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Beginners Guide to SEO Tips & Tutorial - Part 1

First part of our short article explaining what SEO is, what its about and how it can help your business grow online. You may notice that the article seems disjointed, much like the notes you print out before you attend a university lecture. This is mainly because these are from a lecture slide which was used to educate businesses on search engine optimisation and marketing.

What is SEO?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is a method to help websites show up on search engines results page (SERPs)
SEO is used to increase website traffic by obtaining higher search results

Why do we need SEO?

Form of free long term advertising
Increase brand awareness
Decrease expenditure on paid advertising campaigns
Increase potential clients as well as sales

Brief understanding of SE

Search Engines (SE) are used daily to find what we need on the internet
SE uses a "spider" to "crawl" the internet for websites
The "spider" reads the websites and indexes it in a database for users to search
Google "Deep crawls" to index the entire website for better internet coverage
"Deep crawls" are dependent on the website’s internal structure

Basics to SEO

Important key points to take note of are:

• Title Tags
• Meta Descriptions
• Meta Keywords
• Image Alt Tags
• Header Tags (h1, h2, h3 etc)
• Keyword in body content
• Text Links (Anchor text)
• URL (website addresses)
• Sitemap (taxonomy or folksonomy)

Title Tags

Title tags are used to display the text on the top panel of your web browser
Titles are weighted heavily as it describes the page’s content
Titles with relevant keywords are ranked higher on SERPs
Notice top searched results have searched keywords in the title.
Order of keywords in title does not matter much

Title tags tips

Title tags have a limit of 66 characters on Google.
Do not repeat keywords in title
Replace "and" with "&" to save characters
Google treat plurals and singulars the same (save space by using plurals)
Try keep the title in correct order, however keywords out of order does not cause much of a penalty
Having the website’s name in the title is not necessary most of the time
Yahoo has a limit of 120 characters (put into consideration)

Meta Description

This is the tag inserted to describe in brief what a specific page is about
The description may also be displayed on SERPs for Google & Yahoo
Limited to 250 characters
Include 3 - 4 most important keywords to describe page

Meta Description Tips

Do not repeat keywords, this would be deemed as keyword stuffing
Accurate describe the page instead of trying to fit all keywords into description
Have different description for different pages, duplicate descriptions will be omitted on SERPs and ranking will be dropped to supplementary

Meta Keywords

A tag to store all keywords used to describe a page
The keywords must not be repeated
Keywords must accurately describe the page
Keywords which appear here must also appear within the Body of the page atleast once
Use maximum of 10-12 keywords.
Remember More is Less.
Keyword tags are rumoured to be completely ignored by Google
Yahoo values these keywords so consideration into this field would be worth while

Image Alt Tags

Search engines are unable to understand a image’s content
Alt tags are used to describe an image to search engine spiders
They are also used as "alternative" text to describe the image in the event where the browser is unable to find the image. Also for text browsers
Optimising images for search engines will help during "image searches"

Image optimisation

Other than use the "alt" tag to describe the image the following could be used as well - using descriptive image file names eg. "medium_size_tractor.jpg" instead of "1231223SD.jpg" - using folder names to categories pictures, eg "tractors" for images of tractors - large sized images gets a higher ranking due to "quality" of image
Image optimisation is especially effective for websites such as Ferret.com, Fatcow.com and Infolink.com

Header Tags (h1, h2, h3)

As with a simple Word document, html also has Header tags/formatting
Initial, these tags are used to format a page to simulate a word document
Currently, Google uses header tags to determine the content of a webpage
H1 should tag the page’s main topic. Each page should only have one main topic
H2 represents the second most important topics
H3 represents the third most important topics and so on

Using header tags will ensure that Google understand what content is on a page
H1 tags are ranked heavily on Google and keywords within these tags are valued more
Never repeat keywords in the H1 tag
To prevent formatting of H1 tags, CSS could be used
Using effective and descriptive H1 and Title tags will most likely give a significant boost in search engine rankings (SERPs)

Stay tuned for part 2 of this two part beginners tutorial to Search Engine Optimisation.