You’ve told me you’re loving the SEO blogs and I love my search optimization as well – so here goes another post. Today we are going to be looking at how to get the Search engine optimization process correct – from scratch!

That’s right people! We’re going to go through just about everything you need to do, and in what order you have to do them for your site, blog or online application to have as much chance as it can get with the marketing push that comes as a result of getting search optimization right.

The post will at many stages branch off to what you should do if you are running a blog and what to do if you are dealing with a general website. Because WordPress is the most popular blogging platform online, we are going to assume you are running it! I am also going to go out on a limb and assume you as the faithful reader also have a working knowledge of HTML as you will need to do some handy-work at some stages.

Please not that in this blog post we will not be going into specifics such as keyword research and competitor analysis, etc. It is simply a guide to get the SEO process right from the start!

So now that the introduction and caveats are out of the way; without further ado – let’s kick some SEO but!

Step 1: Build your website or install a WordPress blog on your server.

Okay, this step isn’t rocket science – but for the sake of argument, we are going to assume you already have a website designed/developed and sitting there ready to be optimized. On the other hand, you could have just installed a WordPress blog on your server and it has come with the default theme with a pre-installed comment by ‘Mr WordPress’ to get you going

Step 2: Setup your robots.txt file

Wow, wow, slow down cowboy! What’s a robots.txt file?
Good question! Guys who don’t know this one, don’t worry – many people don’t really understand the underlying meaning of the robots.txt file.

In essence, the robots.txt is literally a text file which resides in your home directory; generally ‘/public_html/’ ‘/home/’ or ‘/www/’. It contains instructions or simple rules that robots, or search bots, such as Googlebot use when crawling your website or blog.

What does it do?
It tells search engines, through their spiders/bots (which crawl your website, and look for this ‘robots.txt’ file) what content to allow people searching content from your site to find.

Give me an example!
Geez! ask for much?

Okay, let’s take an example from my own robots.txt file.

[code="html"]
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-login.php

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:

# Does anyone care that I love my sitemap?
Sitemap: http://www.cheb.com.au/sitemap.xml
[/code]

Okay, it’s not as gibberish as it looks, believe me! Let’s dissect it…
User-agent: is basically stating which search spider/bot we want to target. By me putting * it is basically saying I don’t care – I want all bots to follow the following rules. Basically, any rule(s) specified under the ‘User-agent: *’ will make all bots who crawl your website or blog cooperate! Cool hah!
If you look at the next section, my user agent is ‘Googlebot-image’. What I’m saying there is I don’t mind Googlebot-image crawling my server for relevant images to add to Google’s image search at http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en.
Anything that you pre-mark with a “#” is a comment, and will just be ignored; so when it comes time for me to be smart with my robots.txt file, having “# Does anyone care that I love my sitemap” doesn’t affect anything.

Okay, this is pretty cool… Are you saying I get to tell Google, Yahoo! and other search engines what to crawl?
That’s exactly what I’m saying! It’s that simple! Create a ‘robots.txt’ file, fill in the relevant information, save and upload to your main folder (where you can see the file you call when you type in www.your-domain.com) and you’re off on your SEO dream start.

A few more examples?
To exclude all robots from the entire server and its contents

[code="html"]
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
[/code]
To allow all robots complete access to the server and its contents
[code="html"]
User-agent: *
Disallow:
[/code]
To allow only one bot (Google) complete access to the server and its contents

[code="html"]
User-agent: Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
[/code]
Because there is no ‘Allow’ rule, we have two separate rules: Google is disallowed from nothing; whilst everyone else (bot-wise) is disallowed everything in ‘/’ which is basically anything after your domain. i.e. www.cheb.com.au/anything here should NOT get crawled.
I say ‘should not’ as apposed to ‘will not’ because some bots choose not to agree and will just crawl your content anyway. Although, the prominent ones we care about like Yahoo! and Google usually listen!

There is a huge index/website which has everything you need to know about robots.txt alongside more examples and information at The Web Robots Pages

Step 3: Setup your sitemap

Wow, wow, slow down cowboy! What’s a sitemap?
A sitemap in very basic English is a listing of where to find ‘stuff’ on your server or website. Having a well structured sitemap will help a search engine spider and index your pages more efficiently and ultimately lead to the possible quicker addition to the search index of that particular search engine.

How do setup a sitemap if I am running WordPress?
Try installing the cool WordPress Google Sitemap Generator by Arne B. It takes the (albeit minor) pain out of site mapping.

How do setup a sitemap if I’ve designed/developed my own website?
That’s easy too! There are plenty of XML generators online which generate Google-friendly sitemaps. Check out the aptly-named XML Sitemaps. The script will run through a domain you input and look for any links it finds on that page. Consequently, it will then follow any link which is fiound on the pages off the main page – just like a search bot does, and then generate a sitemap for you! The free version only crawls up-to 500 links, and might take its time – so be warned!
You will want to download either the uncompressed or compressed XML version of the file – and if you like keep the HTML version for yourself. Google (and other engines) will need the XML format! Here is an example (of one section only) of what you should see if you load the XML file you download into a browser:
[code="xml"]

- xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
-
http://www.cheb.com.au/

Step 4: Setup your Google Webmaster Central & Yahoo Site Explorer accounts

This step is important so you can track a lot of things about your SEO experience. Google Webmaster Central for example let’s you track your sitemap file and update it ‘on the fly’ as well giving you detailed information about your particular URL and who has searched for what to get to your site/blog.

Yahoo! is pretty much the same, being able to track domains to your account and allowing you to run diagnostic tools to nut out any problems.

Both GWC and YSE ask you to verify that the domain actually belongs to you by either asking you to upload particular file to your web server (therefore proving you can login to the hosting account) or adding a meta tag such as:

[code="html"]

[/code]

Once you register for the accounts you will be able to make sure your SEO campaign is on track by finding and diagnosing any issues your sitemap, robots.txt file; or anything else for that matter – may be inhibiting the search engine from being able to successfully crawl your content. Remember, if search bots cannot get to you – you cannot be listed in their index!

Register for Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! Site Explorer today!

Step 4: Setup Feedburner account

If you are running a blog, or even a website with RSS – you need to have a Feedburner account. Feedburner is an online service which allows you to ‘burn’ your RSS feeds – practically allowing you to find out how many people have subscribed to your syndication as well as allowing you to monetize your blog or website’s traffic through various sources.

More than anything else, Feedburner is the foremost RSS feed management service online. Their feed management tools will make sure you can track any potential problems with your RSS feeds – which could potentially be a problem for your search engine optimization because generally speaking most of the time RSS/XML problems are caused by issues in your code! Remember, we want to make sure nothing comes in our way of a successful SEO campaign.

If you are running an XML or Atom-based RSS feed, make sure you snap up your Feedburner account today if you don’t already have one!

Step 5: Content, content and more content

Make sure that at this stage you have all your content ready to go where it should be. There already is a possiblity that search engines have grabbed you into their index for many reasons. If you are writing a blog, have a post or two already written and as much as possible try to stick to a posting pattern – at least once every week to two weeks.

There are a lot more content rules we can follow, including how to link and write content in a way that it is SEO-friendly. Check out our previous article on SEO-driven blog writing techniques.

Where are my headings?
It is also important, for SEO purposes that you should have at least one ‘heading one’ tag appear at the top-most part of the site/blog. Only have one <h1> tag per page, and make sure that it is well-written using main keywords you want to tackle as well as keyword phrases.

You might think about running an SEO-experiment like I have, but the safest thing to bet on is that every page should have only one H1 (<h1> tag) which is generally the actual title of the blog post or page.

Please note that search engines can and do penalize you for using more than one heading one tag. Do NOT keyword-stuff your headings. Remember, write for humans first, search bots second! Not only do you risk losing a visitor/reader – but you could end up in supplemental results!

Finally, you can use any number of H2s and subsequent levels of header tags in a page, but if we wanted to get somewhat picky, semantically, you shouldn’t jump between headings. For example, H2 should follow H1, as H4 should proceed H5 – but that’s just being picky

Step 6: Add yourself in…

Okay, at this point, if you cannot find yourself in search engines, or after a search for “site:www.you.com” in Google or Yahoo! – then add yourself in. Please note, if you are running WordPress, and most other blogging platforms – unless you have unchecked the option during install, you will ping Technorati every time you blog, so there is a high chance you could already be indexed! Check Technorati to be sure.

So there you go! Believe it or not, you have started your SEO campaign. Believe me, what you have already done has got you miles ahead of those who just ‘launch’ a standard website or blog.

You just need determination and drive to keep it going – and more importantly believe it will work because you will invest more time in making sure it does! Stick around for part II of this post which will go through in more detail what to do now that you have setup the foundation for search optimization.

We will be going through link-building and backlinking techniques as well as where to market your website or blog to make sure you get the extra step forward!

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed so you can get posts in your email inbox and also find out whenever we post new content. Share this article with a friend or digg it if you found it beneficial!
Till next time, Cheb.

I’ve been recently getting some requests to blog a little more SEO-based articles – and because I’m such a nice guy (wink, wink) I’ll happily oblige! We’ve looked at SEO techniques to help you get the most out of your own blog, as well as trends in the SEO pipeline and even WordPress plugins to help you achieve higher PageRank and search rankings in Google – but we haven’t got down to the nitty gritty of what makes up SEO and key concepts within SEO.

In this article, we will divulge some well-hidden terms used in Search engine optimization (or optimisation, for our Aussie readers ) – including examples, where appropriate. So let’s get going with the term itself!

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short is the practice of making a website or blog, and more importantly, its content – highly relevant and fresh for search engines, and searchers alike – who could become readers, subscribers or even customers as an outcome of the optimization. This form of online marketing, also referred to as Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, revolves around the concept of increasing your web presence’s potential to connect to your target audience – by increasing your web site’s findability.

The importance of Search engine optimization (optimisation) is that by increasing your ranking on a search engine result page (SERP), also known as visibility, you can drive a lot more targeted traffic to your web site.

Just as Google’s AdSense become so popular in online advertising for its ability to present relevant, contextual advertising to a user-base; getting SEO right means that people searching for something they particularly want to find; an Introduction to Web 2.0, for example, can be directed to your website if you have chosen that phrase, or those words as something you want to optimize your website for; which, as you can see by clicking on the link, we have.

Another great benefit of Search optimization is that you can not only target particular keywords and benefit from keyword analysis, but it also means you can target particular regions, such as ‘Australian visitors only’ or people searching from a particular market.

Finally, SEO isn’t just about keyword research! It’s a growing, and more importantly changing form of online marketing. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo! are continuously and meticulously changing their search algorithms in the hope of providing a more accurate search result; which in tern means that keyword research is no longer enough to get it right. You need to also focus on backlinking strategies, killer content that people want to read, and more importantly, a solid, consistent writing strategy.

2. Backlink

A backlink, which is sometimes a little self-explanatory, is a link from another site linking to your own site. Also known as an inbound or incoming link; backlinks are one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website or blog. The number of backlinks your site has accumelated over the course of its existance, is a very important measure of the popularity of the website.

Reading through the PageRank patent, it is evident that Google, as well as other big search engines, use backlinks as a form of determining placement (among other things, of course) on a search engine results page, or SERP.

Every time someone links your website, Google, as an example, records that link in a database table in your record. The more backlinks you have, Google assumes, the more current, contextual, and more importantly; relevent your information must be – and believe me, they have perfected their craft so much so that they are smart enough to know when you are trying to spam them into it!

Obviously, the more backlinks you can get from prominent, already-popular websites (who have become popular themselves through backlinks, PageRank, and other methods) such as Yahoo!, or an educational facility (which Google loves, by the way!) – the better it is – not only for your PageRank, but for the viability of your website – so get linking!

3. White hat Search engine optimization

One of my favourite SEO terms, White hat, is not normally a popular, or often-used term. In a nutshell, White hat SEO revolves around ‘ethical’ means which a company, or a search engine optimizer use to perform search engine optimisation.

These tried, and long-used techniques such as setting up a robots.txt, making use of a sitemap, getting your pages indexed and keyword analysis, etc, may take longer to reap rewards (as apposed to Black hat techniques, described below – but most SEO experts believe their rewards last longer.

4. Black hat Search engine optimization

The opposite of White hate SEO, Black hat search engine optimization labeling classifies ‘unethical’ or unorthodox techniques such as spamming or spamdexing (also described below) to aid in the optimization of content and boost search engine rankings. Although Black hat optimizers ultimately know their websites have a very high change of getting banned from search engines such as Google – or falling into the dreaded sand trap of supplemental results – most of them have considered this somewhat in their SEO strategy.

Altough it’s hard to distinguish whether Black hat SEO techniques is ‘bad’ or White hat techniques are more ‘ethical’, one thing remains for sure: both techniques have thier pros and cons, and many SE optimizers are happy to be labelled either – as long as the people and company’s which they represent are succeeding in thier online marketing endeavours.

Definitely some gray area there

5. Spamdexing

Have you ever come across a page on the World wide web that just seems to be either; a) hiding a hundred words/terms down the bottom of the page by having the words the same colour as the background, (so that they are hidden to you – their loyal viewer?), or b) just seem to make no sense because every third word is a catch-phrase they are trying to ‘optimize’ for – such as the ever popular “Viagra is good for you because Viagra is blah blah and Viagra is also ladi dah di da…” ?

Not only is this a good example of Black hat SEO techniques, but this a key example of what the web and search marketing industry’s refer to as spamdexing.

In short, spamdexing is spamming search engines to affect search engine rankings and placement. A very popular method of spamdexing is to build a website in way where it is designed to rank well for a particular keyword when that keyword has nothing to do with the sites content.

Blog comment spam is another prominent type of spamdexing. At the time of writing this blog post, akismet (WordPress’ default anti-spam plugin) has blocked a substantial 136 spam comments from landing on the blog pages of Cheb 2.0. More information on spamdexing can be found in its Wikipedia entry.

5. Key phrase

In short, a key phrase is a search phrase, generally made up of two-or-more words, such as ‘Web 2.0 Web Design’ which a user would type into a search engine in order to find information. Key phrases are important to search optimizers are thier job is to optimize for those key phrases which thier client wishes to be found for.

6. META tags

META tags are important in SEO because nearly all search engines use them in a search results page. It is important to make sure at least teo meta tags, description and keywords are used. Making sure a title is always present for every page is also equally important. In the example below, the purple text, ‘Web design, Web 2.0, Technology…’ is the title of the page, whilst ‘Australian web designer Cheb D’s blog…’ is the meta description of the page. I have included the HTML source of the page so you can see how this was achieved.

Search engine result listing

Relevant HTML source of the index page at www.cheb.com.au

[code="html"]

[/code]

7. Indexability

Indexability, also referred to as spiderability is the term used to denote whether a website can be indexed, or found by a search engine spider. Not being able to be spidered can, and most of the time does affect search engine listing placement in some shape or another. There are many ways a website can fall victim to problems with not being able to be crawled by a search bot (another word for search spider). These can include whether .htaccess does not allow the bot to access a certain section of your website, or whether you or whoever built the website has purposefully not allowed a particular section to be crawled (by means of the all-important robots.txt file.

8. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics online tool provided by none other than Google! It is a feature-packed solution detailing critical shortcomings, and successes on any website it tracks. It not only shows you what people searched for to get to your site, but also which browser they were using as well as where, geographically, they came from. Of course, it is much more extensive than that, allowing you to set ‘goals’ to track how many people sign up to a particular form, etc.

Users of the tool can add up-to fifty websites, as well as have thier statistics update within hours – and of course, the integration with Google Adwords is a worthy mention too!

9. Link rot

Link rot measures the percentage of a websites broken links. There are many reasons why link rot could occur – but the most common reasons include a website going offline (either hardware failure, or page taken offline completely), linking to content which is no longer there (or you need a certain level of access to get to it), changing a website’s content management system (for example, some CMS’s use human ir friendly-URL’s such as ‘/about-me/’ whilst others use general linking like ‘pageid=3′).

Most of the time however, link rot happens due to moving a page’s location. Sometimes, we tend to forget that we move documents around on our servers, and links not pointing to where they are supposed to go not only leads to a negative user experience, but can easily lower our rankings in search engines (because that particular content cannot be found).

Ideally, if for whatever reason you have to move content around on your server (which if by any chance was accessible somehow to anyone browsing your website) or not, for that matter – you should have a permanent 301 redirect, which is arguably the most search-engine friendly and trusted form of re-direction online.

Setting up a 301 redirect does not effect your ranking for that page and is above all, very easy to achieve.

PHP 301 redirect (place first thing in the page)

[code="php"]

header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: http://www.new-url-goes-here.com" );
?>

[/code]

ASP 301 redirect (place first thing in the page)

[code="vb"]

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url-goes-here.com"
%>

[/code]

Ruby on rails 301 redirect (place first thing in the page)

[code="ruby"]

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url-goes-here.com"
end

[/code]

10. Organic search results

Google, as well as Yahoo! and other search engines have results which consist of paid ads and unpaid listings. In essence, those listings which are not paid for, and are algorithmically calculated, through PageRank and other means, are called the organic search results.

Generally speaking, relevency scoring is the means by which the organic search results are organised – but as mentioned previously, there are a lot more calculations involved with a page’s ranking; including, but not limited to: age of the domain, page content, backlinks, backlink quality as well as PageRank (Google, for example).

Most clicks on search results are on the organic search results – and not only is that the better alternative, considering it is free, but it means that you have taken the time to make sure you got your search engine optimisation strategy right to have got that far into the organic listing.

So there you have it people – ten SEO terms you might have known, or not – but nonetheless, very important terms when dealing with SEO. It is important to understand the ins and outs as to what SEO really means for your business or online endeavour. Hopefully the above ten terms, alongside some examples, will help get you closer to your goals and have enlightened you in some way or another as to what SEO is really all about.

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