SEO in 5 basic steps – Search Engine Optimisation
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
SEO is the process of fine tuning a website to increase it’s visibility on search engines.
Ever wondered if your site could appear on top of search results on a search engine like Google or Yahoo? If not then you better start wondering because that is one of the best ways to drive tarffic to your website as you dont have to pay for this traffic. It is free advertising for your site on world’s most popular websites – Google and Yahoo search. SEO can help you get that free organic traffic!
5 simple steps to optimise your website for search engines
I’m trying to create a series of such tutorials that’ll help you learn and implement SEO techniques on your site. I’ll try to give an in-depth knowledge on SEO but it will take time and a lot of post in a series. For now enjoy a small tutorial to make yourself aware on what SEO is and it’s fundamentals. If the fundamentals are clear you’ll never have any problem with SEO no matter what.
The following is what you need to do as the first thing once you launch your site or go through once you have launched a new section on your website. This will also help you optimise your site right from the scratch.
1. Make your site visible
First of all you need to make sure that your site’s content is readable by search engine crawlers. Data collected by these crawlers is sent back to the search engine and used in evaluating your site’s content. Flash, Javascript, AJAX and likes are not readable by crawlers till date. For this you can use HTML in conjunction with CSS to produce text and image effects.
To check how a search engine would see your website you can view your site in all-text mode (done by disabling styles in your browser View) or use a text-only browser. Other than that you can use a search engine simulator like the one here.
Make sure that links on your website are HTML hyperlinks and not Flash or Javascript. The way you link your web pages on your site is one of the most essential factors a search engine considers while rating your web pages and the domain (entire website).
Write original content for the website copy or else you’ll never be able to sustain top rankings on Google, Yahoo or LIVE search.
2. Choose the right Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that users search for on a search engine. Make a list of such keywords that you would want your site or web pages to appear on top for on Google or Yahoo search.Generally, your keywords list should contain the words that make sense for your website’s visitors. If your website is about apples then include keywords about apples not mangoes.
Once you’re done with the list you can see how many times those keywords are searched for; you can do this using this tool. Keyword tools only give an approximate idea about the search volumes for a set of keywords. You can also use such tools for seeing other variations of your keywords that you could include in your list.
A keyword having a high search count will often have high competition because a lot of other websites will be wanting to rank top for those keywords, for an obvious reason. You can check the competition by looking at the number of results found by Google for that search. To get a better estimate search for allintitle:yourkeyword, this will show you the websites that are competing on your keyword.
3. Use the keywords
If a user sees what he search for on your site, does it not make sense? So for this reason we need to place keywords on different places in a web page:
- Page Title: The <title> of your web page should explain the purpose and identity of that page. Write a title no longer than 10 words which also contains your keywords. If the web page is about apples then a title like “Information all about Apples” is good because that’s what inside. Don’t try to fool people by writing “Information – not only on Apples but also Mangoes and Pamela Anderson” because this ain’t going to work mateys.
- Page Heading: The heading or <h1> of your page should be what follows it, just like a newspaper headline. If the page is solely about a Mobile Phone then a heading like “Information on Mobile Phones” is good enough but do not write “Mobile Phones, Computers and Roller Skates” because it won’t make sense.
The idea is to optimise your web pages only for the keywords that make sense for your website’s visitors. The content on your page is for your visitors not for search engines.
- Body Text: The content you write for a page should be written naturally about the topic the page is about. Don’t try to stuff keywords here and there just to optimise the page. If your visitors don’t like what they see then its nothing more than a waste.
4. Links
The way our site is linked plays a very important role in SEO. There are two types of links – internal and external links.
Internal Links are the links that are on your own site and are links to your site’s pages from and to each other. Basically, your site’s navigation collectively comprises of interal links. The anchor texts for these links should contain the main keyword of the page it is linking to. Try and keep anchor texts for internal links small, concise and do not unnecessarily stuff keywords into them. Your site’s navigation is for real humans; let them find it easy to use your site.
External Links are links from other sites to your site or your web pages. Every incoming link from other site to your site is counted as a vote for your site as long as it makes sense for that site’s visitors to come to your site. If your site is about apples then its ok to have a link from a site about mangoes but definitely not from a site about dating and relationships. Worst case, its even ok to have a link to your apple site from a web page about a “Woman’s relationship with an Apple” 
– it is only about the relevance of that link. The anchor text of external links too should contain your keywords.
5. Popularise
This part in SEO is the respiratory system of your Search Marketing plan. Keywords, Content and Links together are the oxygen and popularising your site the mechanism which uses this oxygen to produce a happily functioning breathing website. 
nerdy huh?
In “non-discovery channel” language submit your website url to other sites that may want to add a link to your site. This does not mean you start paying those people to link to your site. Getting links should be natural – if your site is really good then other websites will link to you out of nature because everyone wants to give good references and resources to their visitors.
Did Wikipedia pay anyone to link to them? It happened on it’s own because Wikipedia’s content is a good reference to give.
Submit your web page urls to:
- bookmark and information sharing websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Yahoo Buzz!
- regional and niche web directories – some people often use these directories to find local businesses and interesting sites.
- Dmoz – it is one of the biggest a library of websites added by human editors. Google uses it as it’s directory.
- Yahoo Directory – same as Dmoz but used by Yahoo, it is good too.
- other search engines like MSN/Live, AOL, Ask, Search etc. – this can be done by finding the “Submit a Site” or “Add URL” option on these search engines. Try searching for it on the respective search engine.
Do all of the above with your new website and you would definitely start getting some traffic from Google or Yahoo in 3-4 weeks. Getting to the top will take time and in some cases it takes a lot more effort.
SEO is not a complex procedure, it only requires patience and smart planning.
The above tips are only for beginners. There is a lot more to SEO and Search Marketing; I will try to bring that up soon on this blog.
Until then just sip on this curry!
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8 Responses to “SEO in 5 basic steps – Search Engine Optimisation”
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Great advice, but I disagree with the last statement. SEO is pretty complex when you dive deep into it, and patience and smart planning are only the beginning stages
Smart planning is the complex part in SEO, the actual execution process is only time consuming not intricate
Good stuff. I look forward to your next blog on the subject!
Carl
“regional and niche web directories”…any ideas on how to find a good list of these?
DMOZ? Very difficult, only about 1% of submissions actually get added
Re: Kevinn
http://www.directorycritic.com is a good resource to find niche directories.
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nice post and very informative
Articles like these put the consumer in the driver seat-very iomprtant.