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6 Powerful SEO Tips for Beginners

Anil Gupta — Tue, 25 May 2010 04:00:08 +0000

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a technique bloggers use to rank their blogs higher on search engines. It is easy for most professional bloggers to take a lot of SEO knowledge and other valuable information for granted. So when they write posts, it is very difficult for many newbie’s in blogging to learn and utilize.

Anil Gupta from ScopeForMoney blog share 6 useful SEO tips for beginners.

It is obvious that a blog which ranks higher in search engines will get more traffic drawn to it, so this makes knowledge of basic SEO very important. For the same reason I am writing this post that will teach you all that you need to know about basic SEO.

1. Title Link and Text

The link of your title should not be a number like – ( http://xyz.com/123.html ) or random letters of the alphabet. This is a poor SEO technique and will affect you rankings horribly. A good permalink structure does have an impact on SEO.

Instead, include the keywords of your post title in the title link. When we compare two URL’s http://xyz.com/123.html and http://xyz.com/powerful-tips-for-beginners.html, which makes more sense? Surely, the second URL makes more sense and it’s good from a SEO and user prospective.

So you should always try putting in some keywords related to the content on that page in your URL? Once you have chosen keywords to include in the URL, write out the title of your post. You will have some keywords to work, so it will make it a little easier on you.

When talking about one of the most important factors of good SEO, we talk about the title of the page. By looking at the title of your page in search engine results, people should be able to make decision about the kind of content they have in store on that page for them. So again include your main keywords in your title, but don’t make it spammy by including too many keywords or by making it read as gibberish.

2. Keywords

If you want your post to appear on search engines for certain keywords then make sure that these keywords appear often in your post. You should skillfully incorporate the keyword into your post five to six times – without making it look artificial for your readers.

But be careful, don’t use the keywords too much or the search engine spider may suspect spam. And if you are creating friendly content, have your keywords in your content where they fit in naturally. And please keep your keyword density lower than 2 percent!

3. Quality Links

It is important that your blog is linked from various high quality websites, as this will increase your number of backlinks (link to a previous post) which has great SEO benefits

At the same time, if your site is linked to undesirable sites such as link farms, bad neighborhoods, etc. then it will have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.

So link to authority and trusted websites only so that your website outgoing profile becomes stronger. And at the same time, get links from quality websites and blogs only. You can grab some quality links for your website by submitting your content on ezine publishing websites, guest posts, genuine blog commenting on the blogs in your niche and getting links from other bloggers.

4. Image Alt Tag

Always add an ALT tag to your images when you insert an image. This is important as there is a lot of traffic that is to be gained from indexed images as well.

An ALT tag is basically an alternative description of your image and it is crawled by search engine spiders.

Using ALT text with an image is important as people will be able to see some text when they are having image off on their systems or when see in an email body. And in the absence of ALT text, they will not get any information about the image you placed on a page or email content if they don’t prefer seeing image from an email or page they browse.

5. Use Anchor Text

When you interlink your pages in the blog, be sure to add proper anchor text. Anchor text is basically a word that is related to the post that you have linked it to; in other words: keywords.

Suppose you have a post about toy making, and use the anchor text, sell toys in any of your posts that link to it. When search engines visit your site and see that anchor text, they follow it, and know your page is about selling toys.

6. Interlink Your Pages

Bloggers are so obsessed with getting quality links from other blogs that they forget that the most basic step of SEO: interlinking pages.

This can do a number of things for you. By interlinking, you are basically selecting keywords in your article and linking them to another page on your blog. You can do this with old articles, pages on your blog, etc. This increases the pageviews on your blog, and makes it easier for search engines to travel deep into your blog.

What’s Your Tip?
There is a lot to good SEO, and what was talked about today is only the tip of the iceberg. What SEO tips have you learned from your own blog? Share them here, let’s make this the ultimate list of beginner SEO tips!

What’s the key to Keywords?

Janith — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:56:16 +0000

In relation to search engines, these are simple the words (or phrases) that the user is searching for. If the keywords occur in your pages you stand a good chance of turning up in the search engine results for that particular search. If they don’t, you won’t. Simple!

Keywords can be used extensively to really help your SERPs, as it is one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization. This short guide will explain, in-detail, every part of it. Dominate the ranks, and rake in the targeted Search Engine traffic with these simple tips!

Why should you bother about keywords?

As you should know, keywords are important for non-human visitors to help rank and identify your website. When SEO was in it’s early days, you could barely satisfy both humans and bots, because “keyword stuffing” was the only way to notify the spiders of your content.

However, today the bots are much more smarter and easier to ‘feed’ your information to, they can manipulate text to produce a detail description of your website. Keywords are an important aspect of SEO, and just by following this short guide – you will have your website flourishing with Search Engine traffic.

Identifying Search Terms

Start by considering the sort of terms people would type into a search engine to find a site like yours. For example, if you have a website about console gaming – then your visitors are likely to type terms like “gaming”, “console” or “next-gen”.

Once you have accomplished a few key terms that relate to your site, you should run them through tests to see how ‘popular’ they are. Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool is great for this, as it gives a rough estimation of how many searches are performed for that exact term/phrase.

Implementing Search Terms

Once you have decided on a core set of search terms, you need to ensure that they occur in your pages. You need to make sure that throughout your content, you use the exact keywords you’ve targeted before. They must be identical to your research, even when it comes to punctuation.

In an attempt to implement keywords, many bloggers tend to abuse it, you’re meant to ‘sprinkle’ your content with keywords not flood it. If you swamp your page with keywords (e.g. repeating “SEO tips” 500 times) then you are far more likely to harm your SERPs than improve them as the search engines will regard it as spamming.

What is “Keyword Density”?

This phrase refers to an “optimum” ratio of search terms (i.e. phrases people are likely to be searching for) to page content. If your text has a good smattering of such words or phrases you will be looked kindly by the search engines. However, this again goes back to many bloggers and web-developers abusing this technique and actually hurting their SERPs, just keep that in mind.

Optimum Keyword Density

Unfortunately there’s no such thing; or if there is no-one outside of Google knows the formula! As ever, my advice would be to take a common sense approach, and always write you copy for human readers first and foremost.

So, if your site sells widgets, it makes good sense to ensure that the word widget appears several times – but not too often, where your visitors get sick of seeing it.

Working with the ‘Meta Tags’

There is actually only one tag, but it gets referred to a lot in relation to search engine optimization – erroneously for the most part-simply as “meta tags”. For example, “meta description” is the tag with a name attribute “description”. It looks like this;

What are Meta Keywords?

Meta Keywords was designed to allow you to provide additional text information for crawler-based search engines However, these days virtually all search engines ignore the tag; the consensus is that it’s not worth bothering with.

Frankly, since I got to know that search engines completely omit this attribute of the Meta Family, I’ve totally forgotten about it. In fact, I forgot they even existed till I started writing this article!

Then, what are Meta Descriptions?

The meta-description has some use in search engine optimization, but it won’t actually help improve your ranking. Its usefulness lies in the fact that some searches (Google included) display the description in its search results.

This allows you to create a much targeted piece of text, rather than just letting the search engine grab the chunk of text from your page that just happens to include the search term.

Hmm, can I use page-specific Meta-descriptions?

Of course, in fact it can be a significant positive if you do so. By creating a page-specific meta description for each in your site, you might just encourage a few extra clicks when your page come sup in a search engine listing. Make sure the text adequately describes the page contents, and what the user will find here.

That’s it!

There we go, everything you need to know about keywords and how it relates to SEO is explained. There really isn’t much more to it than that, except maybe how careful you need to be when choosing your keywords. Perhaps some time in the future, I’ll dedicate a post to help you identify key-terms in common niches.

The idea is to pick out common yet not too competitive words, and try to balance the two. Just don’t forget that subtle variations of very competitive words can still wonders for you.