A Complete Guide on How To Do SEO For A Website.

A Specific Overview of Search Engine Optimization
This is a comprehensive guide that explains How to SEO Your Website. This tutorial offers an overview of how to optimize your site’s performance in search engine rankings. From how to set up your site to naming pages to creating conversation across the web, this page offers strategies, tips, and suggestions that will make your site a success. Search Engine Optimization, more commonly known as SEO, is the process of making your website easier for search engines to understand. The goal
of SEO is increased ranking for your website, which will result in more
traffic. Engaging in search engine optimization requires a constantly evolving skill set. This guide contains basic practices that have remained relatively constant over time. Many people who don’t understand SEO or the goals of SEO consider it to be spam or manipulation. However if implemented within search engine guidelines, the practice is endorsed by Google
and other search engines. Good SEO results in pages set up in a structured and orderly fashion. The pages will be filled with better information and more valuable content. How Search Engines Works Search engines have programs called spiders which visit web pages to determine what the content of your site is, and to find other links to scan at a later date.

1. Spiders, or web crawlers, scan the content of web pages.
2. They send the results of their scan back to the algorithm to be broken down and analyzed.
3. If the spiders encounter a link to another page or website these links are stored.
4. Eventually other spiders crawl the linked-to pages.
5. Therefore, the more links from other websites and pages your website has, the more frequently your website is visited and crawled.

What Search Engines Look At
Search engines look at a combination of over 200 factors to determine what pages should rank for which queries. These factors include: 1. Information on the web pages (known as on-page factors), such as:

• Page content
• Title heading
• Off-site factors also come into play. These factors incorporate:
  • How reputable is the page linking to you
  • What words are being used to link to you
  • How long the link to you has existed
• It’s the combination of on-site and off-site factors that determine your search engine rankings. Advantages of Good Site Architecture Having good site architecture offers benefits beyond aesthetic considerations, including:
  1. Easy Expansion—Because your site is divided into manageable sections it is easy to add new sections and grow in the future.
  2. Easy Navigation—Intermediate and advanced users can manually manipulate the site’s URL to change sections.
  3. Easy Maintenance—Because the website is divided up into manageable sections it is easier to maintain than a site with a flat structure.
  4. Well-Defined Hierarchy—Pages with more generalized information are at the top of the
     tree. As you navigate deeper into the site, pages present more specialized information.
• Good site architecture requires:
  1. A good understanding of your website’s subject matter.
  2. Knowledge of how users are likely to search for information.
• Keyword Research Keyword research is valuable because it’s a way to learn how your users search for information. Keyword research can also give you a better understanding of the subject your website will be about. When doing keyword research there are a few basic ideas to understand: 1. Singular vs. Plural—Search engines and keyword research tools handle singular and plural terms differently. * Apple will return different search results than Apples. * Understand how your research tool displays and reports singular and plural terms. 2. Word Order and Prominence—The order of the words that are typed into a search box matters, as does the order of the words on a page. * Macaroni and cheese has slightly different results than cheese and macaroni. * Some keyword tools will always list words in alphabetical order, something you should be aware of when doing your research. 3. Head Keywords—Head keywords are usually short one or two word concepts that can have a wide range of meanings. They have a high volume of searches, but the variety of possible meanings makes it difficult to know what the
  user was actually searching for. * An example of head keyword would
  be golf. Was the searcher looking for shoes, clubs or places to play golf? 4. Long Tail Keywords—These are multiple keywords (at least four or five words). These keywords are very specific and signal a clear intent on the users part. * An example of tail keyword would be Mens black Nike golf shoes. 5. There is a wide range of keywords falling between the head and tail. When doing keyword research it’s important to:
• Compile a list of all of your keywords.
• Try to develop clusters around a particular topic or subject.
• These will become the high level directories in your website architecture.

• Generally speaking, it’s beneficial to have keywords contained within your URL structure. Having the keyword in your URL helps search engines
  understand what your page is about and also helps users know what they are likely to find on the page. Consider these two examples and see which you find more useful:

1. example.com/123467/9876/
2. example.com/images/tulips/

1. The best practice is to use a hyphen to separate words.
2. Search engines do have the ability to understand other characters, such as an underscore, but the hyphen is preferred over an underscore for human usability issues.
3. For more information, see Matt Cutts’ discussion on dashes vs underscores.

• Search engines are very limited as to what forms of information they can read and interpret.

1. Currently, they understand text-based content which is directly on the page.
2. If your web application relies on JavaScript, Flash, or some other non-text form of displaying information, search engines will have a difficult time interpreting the content of your pages.
3. Consequently, your search engine rankings will suffer.

• These factors are largely ignored by search engines due to abuse in the past.

1. In some cases having identical keywords and descriptions across an entire website has been shown to be a slightly negative factor in ranking.
2. The meta description will appear under the title when your website shows up in a search engine result.
3. Therefore, create a unique description that is well-written and eye-catching.

• Page headings (also known as H tags) are structural elements used to divide a page into meaningful sections.

1. They number from H1 through H6, with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least.
2. Your page should only have one H1 tag.
3. You can use as many other H2-H6 tags as you want, as long as you don’t abuse them by keyword stuffing.
4. Many people have their H1 match their title tag.
5. You can make them different, which allows you to use a wider array of keywords and to create more compelling entries for humans.
6. By default H tags are large and bold. You can use CSS to make them appear however you’d like on a page.

• News content is content that has a short-term lifespan.

1. News pages can remain relevant for a few hours, or even a few months.
2. Eventually people stop searching for the term and the page will get very little traffic after that.

• Links are the primary method a search engine uses to discover your website, and a key factor in its rankings. Links help search engines determine how trustworthy and authoritative your website is, and they also help search engines figure out what your website is about.

1. Links from trusted authoritative websites tell search engines that your website is more reliable and valuable.
2. A link from websites like CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal are more valuable than links from your local neighborhood garage or realtor.
3. Search engines also look at the anchor text (words that link to your website).
4. When someone links to you with the words blue widget they are telling the search engines you are about the words blue, widget, and blue widget.
5. Links also increase in value over time.
6. The longer a link has been in place, the more effective it is in passing along trust, authority, and ranking power to your website.

• Once your website is built you want to try and acquire links from as many trusted sources as possible in your particular industry. Getting links from websites that are related to your industry is usually more helpful than getting links from websites that are not related to your industry, though every link helps.

1. One of the first places many people start building links is from directories.
2. Most directories have a fee for inclusion.
3. Look for directories that are charging fees because they review each site before deciding whether to accept it.
4. Don’t join a directory that lets in every site that applies; you want one that keeps out low-quality sites.
5. To see if a directory is worth the review fee, check to see how much traffic they are going to send you.
6. To evaluate potential traffic, check to see if the directory page is listed for its particular search term.
7. If the directory is listed, this is usually a good indicator it will send you traffic.
8. If the directory does not rank well for its term, check to see if it’s listed in the search engine index, and how recently it was crawled.
9. You can check the last crawl date by clicking on the cache link on the search engine result page.
10. Pages that are in the index and have been crawled frequently are usually more trusted and will pass some of that value to you.
11. Pages that are not in the index or have not been crawled recently are usually not worth the review fee.

• Paying for links and advertising can be valuable, as long as you follow search engine guidelines.

1. If a link is purchased for the advertising value and traffic it can deliver, search engines approve of the link.
2. If the link is purchased primarily for influencing search engine rankings it is in violation of Google guidelines and could result in a penalty.
3. If you want to buy or sell text link advertising without violating Google guidelines, look for implementations with a nofollow, JavaScript, or intermediate page that is blocked from search engine spiders.

• Once your website is up and running you will want to know how many people are coming to your site, how they are getting there, what pages they are viewing when they arrive and how long they are staying. For this you will need a website analytics package.
• 1. There are a wide variety of analytics packages, ranging in cost from free to several hundred thousand dollars each month.
  2. Each analytics package measures data in its own way, so it’s not uncommon for two programs to have slightly different results from the same set of
     data.
  3. Additionally, each package provides a different level of detail and granularity, so you should have some idea what you are looking for before purchasing a package.
  4. The two main methods of implementation are log files and JavaScript tracking.
• The most commonly used analytics package is Google Analytics.

• When your web server serves a page there is a special code that tells the browser or spider the status of the file served.

1. A 200 response code means the page serves normally.
2. If not configured correctly, some web servers will serve a 200 code even when a file is missing.
3. This can create a problem when search engines index a lot of blank empty pages.
4. A 404 is the response code when a page or file doesn’t exist.
5. To improve usability, set up a custom 404 page with a message explaining what happened, a search box, and links to popular pages from your website.

1. If you employ a tactic that seems to involve tricks or is done primarily to manipulate search engines and artificially inflate rankings, you can be considered to be engaged in blackhat SEO or spamming. This has repercussions for any site you work with, and should be avoided.
2. For more detailed information, review Google’s guidelines.