BlaineSch's SEO Tutorial

[BlaineSch]

BlaineSch's SEO Tutorial

First of all lets just get this straight. I do not claim to be an "expert" by far on this subject. I know some tricks which I have learned from other tutorials and a few I have picked up myself. I will simply go over things I would suggest you do for your website to help it in the long run. Not always directly dealing with SEO but to help it overall. If you are not familiar with what SEO is it is called "Search Engine Optimization" which basically is a bunch of tips and tricks people use to have better rankings, call PageRank, in various search engines like Google or Yahoo or MSN's Bing.

Why Validate?
There are lots of things to consider when building a website, this in my opinion is not one of them. Most tutorials I have read through would say stuff like "Validate your Code!". Just by looking at different sites I believe this is a waste of time unless you are offering HTML services. Out of Yahoo, Google, and Bing, none of them passed. If they are the major search engines and they do not care then I doubt you should care either.

The HTML Stuff
When I build a website I try to keep in mind that it would be very difficult for a search engine to tell that a span with a class should have more emphasis than another span with a different class. I try to make sure I use h1-6 tags for more emphasis instead of spans. That way search engines can tell what words are more important. I also try to describe each image with alternate (alt) text, and each link with a title description as well. Meta tags are a way of the past but most sites still use them and I recommend still using them as well. Here is an Meta Tag Generator, and here is a Keyword Generator for you to use to help you with this part of it.

Unique Content
Unique content is a must for all websites. If you have a bunch of duplicate content you site will be marked as spam from search engines and you will get a VERY low ranking. If you do not have much text on your website try having a professional blog on there as well. If it is an image website with just a bunch of images you will get a low ranking even if you have alternate text and stuff since almost all of your pages look exactly the same in the HTML part of it. It is not hard to write unique content about a particular subject at all. If writing is not your strong suit then I would sugest finding a freelance content provider.

Make sure a lot of your pages do not contain the same content as well. Even if it is the same page say "page1.php?ssid=123" and "page1.php?ref=http://www.google.com" Google will cache them both and start marking your unique content as duplicate content which may result in a spam flag on your site. Some other things I would just like to point out is frames. I hate them, never use them, they will never come in handy that much, they are annoying in every situation. Also, do not forget to spell check everything you write. Incorrectly spelled words are very annoying to lots of people and makes you look unprofessional. Try and throw the keywords you picked above in the articles and things you make.

Digg what?
Most websites offer users the ability to "digg" their page. I find this very refreshing. This does not specifically help your SEO but it will increase traffic which I believe Google and others may use an estimate on traffic to determine relevancy as well. I have seen a few websites with a "Submit bar" or whatever you want to call it which will allow you to submit that page to like 10 websites. If it is a good page, why not also allow the users to email the page to a friend, allow them to comment on the page, and even even have an easy for for users to "Link Back" to the page by providing them with the direct link. Here is a free script I found just by doing a quick Google search: Add to Bookmarks.

Links too and from
Links are very powerful in SEO. When the age of Google began, they simply saw sites that contained a keyword 100 times getting a higher rank which is obviously spam, so they figured it one site linked to another site that site was less likely spam. In my opinion the more links you have to your site the better, most people end there, I also believe that you should have sites linking to relevant sites yourself. Some people will get a few sites linking to their site and that's it, If Google visits your site, then realizes it has nowhere else to go it stops and I believe this will hurt your PR/SEO. You should link to relevant sites as well. When writing in a blog or something I usually link to sites that I may reference or just randomly linking too or a wiki page about a word or phrase I do not want to explain.

You should also have a "link back" feature. I have seen Google blog do this and found it to be a wonderful idea to manage external links. Basically if they link to page1 then page1 would link to it in return. I set it up so I approve domains, not every page cause that would be impossible, but basically if "domain1.com/page1.html" links to me and then "domain1.com/page2.html" links to me as well I have already approved domain1.com so I do not need to approve it again. I may post the script for this if somebody asks for it.

Getting Links
This can be a costly experience for most, but if you look at it the right way there are lots of ways to do this for free. If you are looking to pay for it, go to my "Advertise" section. There are many ways to go about doing this part of the process under a nice budget. One would be finding link exchanges which basically mean you agree to put a link on your site, to their site and vise versa. Others ways would be to go to a web forum or somewhere that allows signatures and things and be an active user, do not just be an active spammer, try and post unique content on their site as well. Even if your site has unique content, going on a forum that is the same subject like an article on a "Programming" forum would also help your "Freelance" website. If some of your posts have unique content and Google decides to index the page. Try putting a link in your signature on your email as well, this can be very helpful to getting a few more people to your website. Try making a unique article somewhere and posting it, or making a Wiki page that would allow a link to your site for a reference or something. I would discourage link directories, mainly because it goes against a previous statement I made. Most directories do not have relevant or unique content and probably do not have many links going back to them.

Advertising
This subject should be a tutorial of it's own so I will make it brief. Advertising is a big part of how you get customers to your website, and possibly how you make money from them. There are many advertising services out there, like Adsense or Adwords. To make money from your website if you do not offer a service you may want to put ad's on your website which is perfectly normal, but where do you place them? What colors work best? I believe that the more people see the ad, the more likely they will click it, so if the page is stretching down, then put the ad going down so its more visible while they are reading. With colors, usually I see people "Blend it in" like if they have a website with a black background and white text they realize if they put that kind of ad in the middle of their article they will get more links, because it does not look like advertising but relevant links to other websites. I would recommend making a rotators of ads and colors and see which ones work best.

Long and Short URL's
I have heard lots of blabbing about URL's recently. My opinion on these is very very simple actually. I would say rewriting the URL is not a bad thing, but keep it short. Search engines do not like extremely long URL's and neither do users. If you do rewrite then keep it short. If you do not try and get a few keywords, and still keep it short.
Try and avoid things like:

• site.com/page1.php
• site.com/page2.php

Also avoid:

• site.com/pages.php?page=1
• site.com/pages.php?page=index
• site.com/pages.php?page=contact

And also:

• site.com/here_are_some_pages_I_created_using_dreamweaver_fo r_you.php?id=index_page&ssid=2340230482340&bksl2=s ocial&ref=Google&keyword=Long_Urls

I am sure you get the idea. Just keep it simple and clean. I have heard some other dumb things like "Does Google care about the extension? .html or .php?" and in my opinion I do not think Google really cares much. Google, Yahoo, Bing, neither of them even list an extension when searching for something. It will not file all html pages as "static" or all PHP pages as "Dynamic" just because not all html pages are static and not all php pages are dynamic.

Tutorial Info
You are free to edit and redistribute this tutorial as long as you include this information wherever you post it. This tutorial was made by BlaineSch located at www.BlaineSch.com if you have any questions feel free to post them in this thread or email me at BlaineSch@gmail.com

[Jordan]

Excellent read! Easy to read and packed with information. When I saw "Why Validate" I said "Oh no, another person claiming that validation matters for SEO" and then I read it. I agree with you.

+rep

[BlaineSch]

I am glad you agree and thanks for the +Rep!

[WingedPanther]

A lot of this is actually common sense. However, with all the gimmick people out there, that makes this refreshing. There are good reasons to validate code, for example, but SEO isn't one of them.

[chili5]

Wow, this is incredible. Bookmarked and will refer back to it often. +rep for you!

[BlaineSch]

Well I believe it is only common sense stuff if you have not been in the business very long. I do not see it as advanced but some beginners might find it as useful.

[chili5]

I'm a beginner with that kind of stuff. Although the spelling thing is common sense.

[BlaineSch]

You would be surprised about how many times I see sites with spelling errors, iframes, and other weird junk.

[Jordan]

Sometimes, spelling incorrectly is good for SEO.

[BlaineSch]

I suppose if you want to target that keyword than yea I suppose its not "bad".