SEO Techniques

This page will give you a quick rundown of how to maximize your SEO results.

Summary

Here I have a summarized of some of the most popular SEO techniques. I created a chart where you can sort them by criteria and I have explanations of the criteria below as well as links to explanations of the technique below the table.

Webmaster function. This tells you what webmaster skill you will need for each SEO technique. This is useful if you build your web site according to each function (first coding, then design, then marketing, etc). Or if you outsource parts of your site creation based on functions (outsourcing the design for example) it will make it easy to specify which SEO techniques need to be done by the contractor.
Easy or hard? This is useful because as a beginner you will want to tackle the easy ones first. For example, inserting relevant TITLE and META tags is very easy.
Important or unimportant This is one of the most useful characteristics because some of the techniques (keyword-rich text, link popularity, site growth, etc) will be integral to getting good SEO. One might ask why bother having unimportant techniques listed? Well, some unimportant techniques are so easy and quick to do (meta keywords for example) that it is wise to take the 30 seconds it takes to do them because you never know what little boost will make the difference. Don't spend time on unimportant techniques that take up a lot of time though.
Specific or broad? This tells you how specific a particular SEO activity is. This is useful from a planning standpoint. A specific technique like a TITLE tag shouldn't take planning, but a technique like link building may require you to research link partners, create a good email to send out to webmasters, monitor link counts in Google, etc. Therefore, broad SEO techniques (like site growth) will need to be synchronized with the overall strategies for your site.
Long-term or short-term?. This will tell you how long the particular SEO technique will take.
What order should I do them in? This is useful when you are creating a site from scratch and want to plan out your SEO activities.


Click the column headers to sort each category.

Technique Function Easy/Hard? Important? Broad or
Specific?		 Short or Long-term Chronology
Keyword-Rich Text content hard very broad short-term 2
TITLE tag coding easy very specific short-term 5
HEADING tags coding easy somewhat specific short-term 3
ALT tags coding easy somewhat specific short-term 4
Link Popularity operations hard very broad long-term 11
Site Design design medium somewhat broad short-term 10
META description tag coding easy somewhat specific short-term 6
META keyword tag coding easy little specific short-term 7
File name design easy very specific short-term 8
Domain Name planning easy little specific short-term 1
Ongoing SEO operations medium somewhat broad long-term n/a
Site Size operations hard very broad long-term 12
Site Age planning hard very specific long-term n/a
Page Age planning hard very specific long-term n/a
Content Depth design easy somewhat specific short-term 9
Site Traffic planning hard very specific long-term 13

Keyword-rich text (quality of content)

Having text with many relevant keywords on your page is the single biggest factor for getting good SEO. Not only is this technique the most important but it is also the technique which I think will always have a heavy weighting in the search engine algorithms so you don't have to worry about it losing it's weight. All web users want to view a web site about a particular subject and the relevancy of a page's text will always be the number one indicator of usefulness. Writing good text is also the hardest thing to do. Many webmasters just write a little text and throw keywords in the title and meta tags and think they are ahead of the game. Writing good content will always be the biggest thing that separates average sites from great sites because it takes time, thought, and skill.

On all your pages you have to have content that is synchronized to your other SEO techniques like title and meta and header tags. This means that you have to have these same keywords placed in the text of your web site. You will see conflicting advice on whether to pick your keywords first or write your page text first. It is basically a chicken-and-egg question, should you pick keywords and write your pages around them? Or write your pages and then pick the keywords based on the text? I think you should write your text first. Then pick keywords that are relevant to the topic of the page and place those if your meta, title, and header tags. After that go back and make sure that you have these keywords in the page text and if you don't then add them in. The reason to do it this way is because you are writing a webpage for the end user and not for the search engines. You don't want the tone of the writing on your pages to have that keyword-saturated feel to it.

Although you should add in the relevant keywords to your text if they are not in there when you are done writing your page, having keywords in your text should not be a deliberate, conscious effort because they should be in there naturally. If you look at it this way then having keyword-rich text is an almost zero-effort strategy because you will be writing concise and relevant text for visitors anyway. Some people like to have keywords at the beginning and end of the page but some people say it doesn't matter where the keywords are as long as they are somewhere. An easy way to have keywords at the end of the page is to have a copyright line at the end of your page in the footer with keywords in it.

Having keyword-rich text is easier when you have a content site as opposed to an applications site. So if you have an application-driven site then you may only rank well for a couple of keyword phrases.

TITLE tag

The title tag is one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. All search engines use title tags to gather information about your Web site. Always have the keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize in the title tag. What makes the TITLE tag such an important SEO technique is that it not only carries a lot of weight in search rankings but also improves the results from your SEO because the words in the TITLE tag are what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP) and it makes it more likely a user will click through to your page if your title tag is relevant.

What you actually put in the title will be based on the subject of the page. You will write the content of the page first and then choose the most relevant keyword or phrase that summarizes the subject matter of the page and put it in the title tag. Therefore, the keyword in the title tag should naturally be in the text of the page. If you don't have the keyword/phrase naturally in the text then you either picked the wrong keyword or you left that keyword out when you wrote the text of the page. So either choose another keyword or change the text so that it naturally has the keywords in it.

If you want to see what other pages on the internet have the same keywords as you in the title tag you can do a "allintitle" search on Google. In the Google search box type in "allintitle:keyword1 keyword2 keyword3" or allintitle:"phrase". Here is an example. That gives you a good look at who your SEO competitors are. You can also refine the search to look for pages that have the phrase in the title and inbound links by using intitle:"search phrase" and inanchor:"search phrase"

Optimizing the TITLE tag is a very easy and quick thing for a webmaster to do so there is no excuse for a title tag not to be optimized. You can learn about the actual coding of the title tag on my title tag page.

Link Popularity

This is one of the more well-known and popular techniques for increasing SEO because it is such a big factor. The more links there are to your site from external sites then the more important your site looks to Google. Although this is one of the biggest factors in SEO, the techniques currently used to be successful in this category will probably be changing. This is because too many webmasters are putting a lot of effort into on this area and when that happens it usually contaminates that particular criteria for Google. Google will probably be looking more at the speed at which links are attained, looking more at the relationships between sites and the different types of sites, and other criteria. Gaining inbound links should still be one of the main strategies you do but it will be more and more important to go by the book and generate high-quality, honest links.

Heading tags (H1, H2, etc)

The HEADING tags, which format the paragraph headers, play a role in SEO. I have always thought most webmasters and SEO experts pay too little attention to HEADER tags. I think the information in HEADER tags is valuable because it signals to the user (and therefore the search engines) that the information is important. The information is visible on the page so it can't just be spammed like META or ALT tags. I've always thought of header tags as title tags for paragraphs. They play a very big role when it comes to the usability of the content because the headers break up the blocks of text so that web page readers can skim the headings to see if they want to read the text or not. Since the header tags show the relevancy of the content to users Google will pay a lot of attention to what is in the header tags.

Site Design

Concentrating on SEO-friendly designs may be harder for the graphic design-oriented webmasters who concentrate more on aesthetics than on traffic and profits. This is true also for beginning webmasters that are under the impression that a sleek-looking design is a key to a successful website.

Make sure all your pages are connected by text or image links. You need to have text or image links to all your pages. This doesn't need to be your main navigation although it would help if your main navigation were text-based. You can't have only links that are Javascript, Flash, DHTML, or something other language because the search engine spiders can't read them
Make sure your content is text-based. This is a variant of the last rule. You need to make sure you content is written out instead of having a flash or JPEG picture of text. One of the biggest breaks of this rule is when sites have JPEGs of section headers on their site instead of using the Header tag.
Have pages that are accessible. Having a site with frames needlessly complicates things. It is possible to create an SEO for a frame-based site but you just shouldn't bother with it. The same goes for dynamically generated pages (content that comes from a database). Depending on the format of the URL, the page may or may not be accessible by a search engine spider.
Having a site map helps. Having a site map helps with SEO because it has a link to every one of your pages so the search engine spider can easily navigate your site and find all your pages to index them. It's even better if you have a list of all your pages as well as a short description of each page because you can naturally increase the keyword-richness of your page as well as adding links with keywords. These benefits are in addition to the non-SEO benefit of the fact that it helps users.


Alt tags

You should make sure that you have relevant ALT tag attributes for all your images. ALT tags originally gave you information about the image on the page but search engines started given them weight in search rankings because they increased keyword frequency. Over the past couple of years many webmasters started spamming the alt tag, just like they did the meta tags, and the search engines have responded by lowering the weight given to alt tags. Alt tags now contribute very little to search rankings but since they fall into that "easy to do" category, and also are a part of building properly coded website, I still recommend. Optimizing your images for SEO is also good for getting good rankings in image searches.

META description tag

Many people think that meta tags play a big role in getting high rankings but the Meta description tag doesn't affect your page's ranking much at all. It still has many non-ranking benefits, such as providing a nice description of your page when you page is listed on search results. Considering it doesn't take much time or effort you should still put a relevant description on every one of your pages. When writing it you should introduce your website with a short description, like the following "WebpageBlueprint.com helps webmasters build a web site by learning web site coding and marketing."

META keyword tag

The meta keyword tag used to be a big factor in search rankings but people started abusing it by stuffing keywords in there as well as putting keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Over time, the search engines gave less and less weight to meta tags and more weight was given to the content of the pages. Now the meta keyword tag has little weighting in search engines rankings but since it takes so little time and it can't hurt you, you should still use this tag on every page. I use the code from my title tag to put in here and usually never use more than 2 or 3 words separated by a comma. The keywords in this tag should be the relevant keywords for your page so these usually will be the same as you title tag anyway. So cutting and pasting the title tag into the meta keyword tag is not a bad idea if you want a quick rule to use. Make sure you do not "spam" the tag by putting the same keyword in over and over. Google is smart enough to know this trick and punish you by giving you a lower ranking or kicking you out of the search results totally.

Domain Name

I believe that having keywords in your domain name helps with SEO a little bit. Although I don't know the actual amount of weight in the algorithms I do think it is somewhat small. This is because many great companies choose to brand their companies by giving them a unique name that has not related to the subject matter. Google knows that sites with unique branding will not use a domain with a keyword in it so they won't punish you for lack of a keyword in a domain. Having a keyword or branded domain is a decision you will have to make but the SEO affects of a domain name shouldn't be the deciding factor. For more information about deciding between keyword and branded domains check out our choosing a domain name page.

File names

An important technique, which I recommend, is having the file name (and therefore the end of the URL) be relevant to the content and have keywords in it. If you have a page about George Clooney then the file name should be either clooney.php, georgeclooney.php, or george-clooney.php. Another thing to keep in mind about URLs is that it is generally a bad idea to have certain characters in the URL, like question marks or equal signs. These are usually a result of pages that come from a database query. The search engines are getting way better at indexing pages from queries and these days they probably will put these pages in their database but you still don't want more than 2 query strings ("?","=",etc.) in the URL and if you can avoid them totally then I recommend that. If you run a forum then sometimes there are techniques and hacks to make your forum and forum URLs spider-friendly. If you have a CMS then you will want to analyze your URLs to make sure they are good.

When it comes to file names with multiple words it is important to know how Google splits a URL into words. Although nobody knows for sure some people think that certain characters inside a URL are considered delimiters and that the underscore is not considered a delimiter (separator) but a dash is. Therefore you should split a filename up like this - "poker-site-reviews.php" instead of "poker_site_reviews.php". But there are plenty of pages with file names that have underscores so I don't think it will hurt you too much to have them.

When I refer to file names I am referring to the files names of your content (your HTML and PHP files) as well as your images. When naming your images name them using the keyword they relate to. If you have images of celebrities use their last names or a first and last name separated by a hyphen. Don't number your images - unless they are non-content related images like icons and stuff. You will be surprised at how much SEO traffic you get through image searches. Image searches are particularly lucrative because fewer webmasters optimize their images then their content pages so it is easier to rank higher for some very popular image searches.

Ongoing SEO

There are a couple of things you should be doing as part of your continual SEO work on your web pages. The first is to look at Overture's keyword selector tool to see the current popularity of various terms. You want to check these occasionally because these will change over time - especially if the subject of your site has a lot of new events associated with it. For example, if you run a site about a particular sport then there will always be news about new players or events that will come up high in searches. The second is to monitor how well your SEO is performing by looking at your web site stats and seeing what keywords are most effective at bringing in traffic. The terms that give you the most traffic sometimes will not be very popular because your traffic is a result of both keyword popularity and your ranking. The most important thing you will want to do is to check in Google to see what your ranking is for various terms. You should check your rankings every couple of months but doing it more often than that is probably a waste of time.

Site size

Everything else being equal, the bigger website will get a better ranking. One or two-page sites will have a very hard time achieving high search rankings because they have so little content that the search engines won't think your site is important if it is a small site.

Site Age

Everything else being equal, an older website will get better rankings than a young one. People, and therefore search engines, have more confidence in a site that has been around for a while.

Page Age

The age of the page also has an influence on it's ranking. The longer the content has been online the better ranking it will get because the search engines will look at the page as being a more established place to go for that information and will likely be there in the future. The day the page is first spidered would be considered the beginning of the page's life.

Click distance (content depth)

The deeper the content is within your site the lower ranking it will get. This is because people assume that deeper content is less important. The fewer clicks from the home page that any user has to make to get to any particular page of a site, the better. I try to keep all my content 1 or 2 clicks away from the home page. One of the ways to have increased SEO is to have a spider-accessible drop-down menu as your main navigation. This ways all of your pages are only 1 click away.

Site traffic

One of the most important things you need to do to get good SEO is to grow your web site. Everything else being equal, a higher traffic site will get better rankings than a lower traffic site. Sites from popular companies with strong brands often have high rankings even though they don't have much content on their pages. So grow your site and create a great brand - even if it is just a niche category.


 
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