SEO Guide for Beginners

In part three of our SEO for Beginners Guide, we’ll talk about the construction on your site. Spiders and Bots don’t like sites that are not optimized for users. To see if your site passes the test, you can take this simple quiz.

10 Questions for Site Optimization

1. Does your site have any broken links? It’s been said that search engines degrade site rankings if there are broken links. Get rid of any broken links.
2. Have you validated your HTML & CSS? Your code should meet minimum requirements of functionality and properly display to be spidered and cached be the engines. Guidelines have been laid out by WC3 and they provide a number of great validation tools.
3. Do you have web pages greater than 150K? Search engines generally do not cache pages greater than 150K. In addition, smaller file size also mean faster download speed and happier users.
4. Do you have Javascript & CSS in your header? To improve their speed and efficiency search engines program their spiders to give up easily if they have problems with a page or if they have to wade through too much code to find the relevant content. This also pushes your keywords down the page. Move JavaScript and CSS out of the header and into external files.
5. Are your keywords in your title tags? Keywords should be in your page title and in the first paragraph of your web page. Key words in title tags helps rankings and drives click-through-rates from the search results page.
6. Are you making the most of your meta description tag? Although search engines don’t use met tags, including the meta keywords tag, in their page rankings, the meta description tag still plays an important role. Several search engines use this tag as the site’s description displayed just below the clickable title link. Although meta description tag may have little of no impact on the page rank, it can impact the number of visitors th page receives if it’s well written.



7. Are your keywords in your content? Make the primary terms and phrases prominent in the document but don’t stuff it. Also, be sure to keep text flow together rather than break it up with coding by using tables instead of CSS.
8. Have you checked your writing quality? Great writing helps rankings as well as makes happy visitors. Make sure the content is quality because search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help find quality writing. Copyblogger has great articles about how to use a journalistic format to improve your copy.
9. Have you created a sitemap? Create a sitemap page and have it link from all major pages on your site. The sitemap should list links to all pages 2 clicks from the homepage.
10. Are you using human friendly URL’s? The URL should be descriptive and brief as possible as well as include keywords if possible. URL’s shouldn’t contain more than 2 dynamic parameters.

What Next?

Next: How to Make Your Site Standout (coming soon)

Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work

Lesson Two: Six Steps to Effective Keyword Search

Back to SEO for Beginners.

The second installment of Stickyseed’s SEO for Beginners Guide, we’ll show you how to find and use the best keywords for your site. Keywords are how people find your site. If you don’t invest time into researching the best keywords for your site, the wrong terms and phrases will hurt you in lost rankings and no one even finding you.

To give you the best ROI on your site, here’s some simple steps to take.

Six Steps to Effective Keyword Research

1. Brainstorming. Think of all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. Come up with any words that describe all the services your site offers but avoid overly generic terms like ’shoes’ or ‘clothes’. Be sure to include alternate spellings, wordings and synonyms too.
2. Survey Your Target Audience. Get in touch with past or present customers and ask them for input. This is an excellent way to expand your list.
3. Take advantage of keyword tools. Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site. There are a number of great tools that offer concrete data about a keyword trend. Here’s a few, starting with the freebies:
   • Google Adword Keyword Tool
   • Google Suggest
   • Thesaurus.com
   • Check Traffic Tool
   • Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool
   • SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
   • Wordtracker
   • Yahoo! Search Marketing
4. Finalize your list. You should have a lot of data now about all your keywords. Put it into a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and help you narrow down your focus to 10-20 highly successful keywords.
5. Use Your Keyword List. Include three to five related keywords per page. Any more and you run the risk of diluting your page and ruin your rankings. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming.
   Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:
   • Title Tag
   • Meta Description Tags
   • Meta Keywords Tag
   • Headings
   • Alt text
   • Anchor Text/ Navigational Links
6. Monitor Results and analytics. After a few weeks of giving the bots a chance to pick up your keywords, use your analytics tool to monitor results. Google Analytics is an excellent freebie. It will give you hard data about how your keywords are performing in regards to increasing traffic, activity and conversation rates. Pull out the words that aren’t doing much, and put in new ones as your site grows. This is an ongoing process that needs plenty of weeding and watering.

What to Measure

• Conversion Rate. This is the percentage of users searching with a keyword that convert by clicking on an ad, but a product or complete a transaction. They were converted to another level other than looky-loo.
• Predicted Traffic. This is an estimate of how many users will be searching on a given keyword or phrase.
• Value per Customer. This is the average amount of revenue earned per customer using a keyword or phrase.
• Keyword Competition. This is a rough measurement of the competitive environment and level of difficulty for a given term/phrase.

Next: 10 Questions for Site Optimization

Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work

Back to SEO for Beginners.