SEO Basics – at least the way I understand it
- 4 Comment
Since SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a huge topic of discussion and there is a ton of overwhelming information out there, so I thought that I would keep this post very basic.
For an extremely informative article on SEO check out:
Dan Schulz’s post on the Digital Point forums.
Optimizing your site for search engines is an “organic” way to drive traffic to your website, you don’t have to pay for links or beg someone to tell all of their readers about you.
Some of the basics for optimizing your site:
Good Content
- Decide what you are going to write about and then decide on what key words someone might use to search your topic.
- Once you have your list of keywords use a tool like the free keyword suggestion tool from word tracker to test the popularity of those key words.
- Once you’ve found how popular those keywords from your list are you can scrap the old ones and keep the popular keywords (keep in mind that you will be competing with other people doing this also).
- Write your content based on your final keyword list… if your content is good then your readers will stick around.
Use Good Markup
Remember in high school when your papers had to be formatted a certain way, and if you didn’t format it properly Miss Kramugen would take off points. Google is kind of like little ole’ Miss Kramugen in the sense that they may knock off some points if your page isn’t formatted correctly, if nothing else the search spider and your readers will just have a hard time seeing your message.
- If you don’t know how to write good html use something like wordpress or another content management utility.
- If you can’t figure out how to use a content management utility, hire someone to set it up and show you how to use it.
- Once you’re site is setup use the HTML validation tool from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
The two most basic things that I’ve found about SEO are listed above. Write good content around your keywords and make sure you are following proper web standards for coding and design. For even better results use something like CSS markup to keep your design elements separate from the content. This will help the search spiders crawl your content faster and pull more direct key words.
I plan on posting more about SEO in the future, but I just wanted to throw out some of the most basic ideas first before they were washed over with all of the other SEO information I’ve been reading.
Have any other questions about SEO? Ask them in the comment section below and I will try my best to answer them. Maybe we will get lucky and have an SEO guru who will stop by and leave a reply for you.
Other Posts You Might Enjoy
4 Comments on this post
Trackbacks
-
steamykitchen said:
So each time I write a post, I should include keywords in there? How do I incorporate them throughout the text without sounding like a moron?
For example - if I write a recipe for Wonton Noodle Soup, I should keep repeating those words throughout my recipe and post…is that correct?
July 29th, 2008 at 1:03 pm -
entrenewbie said:
Well, that’s where the difficulty lies… no one really knows what the search engine algorithms are.
I’ve seen posts before that were obviously written for SEO where key words were repeated over and over again… Charles Trippy had a great one on http://www.charlestrippy.com where he was complaining about his apartment complex, but I can’t seem to find it.
Now something like that used to work, but I don’t know if the algorithms have changed to where google would ignore repeat keywords like that…. blah… this all makes my head spin.
Let me have a chat with my brother-in-law… he does SEO consulting and he could probably give me a much more straight forward answer…. I will put it in the next SEO post.
My personal advice to you is that you already write great content and I would hate to see that possibly ruined by trying to cram in keywords…. but I know how creative you can be and I’m sure you could find a way to sneak them in there without anyone catching on
July 29th, 2008 at 1:24 pm -
Frank McMillon said:
Hey Keith, just passing through. You have a great looking blog. Keep up the great work.
One thing I can add about SEO (especially Google), they look for new and fresh content. IMO, it is not necessary to repeat a word over and over again. The mere fact the keyword is revelant and is present should be enough.
July 29th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
[...] Comments Last week I talked about some very basic SEO principals. In that post, I had mentioned that one of the first things you need to do is pick the keywords [...]