With so much information - and misinformation - available on the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) it can be tricky trying to separate fact from fiction.

Coupled with the fact that SEO changes only slightly less rapidly than the weather, it can be downright overwhelming to know where to start.

So, if you’re an SEO newbie looking for a place to start, here’s a look at some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics. What Is SEO?

Even the most beautifully-designed site won’t do you much good if potential customers can’t find it. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in: SEO helps ensure your site is more visible in the search engines, drive qualified traffic to your website, and convert that traffic into actual customers.

In short, SEO increases your website’s rankings in the search engines by making the pages within your site more attractive to the search engines. The more attractive your site is to Google, the higher its rankings in the search engine results pages. And the higher your rankings, the more likely users will visit your site. Obviously, a site with a result on Page 1 of Google is going to get more traffic than a site buried on Page 14.

If your site is missing from the top search results, then you may not be maximizing your ability to generate new business and add revenue to your bottom line. Let’s take a look at some stats:

• 1.3 billion Internet users
• Over 85% start at a search engine
• Less than 25% will go beyond the top 10 search engine results
• Top 10 results get 80% more traffic than those ranked in the 11-30 spots

Besides gaining better rankings in the search engines, SEO is effective in several other areas as well:

• Branding/establishment as an authority
• Pre-qualified lead generation
• Easily tracked ROI
• Cost savings compared to other mediums such as glossy brochures and yellow pages ads (average cost per lead is $0.29!)

Breaking SEO Down
SEO consists of several key elements that work together to generate increases in a website’s rankings, traffic and conversions: Keyword Selection, Copywriting, Link Building, HTML Optimization and Analytics. Let’s take a look at each element in more detail:

Keyword Selection
The foundation of any SEO campaign is good keyword research. That’s because targeting the right keywords is essential to getting your SEO on the right track. If your sell silver ladies watches, then you’re going to want to rank in the search engines for the phrase “silver ladies watches” and other similar phrases. If your keyword research is off and you target the wrong keywords, then you may not get visitors who want what your site has to offer. That’s why you need to make sure that your site is properly optimized for the most-searched-for keywords related to your business.

Copywriting
Getting potential customers to your site is only half the battle; you’ve got to convince them to buy. That’s where persuasive copywriting comes in. Be sure to tell people why they need your products or services and include conversion points throughout the site. The search engines like content, so you also need to optimize your copy to include your keywords. This includes things like descriptive product pages, built-out content like biographies, news sections, etc. One important point to remember is to keep your most critical content “above the fold” - that’s the area that’s visible to your users before they have to scroll down.

Link Building
Think popularity contests ended in high school? Think again; you’re not so lucky. Link building is like one big online popularity contest, and the search engines like the popular kids. Your success in the search engines depends, in part, on the amount of relevant incoming links to your site. Of course, having lots of good links also drives customers to your site, which is a good thing, too. Links can come in various sources, including directories, business partners, organizations, social media sites, and much, much more.

HTML Optimization
Title tags, header tags, Alt tags, Meta-descriptions — the search engines want your site’s HTML to be descriptive and clean. Search engines want to know exactly what your page is about; they don’t want to sort through a bunch of extraneous code to figure it out. That’s why you’ll hear SEO types talk about the importance of having clean code and how to use CSS to make that happen.

Measuring Success
No SEO campaign is complete without analytics. After all, if you aren’t measuring things like traffic, link popularity, and conversions, then how do you know if your SEO strategies are working? Programs like ClickTracks and Google Analytics help make the number-crunching a little easier. When analyzing an SEO campaign, it’s important to only make one change at a time so that you know which changes are effective.

If you want to have an effective SEO campaign, you need to include each of the five SEO elements listed above. Keep in mind the information here just scratches the surface of these topics, and there are certainly other more advanced SEO strategies that can benefit your site as well. These building blocks, however, are the perfect way to get your SEO campaign started on the right track.

About the Author: Collyn Floyd is a marketing and public relations specialist with The Karcher Group, a web development and search engine marketing firm based in North Canton, OH. She is passionate about helping The Karcher Group’s clients achieve greater online traffic, leads and sales through search engine optimization and marketing.

7 Homework Items to Complete Before Any SEO Class

Below are seven of the top items (though certainly not the *only* common items).

1. JavaScript and CSS code on the pages…

If you’re using JavaScript to do any cool functions on your website or CSS for styling effects, the code for that JavaScript and CSS should be moved to an external file that is then called from your webpage. If you’re not sure how to do this, check out this guide to reducing the size of your “head” (the area within your HTML document where this code appears).

2. Not having unique title and meta tags for every page…

Every single page on your website should have its own unique title tag that describes the topic of that specific page. Title tags are an extremely important on page factor and having each one be different and topical are vital to your success – both for rankings and click through rates in the search engine result pages.

Additionally, every meta description tag, while not instrumental to your rankings, should be unique to each page because search engines often use your meta description tag in their search engine result pages. Good and unique meta description tags contribute to the overall uniqueness of each page and can help increase your click through rate in the search engines. Which listing looks more appealing?

Homepage
Welcome to our landscaping site. Home Services Rates Contact Us … provide great landscaping services to all of… bookmark us now because you will want to …
www.acmelandscaping.com

Acme Landscaping Services | Houston Texas Landscaper
If you’re looking for landscaping services in the Houston, area who serves the South Houston, Pasadena and Deer Park regions with competitive rates, stop here.
www.acmelandscaping.com

I’m sure you get it now. The meta keyword tag? In my opinion, it’s of no real use, but it is simply good practice to include it on your pages, making sure that the content of this tag applies to the content on your page.

3. JavaScript or graphical site navigation…

If your site is using JavaScript for your menus, kill it now. Even with an additional sitemap to lead the search engines, you lose out on valuable internal anchor text and links. There is no reason not to ditch the JavaScript and change your menus to utilize CSS – and by using CSS, you won’t lose the current design or feel. If you’re using graphics to link to your internal site pages, you’ll want to get a redesign to instead utilize a straight text navigation system or retain your current appearance by utilizing a CSS menu.

4. Enter here pages…

Sure, they look cool, but there are several problems with having the homepage of your website be a flash movie or graphic that asks users to click something to enter the site. First, it is typical that a site has their homepage as the most frequently linked to page on their site. By having a bunch of inbound links coming to a page with no indexable content, it wastes the power of your homepage in regards to obtaining search engine rankings.

Additionally, because some people linking to your site may choose to link to the page you get to *after* you “click here” to send *their* visitors directly to the actual content, it also splits the link popularity between what is essentially two homepages – one with content and one without. You’re better off having all of your power combined into one effective, well designed and content full homepage.

Second, from a user perspective, making them click more than necessary is never a good thing. Don’t make users search for content – put it directly in front of them.

5. Canonical issues…

Basically, a canonical issue refers to the search engines finding several different URL variations of the same page. On your server, they are all the same page, but the search engines, particularly Google, have a hard time figuring that out. For instance, your homepage can likely be found be default under a variety of different addresses:

www.homepage.com
homepage.com
www.homepage.com/index.asp
homepage.com/index.asp

To your server, those are all the same pages. Google however sees them as four separate pages. Fixing a canonical error is fairly simple… pick the URL you want the engines to consider your “real” and only homepage and 301 redirect the other variations to the URL you have chosen. I typically recommend that you choose a version of the root. Either:

www.homepage.com
homepage.com

Additionally, I typically recommend that most sites use the www.homepage.com version, as most people will tend to insert the www automatically. However, you’ll notice that Michael chose to use the non www version for the real and only homepage on SEO Class. His reasoning (sometimes you learn something new every day) was that he found that you could get a larger font size for the URL on your offline advertising materials by omitting the www. We plan to do a bit of offline advertising as our primary focus is New York businesses. If you do as well, I’d recommend keeping Michael’s tip in mind. If you don’t plan to do a lot of offline advertising, my recommendation would be to choose the www version. If you already have a canonical issue, check out Matt’s post on the topic for expectations in fixing it.

6. Multiple domains for the same site…

This is an offense committed mostly by big companies with various brands. They have one site at www.brand.com and then own www.subbrand.com, www.subbrandtwo.com and www.brandnickname.com and either have 302 redirects in place from the sub-brands to the main brands, or simply render the same exact site that appears on www.brand.com on all of the alternate domains.

If you’re utilizing more than one domain name, place a 301 redirect on the other vanity domains to either the main page of the site or to the appropriate sub page on the main site. For instance, www.brandnickname.com might 301 redirect to www.brand.com while www.subbrand.com might 301 redirect to www.brand.com/subbrand.asp.

This allows you to use multiple domains for advertising purposes, but 301 redirect all visitors (and inbound links) to the appropriate pages on the main domain to avoid duplicate content issues as well as consolidate the inbound links to the various subdomains to the correct pages you want to rank for the terms in the search engines.

7. Focusing on the small stuff…

Almost every site has problems of some form if there hasn’t been an SEO professional working with the site since before the launch. But, it is important to have any items you need to work on prioritized in a manner that allows you to make the most impact in the shortest amount of time, or which allows you to fix the biggest thorn. An example:

A client of mine once had huge duplicate content issues. In addition to using part of their content from another site (with permission) they were allowing a huge, old, big brand site to utilize their original content verbatim. The “other site” was ten years old, has over 100,000 backlinks and is someone you would see advertised on television. I had to explain to the client that they were being seen as the duplicate and that this big brand site was who was showing up for all their search terms. In addition, the site had canonical issues and needed a big push in the link development arena.

They proceeded to spend thirty minutes asking about whether or not they should bold their keywords on their pages. I told them that if their website was a house, then the garage was sitting in a sinkhole and that asking about bold tags was the equivalent of asking me what color curtains would look best in the kitchen. It wouldn’t matter what color their curtains were because no one would be visiting them while their house was taking on mass damage from the sinkhole.

Moral: If something is causing you massive damage or your site has a big issue to address, fix it before you do anything else.

So there you have it – a few of the more common items you can address before attending a workshop or conference, or paying a professional to take a look at your site.

posted on http://seoclass.com/ unknown author.

The following are the 9 Biggest SEO Mistakes which Web Designers & Web Developers should avoid.

Splash Page
I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

Non-spiderable Flash Menus
Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

Image and Flash Content
Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

Overuse of Ajax
A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

Versioning of Theme Design
For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

“Click Here” Link Anchor Text
You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

Common Title Tag Mistakes
Same or similar title text: Every page on your site should have a unique tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because, every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the Title Tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit: Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title: Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures” “Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

Empty Image Alt Attribute
You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj”.

Unfriendly URLs
Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356

These things are the pillars of Search Engine Optimization and so to your web site’s success path.

About the Author: Robin Dale is the publisher for www.teeky.org. We offer useful & quality articles and news about Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, Dedicated Server Hosting, Windows VPS Hosting UK, Linux VPS Hosting UK, e-commerce hosting, cPanel Hosting, hosting tips & UK Web Hosting.

Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity. Web designers don’t really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand do not like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.

As a business owner you are caught in the middle of this conflict. For your website to convert you need both design and optimization. There is no middle way. You cannot have a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still be competitive. You cannot have just one of the two either. Without optimization your site is invisible to the search engines, hence to your potential customers. On the other hand, without a good design, your site, although not invisible, will get nothing but hits. Web users are picky and if they find nothing of interest on your site they will just surf to the next site.

Having a beautiful website no one can find is like having a store and keeping the doors locked. You know it is there, you’ve done a great job decorating it, the products are waiting for the customers, yet no one comes in.

When you pay for web design, don’t automatically assume that by paying thousands of dollars on a layout you’ll be a hit on the Web. The Web is a highly competitive place. There are already thousands entrepreneurs who, just like you, invest in design and hope to become the new “it.” Without online marketing (SEO being an important part of the discipline) all these entrepreneurs will remain in the shadow, with their beautiful websites closed to the world.

SEO is the key to that virtual door you need to open for your customers. It is important that you consider this tool when you first conceive your site. Web design and SEO don’t need to be enemies. There are enough professional agencies that employ both web designers and SEOs who work together to develop a good business website, a site that is SEO ready, accessible and readable with any browser. You just need to take your time, research and send a few inquiries. Then choose the company that answers your questions in a timely manner, basically choose the company that proves a clear ability of designing with W3C standards and a clear understanding of the online trends and realities.

Then balancing content with visual appearance shouldn’t be such a difficult task. Aside graphics and artwork you have to choose proper font types, in a readable size, with colors that harmonize with the layout of the site and so on. If your site is not SEO ready from the first stage of the project you’ll face additional costs after you launch. SEO ready means a site that is properly coded (errors in the HTML code might stop some search bots from crawling and indexing your site correctly), with good navigability and good internal linking structure.

On the other hand, SEO and appearance are not the only traits of a good site. Brand conscious companies should look at the broader picture: instead of debating what is better online, entrepreneurs should ask themselves what works best to convert visitors into clients.
Studies show that an over optimized page might hurt the user-experience of people with disabilities. For example, many SEOs stuff the image alt attributes and their alternative titles with keywords. Blind and other visually impaired people who use screen readers to access the Web and read the pages cannot see the images and, instead of listening to a relevant image description, they’ll hear… nonsense.

Usability and accessibility are equally important as design and optimization. Strangely enough images are better for usability. They give focus to the design and when properly optimized they provide for less cluttered website content. The problems appear when the images slow down the loading times, but with the use of CSS loading times should not be a big concern.

As search engines prefer fast loading sites it is easy to understand why good coding and optimization are so important. Poor coding raises many other problems aside loading times and might increase costs when you need website updates, especially when your website administrator is not the one who created your site.

About the Author: Mihaela Lica used to be a military journalist, worked six years as a freelance reporter for the Romanian National Radio Station (ROR) and four years in the Public Relations Directorate of the Romanian Ministry of Defense. Since 2002 she is a PR consultant in Germany. For more SEO articles visit ewritings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (aka “organic” or “algorithmic” search engine) listings. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and ultimately web traffic. This is analogous to foot traffic in retail advertising. The term SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients. SEO strategies vary widely, in accordance with the specific site. Broadly speaking, SEO may be geared towards increasing either, or both, the total number and quality of visitors from Search Engines. The quality of a visitor can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information.

Search engine optimization is available as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because SEO often requires making changes to the source code of a site, it is often most effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term “Search Engine Friendly” to describe designs, menus, Content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively. A range of strategies and techniques are employed in SEO, including changes to a site’s code (referred to as “on page factors”) and getting links from other sites (referred to as “off page factors”)

Some SEO History

The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization do not appear on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.

Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb was created to discuss bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

Some more aggressive site owners and SEOs generate automated sites or employ techniques that eventually get domains banned from the search engines. Many search engine optimization companies, which sell services, employ long-term, low-risk strategies, and most SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies do so on their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of risking client websites.

Some SEO companies employ aggressive techniques that get their client websites banned from the search results. The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned. Google’s Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the main search engines provide information/guidelines to help with site optimization: Google’s, Yahoo!’s, MSN’s and Ask.com’s. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! has Site Explorer that provides a way to submit your URLs for free (like MSN/Google), determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and drill down on inlinks to deep pages. Yahoo! has an Ambassador Program and Google has a program for qualifying Google Advertising Professionals.