SEO Basics or SEO 101

SEO Basics or SEO 101

So just what are the basics of search engine optimization?

In order to answer this question successfully, we need to first break down just what seo is.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization can best be defined as "on page and off page techniques that reside within the rules set forth by the search engines".

Fortunately for us Google has supplied us with such a document entitled Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, within this document, Google gives us an easy to follow and straight forward guide on exactly what they are looking for in a web page to rank highly.

Here is the basic top 8 elements of on page seo with full descriptions and my thoughts to follow:

1. Unique, Accurate Page Titles
2. Description Meta Tag
3. Friendly URL Structure
4. Friendly Site Navigation
5. Quality Content and Services
6. Good Anchor Text
7. Appropriate use of heading tags
8. Image Alt Text Optimization

Unique, Accurate Page Title:

• Google uses (in most cases) the title of the page in its search results as the anchor text to the page in question. The title of your page should be a very short sentence of exaclty what the page is about and what the visitor should expect to learn more about on that page.

Description Meta Tag:

• Google use (in some cases) the meta description tag of your page as the snippet of page text underneath the link in the results page. I say in some cases because it has been documented that Google can, will and usually does generate snippets on the fly from various portions of your page and even sometimes from pages that link to the document from that documents context.

Friendly URL Structure:

• The search engines do not crawl sites in the same way that users navigate sites and therefore do not require or want things such as session id's as they can confuse the search engines parsers when they try and figure out if the page at /page.php?id=123123123132131313212 is the same thing as /page.php?q=blue+widget&id=23839499239283420, therefore if you use Apache's MOD_REWRITE or an alternative for IIS and rewrite your url structure as /page/search/blue-widget not only is this better for users to navigate and remember but the search engines have what is known as a canonical url. Try it for yourself, ask a friend to remember the first url structure and then ask them to remember the 2nd. The second url structure is defintely much more use friendly which is one of the major things that Google is trying to impress upon us. Build sites for users not search engines.

Quality Content and Services:

• Without quality content and services what are you doing sending visitors to your site for?

Good Anchor Text:

• Anchor Text is the content that you use to point users to a new page. For instance instead of structuring your sentence as "Click here to contact us" you would re-write it as "Find out more about what we have to offer at our contact us page". This gives users and the search engines context regarding what the page is about. Does the word "here" or does the word "contact us" more accurately reflect what the linked to document is about?

Appropriate Use Of Heading Tags:

• Heading tags are H1, H2 through H5 tags and should reflect what the next paragraph(s) are about. I Consider them mini title tags for each sub-section of the page and help define to the user and to the search engines what each section of the page is about. An analog here might be the chapter titles of a book.

Image Optimization:

• The reason for Google including this in their document is to help them give context of what the image is about. As far as I know Google cannot parse context from the image itself, which is why it relies upon the alt text attribute of the image to ascertain what the author thinks the image is conveying.

Join us in our seo forum for further discussion on this and other great topics.

That's All For Now,
The Boca Raton SEO Guy