SEO Training

Do you want the content you have written for the internet to rank higher than your competitors?  Of course you do.  In order to rank highly you must first understand how Google works.  This should be a starting point for any SEO training.

Understanding How Google Search Algorithms Work in Simple English

Here is a simple version of how Google works in laymans English.  If you know how Google looks at a page then you can make sure that your content is written in a way that is complementary and therefore help you to rank higher on Google and other search engines.

At the core of Google is a set of mathematical algorithms.  Their purpose is to  try to determine the relevance of your page as opposed to other pages for a specific search term.  Imagine being given a billion pages of text in a language you don’t understand and having to give back the most relevant page for information on a word you also don’t understand.  You may know that there are pictures, but you can’t see them.  That is what it is like for the algorythm!

I am going to describe the process the Google search algorithms have to go through as if I was the algorithm.

If somebody was to do a search for “flabrat” then I am first going to look at URL’s to see if any of them have “flabrat” in them.  This is because flabrat.com is more likely to have information on “flabrat” than “globsheen.com”.  However, globsheen.com/flabrat.html is also highly likely to have some relevance.

Unfortunately there is no guarantee that a pages content has any relevance to its name without going and reading it.

Meta Title

The first information I will find on a page is the Meta Title.  This is the text that will be displayed in my search results.  Does this say “flabrat” in it?  If it does then I could be on the right track.

Meta Keywords

I’m going to take a cursory look at the Meta keywords too if they exist.  Not that I am going to put any weight behind them at all.  I’m just checking to see if they look spammy to me.  If they do I’m going to assume that the rest of the page is also trying to pull the wool over my eyes a bit.

H1 tag

Next comes the H1 tag.  This is really really really important.  The h1 tag is the heading for the whole page.  It is the heading that people will actually see when they view the page.  If the word “flabrat” is used in the h1 tag then there is a good chance that the page is actually about flabrat. See The importance of h tags for more information.

Other Header tags (h2, h3 etc)

These are sub-headings and should relate to the content in the text that comes after them.  They are not as important as the h1 tag but are still useful, particularly for breaking up your text and making it more readable for us humans.  The header tags used in these segments are h3 tags.

p tags

Not content with just looking at the title, like Google, I will then look at the actual content of your text contained in p tags or paragraph tags.  The first paragraph is particularly important, but if it was me I would be looking for the word flabrat throughout the entire document.

I would become suspicious if it appeared a lot though, so don’t overdo your keyword density.

Pictures

Google can’t actually see pictures.  Google can however read text associated with pictures.  For this reason your picture file names and alt text should both reflect your keywords.  Think of it as another way of getting your keywords onto the page without being overly spammy.  Without alt text in your images (img src=”images/picture.jpg” alt=”a flabrat in full bloom”) your pictures are doing precicely nothing for your Search Engine Optimisation.

Google search algorithms are a lot more complicated than that.

What I have just described is a very simplified version of what actually goes on to choose which page gets ranked highest in Google.  There are over 200 factors involved in Google’s search algorithm and nobody knows exactly what they all are or what weighting is applied to each one.

What I have done in this post is give you a foolproof method of ensuring your on-page SEO is good enough to help you get ranked higher.  Depending on what market you operate in, it could even be enough to get you ahead of some of your competitors.

On-page SEO is only half the battle though.  You will need to do some off-page or external SEO too if you want your page to rank in any but the very least competitive of markets.  My next post will be describe off-page SEO in simple terms.

On-page SEO is massively important.  It is the foundation to getting found online.  It is always my starting point.  Get it right and everything else you do will work better too.

Get found online

Getting found online is not all that difficult.  It is not incredibly easy either.  Of course it depends on how much competition you have.  Why do some sites show up above others? On Google it is a combination of over 200 factors!

In general these are split into two types of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – On page (the actual website itself) and Off page (links from other sites to your site).

For On-page SEO all you need to do is follow Googles Webmaster Guidelines.  Although, there is quite a bit to that, and it may take some time and patience to work your way through it.  There are other issues too.  Try looking up information on keyword density for example.  The web is full of different opinions.  The reason that some people will tell you not to exceed 4% density (4 percent of total text on the page) and others 8% density for example, is that nobody knows exactly how many keywords will get your page flagged for keyword stuffing.

Here is the problem…..

You want your site to get found online for specific keywords (SEO training in the case of this blog for example).  In order to show that the site is all about SEO training, it is tempting to use the phrase lots.  However, if I do that, then it will look like I am trying to influence search engines and they will penalise me for it.  This is not to say that it does not work…. but eventually the chances are your site will plummet down the rankings if for keyword stuffing.  I always advise clients to stick to the webmaster guidelines rigidly.

Off site SEO is where a lot of people come unstuck.  How do you get links to your site?  How many links do you need? Should you pay for links? Does it matter where the links come from?

It is a mine field.  Get it wrong and you will pay for it!  Get it right and your site will reap rewards.  By the way NEVER pay for links! It does matter where the links come from too.  What is more, external link building should be something that is an ongoing practice.  I will be posting more on link building in the future.

If you want to get found online, then it really does pay to get somebody who knows what they are doing to either train you, or do it for you.  This saves a lot of time.  Nobody knows it all (the search engines do not release the details of their criteria) but using a SEO professional who has gained experience from spending time on research as well as experimenting and finding out where some of the limits are pays off.

Use internal links to chain your site together and make it work as one unit

One of the things I forgot to mention when I was talking about on-page SEO was internal linking.  This was very remiss of me so I thought I should cover it immediately.

Internal linking is the practice of creating links in your text that point to other pages on your site.  It is a part of SEO training that is often not covered.

Why use internal links?  After all you have a navigation menu so what use are more links to the same pages?  Navigation does not generally allow you use the keywords you would like a page to be found for.  The “home” navigation item is a prime example.  You could forgo the word “home” and put in something that relates to the actual page, but that would be at odds with good heuristics (ease of use) for your user.  Visitors to a website expect to see a home page.  So we need to give it to them.  The trouble is that the word “home” does nothing as far telling a search engine what the page is about (unless you have a property site perhaps).  The same is true with all your navigation links.  They do not give an ideal idea of what the page is about.  They are usually only one or two words long for a start.

With internal linking in your body text, because you control the website, you have total control over what text goes into those links.  Let’s look at it from a search engines point of view.  They look at links, the text in the links and the relevance of the page the link points to.  They assume that the text in the link is representative of the page you are pointing to (otherwise it’s a pointless link).  If you have descriptive text in a link, it tells the search engine a bit more about the page than it could gain from simply crawling the page itself.  You are telling the search engines that the keyword(s) you use in your link are important for that page.  The search engines take that information, and when somebody else types those same keywords into the search engine, the search engine goes, “oh, I know, This page here is about that”, simply because it has been told it is by the link text.  Link text is a prime SEO factor.

That over simplifies it a bit, but it’s all you really need to know about it for now.

How to use internal links.  Like with all areas in SEO, moderation is king.  But I thought it was content that was king I hear you say.  Well yes, but Moderation in SEO efforts is vital.  Otherwise you are stuffing.

Here is a wonderful benefit of using internal link text.  You get the benefit of the words twice.  Say, for example you have a front (home) page on your site (which doubtless you do).  On that page you want to inform visitors about the whole sites’ contents.  To do this you write text that talks about all the things you have going on in the site.  Within that text will be keywords that you want to be found for, and those keywords will relate to other pages on the site.  Make a link out of them and point them to the other pages.

By creating a link in text you are saying to both users and search engines that they can find more information on the subject of the linked text by clicking on it.  The keyword is on the page and at the same time you are pointing out that another page on your site is also related to that keyword.  Sweet.

Blogging is a prime example of where this technique is used well.  I don’t do enough of it.  I sometimes write these posts just to remind myself of what I should be doing.  Take a look at copyblogger though.  Not only do they have a fair few internal links, but they also do a great job of teaching you about writing internet copy (that’s text to you and me).  They also write nice short posts in general, something I should learn from.

A word of caution.

I have seen this done to excess.  Try not to make your pages a horrendous looking sea of links.  Remember that guidelines say that you should have less than 100 links per page.  That includes all your navigation by the way.

Also, I should point out that including several links to the same page within your text is regarded by some (myself included) as a waste of time.  There is some evidence that if you use two different keywords to link to the same page, the first keyword will be given preference and the second will be ignored.  Somebody actually set up an experiment to test it and it would seem to be the case on Google.

Make sure the keywords you use in your link are relevant to both the page you link to and the surrounding text on the page you are linking from.  This is important.

I should have given you the short version of this post really:-

Create internal links with relevant keywords and don’t overdo it!  It will do you wonders.

The 80-20 Rule for onsite/offsite optimization. Yes the 20% is that important.

Following on from the last post on On-page SEO, it occurred to me that I had not mentioned the 80-20 rule.  That’s the trouble with SEO training, there is always something that gets left out!

The 80-20 Rule is quite simple.  Only 20% of your seo ranking will be based on your on-page optimisation.  I think I can hear a collective sigh and a head or two banging against desks.  I know, I know, you thought that if you followed the advice in the last post on On-page SEO that you would be celebrating much in terms of gained rankings.

Sorry, It doesn’t work like that.  That is not to say that On-page SEO is not important.  Indeed I consider it to be the very foundations of SEO.  I am appalled by SEO’s who say they will do all of a sites SEO off page.  20% is not to be sniffed at either, it’s a significant part of 100%, and, as you will have seen from the last post it is not very difficult either once you know what you are doing.

What we are left with though is a massive 80% of our SEO work still to do.  It is the off page SEO that sorts the men from the boys, the women from the girls and the hermaphrodites from the younger hermaphrodites.  Just keep an eye on this blog and we will get there!  I would also suggest you keep an eye on Hobo and grab the SEO e-book available there. I have not got around to writing an e-book yet.

The 80-20 Rule is a myth!

It is certainly not a hard and fast rule.  Nothing much is when it comes to SEO.  Talk to too many SEO’s and you will end up feeling confused.  There is much we disagree on.  As I started out I used to take the commonly held beliefs as fact and then experiment with some of the more “out there” claims made by some SEO’s.  Ultimately I found though that much of the content on the web was out of date.

There is tons and tons of out of date material out there on On-page SEO.  You could end up with half your page being taken up with useless or at least suspect meta tags alone.  These are largely tags that once held some value but no longer do.  Some of them were only relevant to some search engines.

Should you ignore all meta tags?  Not at all. But you can probably apply the 80-20 rule to them as well.  I often don’t bother with the keywords tag.  I certainly don’t bother with things like author tags.  I do however use the Google only “unavailable_after” tag which looks like this….

<meta name='GOOGLEBOT' content='unavailable_after: 12-Jan-2010 01:00:00 GMT' />

I use it where I have pages that are set to expire on certain dates.  It is fairly good at making sure people do not reach expired pages from a Google Search.  Does it have any SEO value?  I think not.  But it is good for visitors, and let us not forget that visitors are the whole reason for this SEO nonsense in the first place.

I’ve done it again, started out with a short post that starts rambling.  I’ll leave it at that for On-page SEO for now.  If you have any queries leave a comment, or contact me through Webshed.  Indeed, if you disagree with what I have written entirely I welcome your comments.  Debate is how we all learn and no SEO is EVER finished learning.