SEO, what is there to know? (Part 2)

Welcome back all, feels like a long time since my last post. Just to get you up to speed I have been building my equipment for the Raspberry Pi (still time to enter our competition), I’m just waiting for a USB hub so I can connect my mouse and keyboard to the Pi, I had to get a Wi-Fi dongle just because plugging the Ethernet cable into it would require a lot of back and forth…personally that’s too much effort for me.

Back to the matter at hand, we chatted about SEO last time and because it is such a lengthy topic I thought it best to split up the intricate nature of search engine chit chat. So, as promised this brings us to Part 2. Let me begin….

After you pick the right keywords, it’s important to start making your content. Search engines have little things called bots that automatically flick through your website, "reading" it to find out what it’s about and then deciding which keywords each of your pages should rank for. You can influence their "decisions" by strategically optimizing your content for certain keywords.

This is especially true if you’re creating content bots can’t read. It’s easy for bots to interpret text, but they aren't advanced enough yet to watch videos, look at images, or listen to audio. You’ll need to describe them, so they bot can understand and rank your pages for the appropriate keywords.

For search engine bots to properly index images, alt tags need to be added to each image, adding a brief description. For example, if there was an image of a “Bubble Gum Ice Cream”, I would tell the search engine that the image is a Bubble Gum Ice Cream by using an alt tag. It would look something like this:

<img src=”http://loverstif.com/images/bubblegumicecream.jpg” alt=“Bubble Gum Ice Cream” />

In addition, make sure your image names are relevant to the image. The picture of the blue widget would be called bubblegumicecream.jpg instead of image3.jpg.

A quick word of advice!

Writing solely for search engines usually makes your content boring, and typically, that won’t help convert your visitors into customers. It’s far better to focus on people first, making your content as easy as possible, and then optimize for search engine bots where you can, without sacrificing the persuasiveness of your content.

The main thing’s to look out for are:

• Titles | Create eye-catching titles that raise the reader’s interest. You only have one chance to make a great first impression.
• Keywords | Pick keywords that will help bring people to your site and are relevant.
• Links | Link to quality sites that compliment what your website is about. It’ll encourage sites in your niche to link to you as well.
• Quality | Try to publish unique content. This prompts users to come to your site because they cannot easily find the content elsewhere.
• Freshness | If you are publishing content that does not age or become outdated, that’s great, but you also need to add new content on a regular basis.
• And most importantly, do not publish someone else’s content on your site. This creates duplicate content, and search engines can penalize you for it.

URL Structure

If your URLs are messy, search engines will have a hard time crawling them, and if search engines have a hard time crawling them, they will not be able to index your site, which means you will not rank in the search engines.

Keep these factors in mind to make your URLs more search engine friendly:

• URLs should not contain extraneous characters ( $ @ ! * % = ? )
• Shorter URLs typically rank better than longer ones
• Numbers and letters only should be used in URLs.
• Do not use underscores. Search engines prefer dashes. 
• Sub-domains can rank better than sub directories.

Site Structure

The way you link web pages together will make a big impact on your rankings. Here are some tips when cross-linking your web site. Links within your content tend to carry more weight than links within a sidebar or footer and try to keep the number of links on each page under 100.

Links

Links are maybe the most important part of SEO. The more web sites that link to your web site, the higher your web pages will rank.

The reason links have a high value in SEO is that it is easy for anyone to do research, modify their content, or create content, but is hard to convince hundreds or thousands of web sites to link to you. In the eyes of a search engine, the more trustworthy, non-spammy sites are linking to you, the more authority you must have on the topic.

Before we get into how to build links, here are some things you need to know. In general:

• Links within content are more effective than links in a sidebar or footer
• Links from related sites are better than links from non-relevant sites
• Anchor text plays the most important role in link building. If you want to rank for “bubble gum ice cream” then you want the anchor text of the link to be “bubble gum ice cream”.

Some things to avoid:

• Links from spammy or irrelevant sites.
• Site wide links can hurt more than they may help.
• If all of your links are rich in anchor text, it can hurt you.
• Reciprocal links (I link to you and you link to me) are not too effective.
• If you buy text links and get caught, you can get banned from a search engine.

Here are a few ways you can increase your link count:

• Social media | Listing on sites like Digg or StumbleUpon don’t just drive a ton of traffic. The increase in visibility also improves your chances of getting linked to.
• Directories | There are many directories on the web. Take the time to submit your web site to the ones that compliment your content.
• Forums | Many forums allow you to create signatures, in which you can link back to your web site. As long as those links are not no-followed, they will help with your rankings.
• Competition | The easiest way to get links is to see who links to your competition and write them an email telling them the benefits of your web site compared to your competition. Roughly, 5% of the web sites you email will also add your link.

So that was my round up of SEO and helping you get started. You only have a week left to win our Raspberry Pi, the entries that we have had so far have been great and if you want your name in the hat you have till Friday the 26th, so don't leave it late.

'Til the next time.

James x