SEO: Objectives, Process, Tips and Tools

SEO is a very specialized and a huge topic to be fully covered in such a small article but still few tips about SEO are given below , categorized in four categories 

Good content is the key for search engine optimization: we have to make sure of the quality of content.

While designing an application and populating content we have to think of users first and then for the search engine and also make sure that the website has good quality content because most of search engines also think like this. Some tips for the creating a quality contents are given below

 

1.      Identify original, unique, useful words and their synonyms as keyword(s) and phrases for describing each page i.e. selected words should be concise and specific to page.

These keyword(s) / phrases can be further be used in various HTML (for SEO) tags. There are various tools which are helpful in finding the right keywords for pages. For e.g. AdWords Keyword Tool , Keyword Discovery, SEO Book keyword tool , Keyword Box, Yahoo Keyword tool, Word tracker , Google keyword Tool, etc.

It is advisable to use phrases to describe the page instead of just single words description and there are couple of reasons for this.

a.       While performing searches people are now day’s searches for phrases or set of words instead of just one word.

b.      Competition is too high for Single words

c.       This helps in differentiating our web page or site from competitors.

Before finalizing keyword(s) if possible also try to find out the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index). It is a ranking system based on how popular a key word is and how much competition it has on the Internet and it ranges in between 0-10. Higher KEI number means the  keyword is a popular keyword and it also less competition. So select keyword(s) with higher KEI number.

KEI is a good starting point for selecting keyword, but in addition to KEI, keyword researchers should also consider other factors like examining the number of pages indexed, backlinks of top sites for that keyword etc. Good information on KEI is available at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/kd-faq-kei.html

2.      Restrict to one topic per page i.e. avoid putting multiple topics in one single page.

3.      Make sure the web pages are information-rich and useful. Pages should also include all chosen keyword(s) /phrases which are relevant to the topic that the  users would use to find your pages.

4.      Avoid spelling mistakes in content pages. There are lots of spell check tools  like MS word , Unix based spell or ispell and online tools like Net mechanic , SEO worker Spell Checker tools, etc that can be used to perform spell checking.

 

Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns .It provides statistics regarding the volume of keywords searched over a time period.

 

1.       Make sure the site confirms to the W3C standards and W3C validator tools can help in achieving standardization

2.      Make sure the site hierarchy is flat and navigation is simple. Content web pages should not be more than three clicks from home page.

3.      Categorize web pages – Better the structure of site, easy it is to target the market. Structure of the site always plays a key role in SEO. So before actually start building the site it advisable that one should carefully plan for the structure of site i.e. how actually the web pages would be categorized.   For e.g. if you are in business of HR consultancy  to different type of industries then try to create separate structure for each industry describing your offerings, specialization  related to that industry and incorporate very specific keyword(s)/ phrases for the same..

 

4.      Provide Web feeds (a.k.a. syndicated feed.) - A web feed is a document or communications channel which contains content items with web links to longer versions. It is a mechanism to share content (not visual representation) over the web. Websites or applications subscribe these feed and then render the content in required layout. Some of the widely used web feed techniques are RSS, ATOM .  

a.       RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – A XML based content used to publish frequently updated content like news, blogs etc. RSS allows to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes so the information is updated in a automated manner. It can contain summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. For more please read RSS Wiki

 

b.      ATOM – It is also an XML-based content and metadata syndication format used for publishing frequently updated content like news, blogs etc. Atom is developed to overcome many incompatible versions of the RSS syndication format, all of which had shortcomings, and the poor interoperability. For the list of  difference in these two formats go through http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared and Atom Wiki

 

There are lots of free online and downloadable RSS and ATOM generators and convertors are available for e.g. rssfeedssbumit that can be used. W3C also provides one validator tool for RSS and ATOM W3C RSS/ATOM Validator

 

5.       Add Sitemap in your website.  A Sitemap is a file (.xml, .htm, .html, .txt.) which contains structured lists of URLs for a site which allows intelligent and smooth crawling for search engines. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complements robots.txt (a URL exclusion protocol). In addition to Standard independent ROR XML format   most of the search engine support other formats like RSS, ATOM, Sitemap for e.g. Google,  Yahoo and Microsoft also support sitemap protocol. It is advisable to keep numbers of link in a site map within 100, if it is not feasible then break the site map into separate pages. Brief introduction to both ROR and sitemap protocol is given below

 

a.       ROR (Resources of a Resource) is an independent XML format for describing any object of your content in a generic fashion, so any search engine can better understand the content. Think of ROR feed as a powerful structured feed for describing all objects to the search engines: sitemap, products, services, reviews, feeds, discounts, images, events, schedule, podcasts, archives and much more.   Tools like ROR Feed Generator,  XML-Sitemaps , ROR Sitemap Generator  makes it easy to create ROR feed. For information on ROR please visit http://www.rorweb.com/

b.      Sitemap protocol is an XML format file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. For more info on sitemap protocol please visit http://www.sitemaps.org/ , XML-Sitemaps, sitemap pals , Google Sitemaps,

Sitemap information is typically placed in website's main directory for e.g. ROR feed is stored in ror.xml, sitemap in sitemap.xml in main directory. So it would be good if every website has ror.xml, sitemap.xml and list of search engine specific sitemap files for e.g. urllist.txt (for yahoo).

 

6.      Robot exclusion techniques - Robot.txt is a file which permits or denies access to robots or crawlers to different areas of website. It’s a protocol that every spiders/crawlers/ bots first look for this file in the main directory of website and then based on information available in this they should proceed further. But still there may be some spiders/crawlers/bots that overlooks this file and continue as they want. For more info on robots.txt please visit : http://www.robotstxt.org/

 

7.      Appropriate handling of HTTP Status code – Dealing rightly with HTTP status codes helps not only helps in preserving the link equity and also to avoid getting   delisted from search engines

a.       404  Status code - With the age of site there are changes that some of the information pages are not available in due course of time because of many reasons say non-relevance of content or offering are no more available etc. In this case instead of displaying “404 Page Not found” error it is advisable to either redirect the request to the related page or display customized message. Following this would help in preserving the link equity.

b.      303 and 302 Status code - Avoid multiple redirection chaining. By redirection here we means when some page is requested by a user then it is redirected to a different page because of the change in URL (HTTP code 301, 302) or automatic redirection can also be done. So the idea is to avoid a scenario which involves multiple redirections for one request like Request for Page A, which is redirected to B, then redirect to C and so on and finally after a couple of redirections final page is displayed..

c.       500 Status code – It is always advisable in case of downtime or non –availability of resources or site to return HTTP “500” status code with relevant message instead in displaying “404 page or blank page” or page with full of db connection errors or unable to access resource errors it is advisable to r because of which the search engines does not index or re-index these page or site and will not delist the page or site.

 

For more detail on HTTP headers visit Wiki page. in with of Redirect deleted page to relevant page

 

 

Developing search friendly webpages is both an art and science and it requires conscious efforts. In order to a make webpage a search friendly there are certain things that be should be done and certain things  which should be avoided.  In this section we will discuss both these aspects side by side but firstly we see what all things should de done.

1.      Make sure that every page is a well-formed HTML or XHTML page. Some of validator tools  like W3C validator  tool, SEO Worker validator which are available which can be used.

2.      Size of page should neither should be too small (<5K) or too large (>15K). Try to limit it to a reasonable size.

3.      Make sure all key information and business pages including home page are fast loading. Try to   restrict the page loading time within or around 8 sec. One of the way improving page loading time is use  of optimized images

4.      Try to restrict the number of links on a given page to a reasonable number (say <=100).

5.      Usage of keyword(s)/Phrase in site navigation structure.

6.      Title Tag – Define title tag for every single page as this is a one of most import SEO technique .Use unique, original strongest and exact keyword(s)/phrase  that best describe the web page. For high page ranking, it is required to carefully choose keywords/phrases that should be a part of the page title:

7.      Meta Tag Usage -Author, Description, and Keywords Meta tag should be used on every page and each of these tags has its own significance and role. The Meta description tag doesn’t help much in improving page ranking

a.       Author Meta Tag –Always define this tag with name of the company that owns the site as this helps to get no #1 position in search results if it contains company's name:

b.      Description Meta Tag - Use the description tag to describe the page is about. The content of this tag often appear as the text snippet below search result listing when displaying a list of links..

c.       Keywords Meta tag - Keywords meta tag helps search engines to categorize webpage and site with which will user can easily and quickly find pages. Optimized usage of quality keyword(s) is advisable as some search engines puts limits on the numbers of Meta keywords.

d.      The Robots META tag - It is to indicate to the visiting robots if a page can be indexed, or used to harvest more links. For this no server administrator action is required and as of now only few spiders/bots are following this.

8.      Heading and Bold Tags – Usage of relevant keyword(s)/phrases in heading tag also makes a good contribution for SEO. Use of relevant keyword(s) in heading tags (H1 , h2 h3,..) is suggested and it would be good if we restrict the usage of h1 tag to one per page. Sequence of heading should as such that H2 follows h1 and so on.  Similarly also try to use all the relevant keyword(s) /phrases in bold tags (<B>, <I> <STRONG>, <FONT SIZE="+no">) at least once in a page.

9.      ALT Tags – Use relevant Keyword(s)/phrases at relevant places in ALT tags, but don't over do it because it could results in dropping of page from search results or even worse banned for life. The use of this tag becomes more important when link is created for image.

10.  Please make sure that keyword(s) /phrases we want to indexed should be placed be as part of Image file name and if not possible the try to use then outside of images and with in ALT tags.

11.  Use identified keyword(s)/ phrase of the linked page (page to which you are linking) for your hyperlink text

12.  Anchor text - Use keyword(s) /phrases as anchor text when linking page internally. This helps spiders what the linked-to page is about. Generic statements “click here" or “view this” or “See this” didn’t add any value to SEO.

13.  Inbound linking (a.k.a. External Linking) – It would be good that some high quality content webpages or sites provides link to your webpage or site and few of your chosen keyword(s) are in the links we get. Both the quantity and quality of inbound links helps in getting better page ranking. Here I would like to introduce one more word “Cross linking” it means that you are putting a link on one site to another site. Some of the best practices of cross linking is available at http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/0406/crosslink.htm

14.  Reciprocal linking (a.k.a. link exchange) : It is a process of exchanging link with some others sites. This helps in increasing traffic and page ranking.

15.  Link Relevance - Search engines rates higher those links which comes from a related page or site. Too much of irrelevant links from non related sites may have negative impact.

16.  Internal Linking – Provide link to other important pages in your site from other page content i.e. interlinking web pages of site. Make sure that every page on your site should link to at least one other page and also homepage is linked to your sitemap.

17.  Social Bookmarking – Allow user to do social bookmarking of your pages. Small icons related to targeted social bookmarking sites (e.g. digg, del.icio.us, Reddit  ) should be placed on your content page and when user click on these icons current page will bookmarked with targeted site. For more info on Social bookmarking visit Wikipedia and for top ten social book marking list visit  blogmarketingtactics.com . More the number of people do social bookmarking of the page, more traffic would be on your site.

18.  Keyword Density – It is the percent that keyword or phrases are of web page text and it should range in between 5% to 20%. Selected keyword(s)/ phrases in the general should be used throughout the webpage but specially to be used in the first few sentences and in the last one, at least once in the title tag, once in the heading tag and once in bold text.

19.  Link and Content Location – Links and primary content which are clearly visible and available near the centre of page are being treated as more important links and contents in comparison to the links and content located at the corner of the page.  It is also advisable to have primary content of the page should be located early in HTML source.

20.  Use of HTTP header- Use HTTP headers like If-Modified-Since, Last-Modified, expires  as they are very important and play vital role in doing SEO.  For e.g. Google search get’s the information whether the content has changed since last time Google visited the page/site. These headers don’t help much in improving page ranking but certainly helps in improving bandwidth usage and decreasing indexing overhead. For more information read http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html.

Till now we have seen things that should be done, but there are few things that should be avoided  are given below:

1.      Avoid use of  multiple frames, JavaScript (use <NOSCRIPT> instead ), cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash , pop-ups, install malware (i.e. spyware, viruses, Trojans)  as  spiders/crawlers/bots may have trouble crawling the site or they might ignore it also.

2.      Avoid creation of  different content or URLs for users and search engines. This process is called as cloaking.

3.      Avoid making frequent changes in the page URL, even if it is required then set up the page's original URL to direct to the new page, and inform whether the move is permanent or temporary.

4.      Avoid using hidden text, hidden links, and tiny text as some search engines might remove site from their listing.

5.      Avoid using keyword(s) in Meta refresh tag and author tag, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, use of link farms,  creating identical pages, doorway pages, duplicated contents in a page, etc for improving keyword density and inward traffic.

6.      Avoid having broken links in web pages. There are various tools which are available which helps in finding broken link for e.g. http://validator.w3.org/checklink , http://www.dead-links.com/, Firefox plug-in linkchecker.

7.      Avoid over usage of Keyword(s)/phrases in keyword Meta and ALT tags as search engines might drop page or site from their listing or even they banned them for life.

8.      Avoid interlinking sites that come from similar IP address as they will regarded as artificial links for improving the page ranking and search engines can drop these types of links from their listing.

9.      Avoid making frequent changes in links provided in Page.  The rate with which links on a page change over a time is called as Link Churn.

10.  Avoid doing html and JavaScript error and also does image optimization as if these are  not followed then it make negative impact on page loading time and some search engines doesn’t like this..

SEO techniques are not just limited on what information is to be placed or where is to be place or how is to be placed but also includes how it is accessed. WebPages are accessed using URL and with every day more and more websites are coming up which also have some dynamic pages in addition to static HTML pages. As we know dynamic pages are pages which get generated based on certain parameters passed to them. It is required that we should also make these dynamic pages SEO friendly because they also contain vital information’s that should be searchable. In addition to above given guidelines we also need to make Dynamic page URL a search friendly URL. Generally spiders/bots doesn’t crawl pages which had certain characters like “?”  i.e. they just don’t crawl pages which accepts query parameters but still up to certain level we can still make a search friendly URL and tips for the same are given below.

1.      Uses identified keyword(s)/phrases in URL of page and filenames and replace the id with text names (keywords) in URL for e.g. URL http://www. myexample.com /product/Mens_Short_brown is preferred over http://www. myexample.com /productPage?id=122 even when both are pointing to same.

2.      Avoid using parameters like 'sessionid' and 'id' if possible as some spiders/bots just ignore them.

3.      Try to limit the number of parameters and length of URL as some spiders/bots puts certain restrictions on these.

4.      Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

1.      Use of relevant Domain Name and extension – Domain name should be easier to remember and with primary keyword(s) (if not the company name) without hyphens. Choice of Domain extension should be made based on targeted market segment and business category in which site falls in like .com for commercial Global Market, .co.in for commercial Indian market, gov.in for government site (India), etc

2.      Domain Name Registration time duration – Longer the duration for which domain is registered for better it is because in this case search engine considered it as genuine site.

3.      Appropriate Hosting Location – Choice of location for hosting should also be based on main targeted region e.g. hosting site in INDIA if main targeted region is  India, Hosting site in US if region targeted traffic is US.

4.      Site, Page and Link’s Age – older the site, page and links better would be the page rank if they are not much changed. 

 

All the above discussed techniques helps us in creating a good quality search friendly website or web pages but still there is a need to  ensure certain other things to increase traffic  and make site more easily searchable.

 

1.      Site should be separately submitted with targeted search engines - Each search engine has a way of letting it know about the site. Submit the URL like to be included in the index or feeds like RSS, ROR etc. Each search provides its own way for submission for e.g. Google , Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search.

2.      Link Bait – “Link Bait is more or less anything you create anywhere on the Web that inspires other people to link to it. They can link to it via a Web page, a blog, social bookmark site, tagging site, e-zine, newsletter, IM, email or any other method that tells others about the bait” as described by Eric Ward. Link bait is not a new concept and with this higher traffic can ne attracted to site your  site and which results in  higher search engine rankings. This can be achieved by publishing interesting articles, some funny humor, special reports, something controversial, building useful tools, etc. For more information on link bait read http://www.famousagents.com/link-bait-success. and http://www.jimwestergren.com/link-bait/.

3.      Providing Blog Feature at website: BLOG is short for Web log, where people publish their personal information, thoughts, experiences, web links, news on a particular subject, etc and the information is displayed in reverse chronological order. For more information read Blog Wiki page.

Blog help in attracting lots of traffic and increase the usage of site. It would be good idea to provide blogging facility at your website at least for a limited user of your domain for i.e. blog page facility would be provided for registered user or user who fulfills certain business criteria of your company. For e.g. if you owns a B2C site then it would be good idea to allow registered user to have blog page where they are allowed to share their personal & contact information Past purchase, Gift Lists, favorite products and link, their reviews . It not only helps in increasing traffic to site but also helps other buyers in doing on line shopping in some ways.

 

4.      Do marketing for the site like putting online and offline advertisements. PPC is another very effective mechanism for increasing traffic. PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is a type of search marketing where search engine that allows advertisers to pay for positioning in search results and advertisers pay a set amount every time their ad is clicked. For more information on PPC visit http://www.payperclickuniverse.com/

 

5.      Register the site with industry related yellow pages, business directories, associations, etc.

6.      Effectively utilize or participate in Social Networks Forums, Blog sites related to the Market Sector, publish expert content on third party websites.

7.      Use of Ping services like Pingomatic  will ping a variety of websites to notify them that page is updated which also results in informing search engines know that page is update which will trigger their bots.

8.      Perform SEO testing for webpage or site. Few of the tests that can be performed are below:

a.       Standard Complaint testing – Some tools are listed at  http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/, http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/07/WebAgency-Requirements

b.      Browser Compatibility Testing- Make webpage /site is viewable in most of the browsers. So test site on text based browsers, JavaScript disabled browsers.

c.       Page Resolution testing – Try to make pages viewable at most of resolutions on different browsers.

d.      SEO friendly URL testing and Spider testing .For e.g. SEO book Spider test tool can be a good starting point.

e.       Broken link or Dead links testing for e.g. Linkchecker

f.        Page loading Testing , etc

g.       HTTP header testing – Online tools like SEO Consultant tool , vipsem tool  and plug-ins like tools like ieHTTPheader, LiveHTTPheaders can be used.

h.       Spilt testing - Split tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations and it is an ongoing process. Few tips for performing spilt testing is given at http://www.seoegghead.com/blog/seo/3-tips-for-seo-aware-split-testing-p160.html

 

Lots of tools are available which can be used of SEO testing but only very few of them are mentioned here for e.g.  SEO Book , SEOpen, Meta tag, iWebtools, Clickability tools, vipsem tools, webconfs tools,  firefox extensions, making firefox browser behaving like spider by adding  following line in firefox.js

 

As stated earlier SEO is continuous process and will continue till the time we decided to have online presence. In order to perform consistently good, a regular monitoring and analysis of site and marketing campaign performance in terms of SEO is required followed by appropriate corrective actions. This can be achieved by regularly reviewing web site statistics which are available from hosting service provider and using marketing research tools. Some of the tools are listed below:

a.       Tools like MarketLeap marketing tools  help in finding how our site is performing in comparison to our competitors.

b.      Tools like Yahoo Site Explorer provides the information what all pages of website are index by search engines.  Similarly Google and MSN also provide this information. To view the index list open search page of targeted search engine and then search for “site:www.<site name>” . For e.g. if we want to know which all pages of “www.hcl.in” are index by yahoo then open yahoo search page and search for  “site:www.hcl.in”. 

c.       Alexa is a powerful tool used for doing following analysis:

                                             i.      Reach -Percent of global Internet users who visit this site

                                           ii.      Rank - Alexa traffic rank based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach

                                          iii.      Page Views - The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site.

                                         iv.      Comparisons with other websites.

 

Alexa ranking ranks websites based on traffic quantity that a particular site receives from visitors that have the Alexa toolbar installed. For more information about Alexa ranking please read “About the Alexa Traffic Rankings” article.

 

d.      Some more useful SEO tools like SEO plug-in for firefox, etc are also available http://tools.seobook.com/.

 

There are lot many SEO companies, forums, blogs and tools are available which provides very useful information and help on SEO. Few sites which I found to be informative and interesting and they are worth to be visited for more information and techniques are Search Engine Watch, SEO workers, SEO techniques,  Yahoo site explorer , Integrated resource Mgmt SEO Tips  - pretty old (Last Updated: 3/8/05) but still informative, Yahoo Search Blog   Google Search Blog ,  MSN Search Blog , Search engine watch Blog, http://www.searchengineforums.com/, Search engine watch  forum.

 

All the techniques discussed above are not the only available SEO techniques, but definitely these are widely used effective SEO techniques. In addition these it is suggested to have a look at the targeted search engine SEO guidelines and following those would help further in achieving better indexing and ranking of the site in search engine. It is also suggested to have a look at the webmasters tools of the targeted search engines.

For some of the widely used search engines guidelines visit Google webmasters guidelines , Yahoo guidelines, MSN live search guidelines and for webmasters tool visit  Google’s Webmaster tool , MSN Webmasters tools .  Outcome of SEO is not immediate, but after few months only you can see the outcome of this especially if you are small in size  and going online for the first time. So have patience - and happy SEO!

 

a.       SEO Book

b.      21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques 

e.       Search Engine Guideline documents - Google webmasters guidelines , Yahoo Guidelines ,MSN Live search Guidelines

f.        Search engine Guide

g.       SEO Excellence

h.       SEO techniques

j.        Professional Search Engine Optimization With PHP By Jaimie and Cristian