SEO Tutorial for Beginners: Putting Your Company on the Map

Search engine optimization (SEO in short) is basically comprised by two fundamental strategies:

1) On site SEO

2) Off site SEO

We will examine both aspects in the following paragraphs, focusing first on factors strictly inherent to the web pages in the domain, how they are linked together and we will follow on how to make the site popular and "trusted" on the World Wide Web. Because of the difference in how the different search engines rank web sites, we will determine only the common factors. Very often, the same SEO strategy works in the long term on all engines.

On Site SEO

The first step is to take a look at how the web site is designed. This is an extremely important factor in how the search engines can "read" and rank the site. Let's start with how search engines visit your company' s site and read it to analyze content, navigational structure etc.

-The spiders/robots

Search engines send out what is commonly called "spiders" or "robots" (these are interchangeable definitions) . Although these words sound fascinating and invoke images of little "creatures" crawling the internet, a robot is nothing more than search engine automated software reading a web site partially or in its entirety. This takes us to the next step:

-Make your site spider friendly

The way a spider reads a web page is different from what a human observes when visiting a site. The spider cannot see images, it has a hard time following web pages with frames or following a link with a long string of characters that may change over time because of "dynamic content". On site SEO has to address these issues. If you have frames (those windows within your page), take them out. Either position what is inside into another element such as a table, or move it altogether into another page. If you use Flash, bad news. Flash at this time is not spider friendly. If you need to have a Flash page, make an alternative page in regular html format. Besides, not all users have the flash reader, which is another reason to offer an alternative page. For example, you could have the page index.html as a Flash one and have a link from such page to index2.html. The latter would be the home page made with regular text . This is where the SEO would be. Images, as we mentioned, are not read by SEs. You can create an alt tag to describe what the image is about. Alt tags are important for both spiders as well as people with poor eyesight who cannot see an image well. Also, in case an image does not load on a browser, the alt (alternative text) will be visible.

Other technologies such as Java are not read by search engines either. Having fancy Java applets on a page may be attractive but it will cause the robots to skip the code and go on. If you are using Frontpage to design web sites, be careful that the program does not include any proprietary tags. Finally, Frontpage uses server side extensions to execute certain functions. Whenever the functions are called, the part of a web page using them may not be indexed.

When designing a web site, consider using professional tools such as Dreamweaver. Employ CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to define styles on the page. This will keep clutter code to a minimum and make spidering easier. The cleaner the code, the easier it will be for a robot to go through the text and links.

Your web site will have links to navigate to other pages. A proper internal linking strategy will create a better value in your SEO efforts.

-Internal linking strategy

When you create links to navigate your company site, use complete URLs. Let me explain: instead of i.e. using seo_tutorial.php to link to this page from the AllPCOnline home page, we use the full URL, http://www.seotampa.com/seo_information/seo_tutorial.php. This creates a better relationship within the site. Also, create a site map. A site map is a page with all the links to the pages in the web site so that a spider has a better and easier way to navigate the domain. Same concept here, use full URLs.

Finally, thoroughly check the site for missing links. The dreaded 404 error, page not found, means that there are links that point to a page that does not exist. This is usually because of human mistakes in the design, such as mistyping a URL. 404s are not liked by search engines and users alike. Make sure there are none.

-Anchor text

Anchor text is the description of the URL you will be putting in on a page to link to another. If you wish to point to a page, it is useless for SEO purposes to say "visit http://www.xyz.com"; instead, use anchor text. In this case, if we want to optimize the page or site for "Ipod accessories", make the link read "Ipod accessories". The search engines will rank the link by looking at the key term in the anchor text. This strategy is extremely important for internal and external linking (The latter which will be discussed in the "Off Site SEO"section).

SEO Tutorial Page 2