be separated by commas.

The Robots Tag

A robots Meta tag is meant to instruct search engine spiders or 'bots' in how to index--or not to index--your web site. The default is "index, follow", which means that without a robots META tag, the search engine spiders should assume you want them to index your site and follow its links.