We are happy to present this FREE search engine optimization guide for beginner and intermediate webmasters. Following these SEO lessons you can build your own successful website that can attract search engine traffic even if you are starting from zero. The ultimate goal of this guide is to help your raise your website's search engine ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN safely for your own target keywords.
SEO is not hard and it’s definitely not an elite skill to be only mastered by the “gurus of internet marketing”. In the field of SEO, anyone can claim to become a “guru” overnight and unfortunately a lot of people get duped into the search engine marketing hype or the latest SEO trick. This guide will clear the air and put you on a foundation of SEO knowledge you can build upon. With the right information at your fingertips there is no limit to making your website rankings soar.
SEO in 12 Steps
Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
If you think META tags still rule, you need to read this
manual
Some not so honest webmaster that came before you in the 1990s used META tag spamming
and other web page manipulation techniques to get higher rankings. The search engines got
the message loud and clear, and answered back with a set of algorithm changes that are still
evolving today. The Meta tags were slowly phased out as reliable ways to determine the
relevancy of a web page by the major search engines by the late 1990s. Currently, the META
description tags only real value is for website owners to succinctly describe their sites in the
search results. It no longer has any ranking relevance at all.
So now the search engines have the upper hand, and dishonest webmaster have a much
harder time manipulating the search results. Of course there are still a lot of people out there
who can game the search engines for at least a few weeks or months until their sites are
penalized by the engines. At that point, they simply register a new domain and start over
with a new link farm, blog spamming, or a new hot off the press "black hat" SEO technique
the search engines haven't discovered yet.
Avoiding the bad apples of SEO
We hope you are here because you want your website to do well on the search engines for a
long time and not just for a day or two. The search engines continue to challenge even
seasoned SEO professionals, but by no means is search engine optimization an "elite" skill
only a handful of people in the world can master. Although a lot of Internet marketers are
pushing some new secret formulas for gaming the search engines, the fact is there are none
if you want to ensure your site's long term success. In every market we can find snake oil
sales men who are peddling the next miracle cure to your problems, and the Internet
marketing world is no exception.
Just take a look at this typical claim below.
The sales pitch is always the same. They say you are missing a key ingredient in your web
promotion campaign and only they know what it is. Or they flaunt in front of you affiliate
checks or Clickbank earnings reports to convince you they know the next big SEO secret that
1
helped them earn a pile of money. Did you ever notice, there is also a sense of urgency in
these offers. If you don't buy their e-book or spam generator gizmo today you are going to
miss the boat.
SEO is not a secret, but a discipline that can be learned by anyone with patience and
practice. Yes, that includes even you.
How can I master SEO?
? Dedicate sufficient time to learn the fundamentals of SEO and search
engine guidelines. If you don't have the budget to hire a SEO to do the work for
you, you will need to have a fair amount of time on your hands to understand the
most basic SEO techniques. This manual could take only a few hours to read, but
we guarantee it will take a few weeks to really sink in even after a few re-reads.
? Master keyword research techniques. Imagine if you were the owner of a retail
store on a busy street, and your store didn't have a sign. You would probably get a
lot of people who come into your store just out of curiosity, but would they find
what they are looking for? Most likely not. It's the same with the search engines
and keywords. If you optimize your site for the wrong keywords, you will get a lot
of lookers and no buyers.
? Understand web design and HTML at a very basic level and learn a
WYSIWYG HTML editor such as Dreamweaver. If you can't make changes to
your web pages and upload them, there is no chance of improving its relevance
through keyword optimization. You don't need to have complete control over the
website, as you may work with a template based CMS (Content Management
System), but you need to be able to make modifications to the Title tags, META
description and the body content. If you have a web designer who makes the
changes for you, that's perfectly fine as well.
? Learn to write and inject keywords into web content and HTML elements.
You don't need to be an expert writer to create well optimized keyword rich content.
As long as you understand you potential visitors' needs and wants, writing search
engine optimized web copy can be learned by anyone. The important thing to
remember is to always write for your web audience first, and then tweak your copy
to incorporate your target keywords.
? Dedicate enough time to grow their website content by a few pages a
week. Most small business websites stop expanding their web content after 45
pages, which also include some not so relevant pages like privacy policies, contact
us page, etc. Websites with more relevant informational pages do better on the
search engines. So commit to writing at least one new page per week on a topic
that answers some common questions your visitors may have. Begin with "how to
tips, "top 10 lists, and "did you know articles" to start your creative juices flowing.
? Grasp the concepts of links and execute a link building plan. If you were a
hiring manager for a large company, would you hire someone without checking
their references? The references provide some tangible way to validate the
candidate's skills. Links are the equivalent to references on the web. The search
engines use links as validation of another website's value and quality on a specific
search topic. The more "citations" the search engines find from reputable websites
linking to another site, the higher they rank them. It's important to develop a sharp
"eye" for valuable links from the beginning that can push your site past your
competitors.
? Remain patient even in the face of sudden ranking drops and continue to
learn more about SEO each day. Overreacting to ranking changes and undoing
all the previous work is the single most reason new webmasters fail at SEO. If your
site is only a few months old, you need to give yourself and your site at least a year
to attain reasonable ranking. As long as you follow the safe optimization and "white
hat SEO" link building techniques we describe in the following chapters, any ranking
fluctuation will be only temporary and there is no reason to change course. Educate
yourself daily by subscribing to SEO blog feeds, read SEO forum posts and expert
Spoon-Fed SEO for GrownUps
Page 2 of 127
articles. You can find some of the most popular SEO resources at the bottom of this
page.
What's so secretive about search engines?
"SEO"
"Keywords"
"SERP"
"Page Rank"
"Back Links"
What do all these terms mean? Well, that depends on when you first realized your website
needs search engine traffic in order to attract visitors to grow your business. The terms
above are common knowledge to most webmasters who have at least visited a few top
search engine marketing portals, SEO forums, or read at least one e-book on SEO. If you are
unfamiliar with these terms, don't despair. We understand the confusion about the search
engine optimization process, and we are here to guide you with an easy to follow road map.
Search engines are still very much misunderstood by most webmasters because the search
engines don't publish the exact methods they use to rank websites.
If you are serious about your website's visibility, you owe it to yourself to learn as much as
you can about the most effective and safe methods to get top ranking on Google, Yahoo!,
and MSN. What you have to realize is search engines actually need your website for their
survival and profitability.
The commercial aspect of the Internet has created an entirely different set of problems for
the search engines. Search engines existed long before Google came along in libraries,
research institutions, and government facilities. In those early days, the document retrieval
process consisted of mainly looking at the content of the documents without any external
influences and links. The Internet explosion has single-handedly created the race to invent
the "smartest" search engine that is able to find the "diamonds in the rough. The diamonds
being the truly valuable web content that is relevant to user queries, and the rough being the
junky low quality deceptive web pages that try to mislead the search engines. Organizing the
billions of web pages and its content into meaningful, relevant well sorted search results is
an immense task even for Google.
Think of search engines as the editorial watch dog of all content on the web. As chief editors,
it's the search engines job to retrieve the most suitable web pages in response to a user
query. The search engines make money by displaying ads next to the natural search results
returned. This is why their search relevancy is the key to their survival. The more relevant
the search results are, the more people will make them their favorite search tools. Since
about 2001, Google has been doing a fantastic job at returning the most relevant results and
has been rewarded with hoards of advertisers bidding on keywords making them a pile of
money year after year. In order to keep their search results relevant, the search engines
have to ensure there is a level playing field among websites. They do this by frequently
tweaking their algorithms to find bad apples that don't play by the rules.
This short tutorial will try to take you through the necessary steps to build a site the search
engines will love and reward you with high ranking(s). And finally, this tutorial would not be
Spoon-Fed SEO for GrownUps
Page 3 of 127
complete if we also didn't warn you about the inherent risks of trying to trick or game the
search engines with different spamming techniques to get ahead of the pack.
