Beginners Guide to SEO Tips & Tutorial - Part 2

A continuation from our previous chapter of Beginners Guide to SEO Tips & Tutorial - Part 1 which contained all the information a SEO newbie would need.  

Keyword in content

Also known as keyword density, refers to the amount of each keyword within the web page
Web pages must have an good distribution of keywords within each page which must also be related to the H1 and Title tags.
Use the Google keyword suggestion tool to determine popular keywords
Try to use keywords which competitors rank well on
Try using "niche" keywords instead of general keywords. Eg "finance industry" instead of "finance"

Keyword optimisation

This is a long and tedious process but once done properly, results will be seen within months
Highly ranked terms are usually too competitive to be optimised with
Optimising for specific but less searched terms is more targeted and a lot easier
Monitor competitors for their keywords and emulate the successful ones
DO NOT SPAM KEYWORDS

Text Links - Anchor text

Text links are the links which could be clicked on to take you to a different page
Also known as hyper text
When search engine spiders a website, they follow text links to go deeper into a website
They take into consideration the keywords used as the text links (called anchor text)
They then compare the keywords on the page they arrive at for relevancy.
If the page have content which relate to the anchor text, it will get weighted more and ranked higher (highly) during SERPs
Please note that they may take into consideration the text surrounding the anchor text for relevancy

Text Link optimisation

To help with better indexing and relevancy of content, we can construct a better internal linking strategy
Having good anchor text for links will provide the foundation for good internal linking / relevancy
Using specific keywords to describe the linked page will help SE understand what the page is about
Placing the link on a page related page will increase the SE’s trust for relevancy for BOTH pages
Text surround links will help determine the relevancy of both pages so having good content helps

URL - Website Addresses

URL is an address for websites
Having a descriptive domain name helps users remember the website
Descriptive domain names with keywords in the name will most likely appear top 10 on search results
As descriptive domain names are rare and expensive, we must move our keywords down to our "directories" and "file names"
Having keywords in our URL will boost search engine results due to google’s assumption of guaranteed relevancy for that page

As most notable websites are using "dynamic" content, it is hard to have keywords in the URL
A method to change dynamic urls (which uses database IDs) to human legible urls was introduced
This is called URL rewrites

URL Rewrites

Using the method of URL rewrites, we can optimise a URL to contain files made up of keywords as well as directory made up of keywords without physically having the file or directory.
For example http://www.domain.com/2342SD/Big-good-tractors.html could be used to represent http://www.domain.com/article.php?id=234sd
From the above, Big-good-tractors.html does not need to necessary exists on our server, URL rewrite changes that url to another url which is invisible to search engines and users but used by our servers

Having the keywords "Big-good-tractor.html" as the url/file name, would help when someone searchs for "big tractors " or "good tractors".
Having the database ID in the URL does not help as no one will search for a specific ID

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are web pages which contains the complete logical structure of a website and all the links to internal pages.
They are used to help users find what they are looking for quickly
They are also used for better search engine indexing (helps the spider crawl)
Generating a sitemap is worth while for all websites
Note these are not google sitemaps but navigational sitemaps within websites

Sitemap - Taxonomy

Creating a sitemap using a taxonomy method helps decrease using confusion behind folksonomy structures
Helps users define website structure easily
Helps spiders define top most important topics

Sitemap - Folksonomy

Usability nightmare
Fundamentally flawed - similar words "tv, television", Human error (regardless if its deliberate or not), looks like spam, messy and unorganised
Extremely limited relevancy, a article about books on tractors may be tagged with "wheels". Tractors may have wheels but being tagged as "wheels" means nothing to the user

Something to ponder on

A collaboration of folksonomy and taxonomy so that the organisation and systematically structured taxonomy categorisation can be implemented into a user submitted controlled tagging environment.
In short, having a system which allows tagging however controls the level or number of tags a user can contribute and combine same meaning tags etc etc.

Now that you have the necessary ingredients to optimise your website, go ahead and try it. Remember, SEO is not rocket science, all you need is spare time and heaps of trial and error. With persistence comes success, however if you still don't understand SEO, you can contact us and we can help you optimise your site.