Search engine optimization for beginners

August 8th, 2005 at 7:02 pm

Search engine optimization or SEO is the art of creating pages that attempt to meet the criteria of search engines. The goal is to create pages that are full of quality content and rank high in search engines for specific keywords. Who doesn’t want their site to be highly ranked by search engines?

There are many SEO consultant firms which will promise you top page rankings, results and submissions to thousands search engines and directories. But most of them won’t do nothing more than you can do it yourself. Just follow this basic steps that all search engines are looking for.

1. Quality and fresh content

By writing quality content and adding new content regular, your visitors will come back and eventually they will link to your site. Search engine robots will also visit your site more often once they notice that you update regularly.

2. Use friendly URLs

It’s well known that search engine robots have difficulties with dynamically generated URLs. Friendly, human readable URLs will also help your users to easily remember them.

3. Descriptive titles and real headings

Page title is one of the most important elements on the page. If it is relevant and descriptive, search engines and people can easier determine what each page is about. Don’t ever use the same title for all pages!

Use real text and h1-h6 elements for headings. Avoid using images because search engines don’t pay much attention to them.

4. Valid and semantic correct markup

Validate your (X)HTML and don’t hide your content inside graphics, Flash files or inside JavaScript code. This way your site will not be only search engine friendly but faster to.

5. Incoming links

Incoming links from high ranked pages are very important for SEO. The easiest way to get linked is to write good and quality content.

6. What you should not do

Don’t try to cheat the search engines with link farms, alt text spamming, keyword stuffing, … With the search engines becoming increasingly sophisticated in detecting these techniques it is now more important than ever to know what are considered ethical SEO techniques and what is considered spamming.

7. SEO is much more

These are only the first steps for SEO. If you are going to follow these advices, you sure will be on a good path to improve your search engine rankings.

But at the end try to remember: content is still the king.

For further reading I highly recommend the #1 ranking SEO book (my review) on all major search engines.

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6 Responses to “Search engine optimization for beginners”

This is all really good advice for beginners and experienced bloggers alike.

May I add one more suggestion? Everyone interested in SEO should read Google’s own tips for webmasters.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html

Comment by Hugh Fraser | August 9th, 2005 #
Really very nice tips there… Will help the begginers a lot…

Take care

Manish

Comment by Manish Pandey | September 21st, 2006 #
Hay Help Me i want to Optmize my web site.
When any budy search keyword ” fun “in google

Comment by Harry | February 1st, 2007 #
http://puresexmoves.info x

Comment by Zmajrtf | June 15th, 2007 #
Thanks for this advice. I will apply them in optimizing my site. Hopefully my Watching Ruca search engine optimization website will start to improve its search engine ranking.

Comment by Aris | August 20th, 2007 #
well, what to do if you don’t write in english and it’s very hard to locate your site?

Comment by magnum | September 6th, 2007 #