What,What Not and Who of SEO

What SEO is
Search Engine Optimization refers to the collection of techniques and practices that allow a site to get more traffic from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). SEO can be divided into two main areas: off-page SEO (work that takes place separate from the website) and on-page SEO (website changes to make your website rank better). This tutorial will cover both areas in detail! Remember, a website is not fully optimized for search engines unless it employs both on and off-page SEO.

What SEO is not
SEO is not purchasing the number #1 sponsored link through Google Adwords and proclaiming that you have a #1 ranking on Google. Purchasing paid placements on search engines is a type of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and is not covered in this tutorial.

SEO is not ranking #1 for your company's name. If you're reading this tutorial, you probably already know that ranking for popular terms is darn near impossible, but specific terms, such as a company name, is a freebie. The search engines usually are smart enough to award you that rank by default (unless you are being penalized).

Who uses SEO
If a website is currently ranked #10 on Google for the search phrase, "how to make egg rolls," but wants to rise to #1, this websites needs to consider SEO. Because search engines have become more and more popular on the web, nearly anyone trying to get seen on the web can benefit from a little SEO loving.

source:http://www.tizag.com/SEOTutorial/

Website Optimization

Your keywords and phrases influence the way the copy should be written on each page of your site. They also need to appear in the page's code in certain ways to make sure the search engines index your page for the correct keywords. If your site already exists, placing the page elements and making slight copy modifications will mean all the difference the next time your site is spidered by the search engines. If your site is being built from the ground up, the content and page elements can be developed as the site is being built so your site is search engine friendly when it launches.

See this website for example.

Source: http://www.bigoakinc.com/approach/search-engine-optimization-approach.php

Important Points For SEO

1: Write Semantic and Valid Markup

It’s important to write meaningful and semantic markup so search engines can easily extract and classify what’s relevant on your page. That includes two key practices:

1. Use proper headings and listings.
2. Always validate your markup

I can’t stress enough those two points. There have always been a debate about if you should use the tag for the logo/title of your page or the post title (if you are building a blog), but the important thing here is that the information in your page must be presented hierarchically, using all six heading tags if possible.

2: Optimize your Title and Meta Tags the Correct Way

Back in the day, meta tags were the first thing you had to take care of when dealing with SEO. Because Google and other search engines don’t rely on them anymore, you only have to focus on the description meta tag, because that’s the one which will be displayed on the results page under the title.
Your title tag is very important to search engines, and like your meta tags, should be different for every page of your site. It must be relevant and descriptive to the content of the page, and shouldn’t be too long -but enough to describe what your page is about. For example, instead of:

<title>John Smith's Shop</title>

Something better would be:

<title>John Smith's Fishing Supplies - Find the best fishing supplies in California</title>

If you are using WordPress, there are many useful plugins for managing title and meta tags in your blog. I recommend the All in One SEO pack, it’s easy to use and works out-of-the-box.

3: Always Use alt and title Attributes

The title attribute, besides making a site more accessible, serves the purpose of telling search engines about the topic of the site you are linking to, so try to avoid things like:

To see all of our fishing boats, <a href="#">Click here</a>

Instead, use…

<a href="#" title="View all of our fishing boats">View all of our fishing boats</a>

The alt attribute is basically the same, but for images, it’s the way of describing our image to the search engine.

4: Maintain your CSS and JavaScript files Externally

Search engines usually ignore CSS and JavaScript files, but even if they don’t (Google’s algorithm changes), placing your CSS/JavaScript in external files will help the crawler find your content faster.

5: Use Google Webmasters Tools

You can make Google do a lot of work simply by adding your site to Google Webmasters Tools, that is linked to your Gmail/Google account. It shows you how Google crawls and indexes your site to help diagnose problems. You can see all internal and external links pointing to your site and which search queries are driving the most traffic. Also, it lets you configure things, such as a preferred domain name for your site, with or without www, so it knows is the same site and page rank doesn’t get divided.

6: Keep your HTML Simple

Build your site using only the necessary markup and make your layout as simple as possible (no tables, of course!). It will help the search engines to index it easily. And that brings me to my next point:

7: Avoid Frames

Frames make your site load slower and makes it difficult for the robots to crawl it.
If you must use frames, always offer noframes content and be sure that each frame has a descriptive title.

8: Use JavaScript Only for Progressive Enhancement

You must ensure that your JavaScript only adds new layers of enhanced functionality and your site works with JavaScript disabled, specially when dealing with navigational elements, such as menus.
The search engines should be able to read your navigation as a nested list to index it properly:

<ul>
 <li><a href="home.html">Home</a></li>
 <li><a href="shop.html">Shop</a>
  <ul>
   <li><a href="boats.html">Boats</a></li>
   <li><a href="supplies.html">Supplies</a></li>
  </ul>
 </li>
 <li><a href="about_us.html">About Us</a></li>
 <li><a href="contact.html">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

And then you can format it as a fancy drop down menu using CSS and JavaScript.

9: Be Careful When Using Flash

Although now search engines can index flash content, they still don’t do it very well. Keep your flash to a minimum, and avoid using it for text. Don’t use it for creating menus either, you can probably make the same effects, like I said before, just with CSS and JavaScript while keeping your html structure nice and clean.
Personally I would limit the use of flash in the web to embedded videos/sound and some useful animation (like an animated infographic), but nothing more.

10: Create a sitemap.xml file for Google

To be sure that your pages are indexed and cached quickly in Google, you can create a sitemap.xml file. It’s a XML file that contains a list with all the pages on your site. It follows the Sitemap protocol like that:

version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   
      http://www.example.com/</loc>
      2005-01-0</lastmod>
      monthly</changefreq>
      0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

You can create it manually following Google’s help for creating sitemaps or, if you use WordPress, you can install
XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin that builds it automatically and notifies Google of the changes.

11: Make a Site Map

Besides creating a sitemap.xml, you should also make a detailed html sitemap page that links to every page on your site. It helps your users and search engines find the content easily. The less clicks it takes to get to a page, the better.
A good tool to create beautiful and easy to maintain site maps is slickmap, a simple stylesheet that shows a nice site map from an unordered list navigation.

12: Add a robots.txt File to Your Root Directory

By default, search engines crawl and index everything in a website. You can block some files or folders that aren’t relevant or don’t want to get indexed by placing a robots.txt in your root folder. An example of a robots.txt could be:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /js/

The command “User-agent: *” allows the crawler to search through your site freely, and “Disallow” commands prevent it to analyze those folders.

13: Check for Broken Links and Images

If your page has links pointing to content that doesn’t exist, it will probably never be found. It’s also a fact that search engines penalize sites with many broken links, so don’t forget to use the W3C link validator tool to find them.

14: Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can be dangerous to your search engine rankings. But, what is duplicate content?
If you have a WordPress blog, you probably have a category and archives pages in your sidebar. These pages are just a collection of your posts, so you could have identical content in some of them: for example, when you have just a post in a category or in a given day, the content in that archive/category page will be the same as the post itself.
You can solve these and others duplicate content problems by using noindex, follow in your robots meta tag, using a 301 redirect or with a robots.txt file.

15: Create an Informative Error Page

If a user mistakenly types a wrong or incorrect url, it will show a default server page with an internal error message. That message is not very helpful, so instead you should create a user-friendly 404 error page that links back to the homepage, shows alternatives for navigation or links to possibly related content.
There are plenty of WordPress plugins for improving your error pages. The 404 SEO plugin gives you a smart error page that will automatically display links to relevant pages on your site, based on the words in the url that wasn’t found.

16: Keep a Flat Structure Directory

Because search engines like to access quickly and easy to any file, you shouldn’t go too deep in your structure directory. Avoid things such as:
http://somedomain.com/shop/products/boats/motor/red_one.html
and use something like:
http://somedomain.com/products/motor-boats/red_one.html
Keep in mind that any page shouldn’t be more than three clicks away from your home page.

17: Use Search Engine Friendly url Names

Search engines cannot make sense of urls with dynamic and session id names, so instead of:
http://somedomain.com/?page_id=12
you should use a meaningful name with hyphens instead of underscores, like:
http://somedomain.com/fishing-boats-and-supplies
In WordPress you can configure that in the permalinks options page.

18: Design an Effective Footer

User your footer links to help search engines navigate through your site, replicating your main navigation and linking to the most important pages on your site.
An example of a good designed footer is the one found in CSS-tricks.

19: Use Breadcrumb Navigation

Consider using breadcrumbs as a secondary navigation aid. It makes it easier for users to move around your site. Be sure the text on your breadcrumb links describes accurately the content of the corresponding page.

20: Write Good Content

Finally, forget about keywords and all that, the best SEO advice you can receive is to just write good content, interesting articles that people will like and find useful.


Credits: http://blog.themeforest.net/resources/20-seo-tips-that-every-web-developer-should-follow/

Example of good SEO

This site was optimizing for debt-related terms and surprisingly,they are doing all the right things! Follow this site regularly to see the changes they make to get good rankings.

Defining Niche Markets

A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing on; Therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.

Every single product that is on sale can be defined by its niche market. As of special note, the products aimed at a wide demographics audience, with the resulting low price (due to Price elasticity of demand), are said to belong to the Mainstream niche, in practice referred only as Mainstream or of high demand. Narrowed demographics though lead to elevated price because of the same principles.

In practice, product vendors and trade businesses are commonly referred as mainstream providers or narrow demographics niche market providers (colloquially shortened to just niche market providers). Small capital providers usually opt for a niche market with narrow demographics as a measure of increasing their gain margins.

Know more about this here.

Definition of SEO-what is the meaning?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Know more about this here.