Seo for Dummies: The quick guide.
Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
We have all heard the saying there is more than one way to skin a cat, haven’t we? Let’s say for the sake of argument all things in life have more than one way to accomplish the same outcome. Assuming that you accept the last statement as true, SEO is no different. Like many things in life there are good ways to do things and then there are bad ways, in the case of SEO it would be good and evil.
Black hat or the evil step brother of the teachings we are going to employ in this paper uses a variety of questionable tactics such as spam, content stealing, etc… In this paper we are going to teach you how to employ some white hat techniques on how to get better rankings in the major search engine Google.
Ok, maybe you are asking yourself right now what makes this guy an expert. I do not claim to be an expert because that is a big word, what I did accomplish with my web site though, might interest you. I got my website listed for keywords on the hit MMORPG World of Warcraft. My rankings in different categories on the subject mater ranged from 10-50 on Google and many of these terms were out of millions of pages, one keyword term had over 22 million listings for it and I ranked myself 25 in it.
Now that being said, here is a list of things you should have to accomplish your goal: A website or even a web page will do, Internet access, a brain; even a half of a brain will do in most cases. The major areas we will cover on this subject mater are: Page Rank, Keywords, and obtaining links.
The reason we mentioned earlier a half of brain would do in most cases is because this is not rocket science a little common sense goes along way. If you have already created a website you have finished the hard part now comes the time consuming task of making your web site grow in terms of both popularity and traffic.
Page Rank
This is some fancy algorithm that the Google engineers came up with to determine if our site is worthy of being crawled and how often they should do it. Basically it’s a number between 1 and 10, 10 being the best you can get. It’s a weighted factor so a web site of 10 will carry more weight than a web site of 1.You can check your current PR by downloading and installing Google toolbar. It has and option so you can determine the PR of the current site you are visiting. Our main goal as a white hat SEO is to manipulate this rank so that we get listed ahead other sites on the key search terms we are trying to get listed for. Some of the major values in manipulating PR are:
Links – One-way links carry more weight than reciprocal links.
Content – Relative content carries more weight than irrelevant content.
PR – Links or content from higher PR sites carry more weight than lower PR sites. (.GOV and .EDU sites carry a lot of weight get links from these types of sites if at all possible)
Update often/Time – Update your website frequently this tends to make the little Google robot return more often. Time is simply how long your web site has been registered.
There are limits though having five PR2 websites with similar content link to yours would be far more valuable than one PR5 without similar content.
Key Words
Our goal in this section is to determine what niche or what words our competition are using and assess if we have a fighting chance to get our site listed for these key words. Overture is a great tool for determining what words have been searched for in the past month and how many times. Although overture is a yahoo tool we can still us it to help us determine what people are looking for i.e. Widgets from down under. Now we should also use a thesaurus and determine other key words that are similar and less populated on the search engine. Some times it’s about the quality of the searches not the quantity.
Find our niche– There are a plethora of sites out there for determining our niche or keywords. Google it self now has a pretty good tool for determining what key words we should focus on. Some other good sites are nichebot.com and wordtracker.com is a good pay per use site.
Write it down – Once we have determined our niche i.e. Widgets from down under and document them will use these a lot in the future. We are now ready to start focusing on a plan of attack and move our website up the rankings.
Our site - Content is king! Our number one goal of maintaining a healthy web page is content. Meaningful content is our goal focusing on our key words selection from the prior section without spamming our keywords, having meaningful content also means the chance of another web site linking to ours is greatly increased. Write a page of content a day. If you can’t commit to writing a page of content a day then try and write one new page a week. Commit some time to this and before you know it you will have a website bustling with a wealth of information.
Obtaining Links
*Focus on our key word terms from before i.e. Widgets from down under
Links come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, well not literally but in theory. Obtaining links will be our maintenance this will be our daily homework; at the very least you should shoot for one new link a week. Our goal in this section is to take our niche; lets say i.e. Widgets from down under. We will now focus on our keywords when we are obtaining our links. So lets use our example Widget from down under, we will want to make sure any link that we are obtaining from another site has one or all the key words from the phrase included in the link code back to our site. Some sample code for a HTML <a href=”http://www.store.inringtone.com” target=”store.inringtone.com”>Store</a> Cellular phone packages and stuff, Accessories. Now it depends on what kind of site you are linking to on what code you will need to use but they usually tell you what they want the link to look like.
Directories (Free/Paid)– One of the single fastest ways to increase your page rank is by paying for listings in directories such as Yahoo directory. These directories usually list your site within a mater of days rather than weeks or months the free directory sites take to list your site. Free directories include DMOZ.org, www.computer-remote-control.com, Beedirectory.com, VXbox.com and there are many others that you can use. Just, Google your topic for free directories and see what comes up.
Reciprocal links – This is known as link trading. Simply approach other webmasters with a link exchange. Email them and explain the benefits you both will share by trading links. I put you link on my site and you put my link on your site. There are a bunch of sites that will remove your links though you have to maintain them every so often and verify they still exist.
Article sites - There are many article sites out there. Become a regular on one or more of these sites and write free articles on subject mater related to your website. Many of these article sites allow you to insert HTML code into the article itself and also into the author tag. Bottom line these are a great way to get free links to your web site.
Blogging Sites - This is another way to get your site crawled often. Sign up on a free blogging site and write, write, write. Blogs work pretty much the same way as web pages and article sites do. Blogging sites often get crawled more often than regular sites due to the fact that they are getting updated more often.
Write a free eBook– Making a simple eBook on the topic you are writing about on you webpage is another great way to increase you exposure. Just write about the stuff that is on you web page and start offering your free eBook to people around the web, Viral marketing this is called. Let your work take off like a virus.
Forums– Sign up for forums in the areas of your expertise, most forums will allow you to add a tag at the bottom of you avatar. In turn this means more exposure to your webpage, every post you make is free advertising.
Email – Our goal in email isn’t to spam people lets leave that to the evil side of the force. We are simply adding a tag at the bottom of out email address so when we make everyday emails people are reminded of our site.
Networking – Let colleagues, friends, and family members all know about our site and remind them often.
So what would I recommend to someone who wanted to get listed in Google on their key words? Well the recipe I use for success is:
2 Parts Hard Work
1 Part Dedication
1 Part Patience
A splash of Fun
Like everything in life if you can’t dedicate time to it or have fun at it, you have to ask yourself if you should be doing it in the first place. Have fun taking over the internet with your content.
Author: Gary T Adamik
All content is reserved 2007.
