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Since this blog’s main subjects are standards and web design, SEO or Search Engine Optimizing is an important part of the world wide web too. This article will tell you what and how to optimize your websites for all major search engines.
First I’ll give you some information on offsite and onsite SEO and later on I’ll give you some tip how you could improve your websites.
What is SEO?
My definition of SEO is all the work you do to get your website a high(er) search engine ranking. The difference between offsite and onsite is guessable in my opinion. Onsite is making enhancements to your HTML or PHP web pages. The reason for this is very simple, of course, you want a search engine to recognize the important content (titles, keywords) when crawling your site.
If you didn’t optimize your content and design, the SE will collect insufficient data and this might mean you don’t get the visitors you are looking for. Alright, we continue on the offsite term. Offsite SEO isn’t something you do on the page, but its main goal is to make sure SE’s think your site is an important one.
What is Offsite SEO work?
There are different ways, but the most used is link building. When another ‘big’ website links to yours, SE’s will think your page is important. The more links your website gets, the higher your rank is in the search engines. The best for your website is to do both offsite as onsite SEO.
In this article I’ll show you some smart and easy things you could do to improve your page structure. What I show you here below is what I use myself too. Remember, a browser and search engine isn’t a real person!
What isn’t really a subject on SEO, but what is very important for your webpage, is validating your webpage. You first should make sure your site looks perfect in all browsers. You can validate your xHTML here and your CSS here.
Subjects
- Make good use of keywords
- A good title and site description
- The use of H1′s and H2′s tags
- Add ‘title’ tags to links, ‘alt’ tags to your images
Make good use of keywords
When people search on search engines, they search by keywords. If you don’t have enough keywords or even any at all, they will not find you. Don’t use too many either, SE’s can give your website penalties for that. Always try to blend in your keywords in your content. We’ll talk on that later when we get to subject ‘H1 and H2′.
I’ll give you a code you should use in your webpage. A Meta tag. Use this code to point out ‘standard’ keywords for that webpage.
Don’t add to many keywords in the Meta tag. You should use only your most important keywords. This tag should be added between the tags on your webpage.
But the best way to use keywords is to use them in your content. If you are writing a article on Doctypes, you should add keywords like ‘Doctype’ or ‘DTD’ to your content. The search engines will look through your page, and sees a lot of those keywords. This way, search engines can better determine the page is important.
A good title and description
A good title is important too. Let’s say you are looking for web design books, and you search for it through Google’s SE. In this example, result #1 is a website that sells web design books, but the title and description says this:
Title: ‘Writing books, business books for sale now!’
Description: We are selling all different books, from writing books to business.
Result #5 has some other title and description.
Title: ‘Web design books, most subjects available!’ Store name
Description: We are specialists in web design books. We have most books in stock.
What do you think? Do you go for #1 or #5? The most people will go in this case for the one with the better store description and title. This happens all the time on all different subjects, so it is important to have a good title and description.
Usually, I build my titles like this:
Description with my most important keyword or tagline – Sitename
The codes you should use to add a title to your site are these:
Place these codes between the tags.
If you want to add a description to your website too, add the following codes, between your tags too.
The use of h1 and h2 tags
As you already read, your webpage always should have titles and that your content includes keywords too. But there is another way to let SE’s know what a page is about. I’ll explain why to use h1 or h2 tags. h1 h6 tags are headings. H1 is the biggest, and the smallest. H1 defines the most important heading, in our case, the most important keyword. Using h1′s on your page, you’ll tell search engines this is the ‘content heading’ and one of the most important lines of content.
Therefore h1 should always include your head keyword. H2′s is the most important heading after h1. You should use these in your content as ‘subheadings’. The keywords that aren’t your websites top-priority should be included in this heading.
Add ‘titles’ to your links and ‘alts’ to your images
When someone rolls over your link, they will not see any ‘description’. When you roll over an image, you might see an ‘alt’ text. When you want to call for an ‘alt’ on links, you should use ‘titles’. This title is better for your website’s accessibility and is a great for search engines too.
Think of it this way. You are getting an extra free keyword you don’t even see on your webpage! The SE’s won’t recognize it as an extra keyword, but they see it as clearing up what the link is linking to.
If you want to add a title tag to your link, please follow this way:
SEO Lesson
You see you have got 3 times the word SEO now. If this was your keyword, you simply have one extra in the link its ‘title’.
This same trick goes with images. Now, don’t use a ‘title’, but use an ‘alt’ tag instead. When you know roll over an image, it’ll clear up what the image is about to the search engines. And you get your extra keyword(s).
You’ve hit the SEO jackpot three times.
Conclusion
If you haven’t thought of points like these before, study this article. It’ll help you develop your websites as they become visible in the search engines. Remember, you should do offsite SEO work too. Let me know what are your thoughts on this subjects, and possible improvements.
Thanks for reading!
There are strong arguments for validating code and CSS, but is it really so neccessary for SEO?
Don’t take on that point to hard. It is intended for the less experienced, to make them understand validating a webpage is an important part of building a good website. I’ll change this in the article. Thank you for your comment.
Edit: Changed in the article.
Nice Article.
I am a noob and this article is really useful…10x man…
Thanks man! That helped out alot
appreciates….expecting some more !!!
Good tutorial. You covered the basic points. Can we expect few complex ones? Thanks.
Appreciate all the comments made!
@Abhijit, thanks for your comment. Do you have a subject for a complex tutorial? If not, I’ll find something myself and see what I can do, just hold on.
Dear Stefan,
I would like you to write something on offsite SEO. Like about link exchange, directory submissions …etc. These are the factors which beginners like me have less knowledge about. So I can call them complex ones.
Thanks. All the best…!!!
@Abhijit, I’ll write something about it soon. Thanks for replying.
[...] but these are great to start with. When you have enjoyed reading this, read my article on Onsite Search Engine Optimizing as well, because that’s a good attentions point too. Thanks for reading and watch out for the [...]
Thanks Stefan….I recently read your article. A good one. Keep on writing. Thanks.
Great you liked it. I will keep on writing, you keep on coming back! Thanks
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Great article, it described very well the basic of SEO. great stuff.
this was a great read, i am new to SEO.. so any extra refs are great. keep em coming..many thanks
Thanks guys!
Hello Stefan,
I just read your article and also about your tip about ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags used for text-links and images.
I don’t agree that the alt-text (for images) is meant for SEO purposes. The main function for the alt-tag is that text-based webbrowsers also can understand the meaning of an image (they don’t see). That is the main purpose of the alt-tag. It is a misunderstanding (but a welcome profit) that it must be used for SEO purposes.
By the way, designing a website should be done for multiple browsers. Firefox for instance, doesn’t show the alt-tag text when pointing your mouse over a picture. The reason that MSIE does it, is because they handle the alt-tag in a wrong way (like MSIE is doing a lot wrong when using correct CSS).
If you want to use an alt-tag for images, but wants also that the image shows a so-called tool-tip, then you also have to use the title-tag for an image (source: W3C).
By the way, it’s great to see so much useful information on your blog!
kind regards,
Bart
Hello Bart,
Great comment, thanks!
What you tell about the alt-tag is true, of course. Text-based webbrowsers can understand the meaning of the image, as well as search engines. Search engines don’t know what the image displays as well, but when using the alt-tag for SEO purpose, your search engine knows what that image means. Just my thought on that part.
The part your wrote about MSIE is completely right. I completely hate how CSS is rendered by IE.
Thanks again for your tip and nice words. Good to see a fellow Dutchman on my blog.
Groetjes,
Stefan
Great article. Thanks a lot for the tips.
[...] but these are great to start with. When you have enjoyed reading this, read my article on Onsite Search Engine Optimizing as well, because that’s a good attentions point too. Thanks for reading and watch out for the [...]
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What is an SEO friendly web site ? How can any person make his site SEO frinedly or how can a person make an SEO friendly web site
A SEO friendly website is a website search engines are able to scan very easy. The easier it gets, the better your site gets included in the search results!
Very nice article. You covered some very useful tips.
Don’t forget the importance of one way link building when working on your offpage seo.
Nice
I have just read your blog on Offsite SEO and now this blog on Onsite SEO. They both give very informative information on the subjects.
Are you going to write about any more advanced SEO techniques?
Thanks again
I hope you don’t mind my link title
Hey great seo article, over a year old now and all still stands! Great reference material, ty.
Excellent on-site optimization tips. I know a number of pages on my own site that could use a checkup about how SEO-friendly they are. I’ll be following this checklist when I get to that!
hey, good stuff here, thanks for sharing this. if you have time check out my post on this topic as well. Making Your Blog SEO Friendly I have been talking about some regular update of quality content.
I was surfing around to find some good tips for begginers how to setup good blogs to get good SERP ranks. It seems I got some good tips here!
Keywords in the URL were deemed to be quite important in the past, but Google recently announced that dynamic URLs were the way to go foreward. This probably means that URL keywords don’t have the same weightage as they used to.
@Waqar – Yes I have heard that announcement too. Let’s see what happens. This article is written some time back, so things have changed a bit!
It’s amazing that something like 90% of companies don’t bother with proper on-site SEO. I also agree with Bart’s comments – cross-browser compatibility is important – Firefox renders CSS correctly, IE doesn’t which is a pain. As always, quality content is key.
One thing I have not come across is whether or not it is worth your time to make your website “safe search” friendly. There are a lot of kids out there that I wouldn’t particularly target but it couldn’t hurt to have yourself listed at the top of those search engines as there are very few websites on them. Any info one might have would be appreciated. Thanks for the good read.
Good solid information. Would you consider writing anything about link building as that’s always been the toughest part of SEO for me?
I know there’s quite a bit of info on that topic already, but it reaches a point where you don’t know what info is credible?
Thanks for your time.
SEO Optimization is difficult no matter how many ways you try it. It just takes a lot of work.
well this information is very useful. i like it.
Hey Stefan,
I think you have outlined some of the basics pretty well here, but as you will understand, there is a hell of a lot more to it, more so than can be explained in one post, so I forgive you for not going into too much detail
Regards,
Wes