So you decided to launch a site, but you don’t know the basics on SEO. SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Basically you develop your site according to a few principles. You cannot just launch the site and wait for miracles.

This guide is made with the idea, that you have some basic knowledge of html, and web sites in general.

1. Study the keywords and your future competitors

The first thing to do is to learn how many competitors you have, and what keywords are good for your niche, good as in they get a lot of searches on Google and other search engines, where Google is the King of course.

For example I want to open a pc games site, right? My content will be based on pc games, games articles, reviews, games lists etc. First ill study the first 10 games sites ranked in Google for “pc games” keywords a search with English only selected. Let’s keep in our example first 3. On this search if you see it here the top 3 sites are ign.com, gamespot.com, pcgames.gwn.com and will see 14 millions results, which means the keyword is very hard to compete with, meaning it hard to gain best ranking in Google, top 10, first page.

At a closer look at these sites, you will see the keywords pc, or games are in their domain which that helps on ranking too, also if you visit them and on your browser go to tab view, and see page source, you will see their keywords on meta tags. And most of them the keyword pc games in their meta keywords at the top of the page, which doesn’t help much, but it on part of the SEO.

But does this keyword brings traffic? Well we can use one of the tools below, and see what traffic in brings.

Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Keyword Tracker

Analyzing the “pc games” keywords with these tools you will notice that these words together get around 2600 searches per day – 78000 searches per month. So what can we do? Let’s get a less competitive word, but that is still searchable. Let’s see how’s “rpg games” keyword is doing. It seems 1500 searchers per day, and 5 million results on the Google search (English only on languages settings). So it seems it a little bit less tough to compete with, but also we got to take a look at how powerful are the first 5-10 sites ranking on first page, based on their quality back links, age of the domain, directory listings(yahoo, dmoz), .edu, .wiki links, basically the web site strength. Studying all these information will get you prepared from the start, and you will save a lot of time.

So make a list of keywords, 5 to 10 that you will use in your content, link buildings and in your web promotion, try to keep related to each other.

2. Choosing your domain

Now that you have chosen your keywords, it time to buy a domain with hosting, and making it SEO Friendly by including me of they keywords in the domain name, those available of course. For example www.coolrpggames.com www.myrpggames.com or www.darpggames.com or www.da-rpg-games.com , anything you find available and like, but have at least one keyword in it.

You also got to understand that they are two instances of your site the one without “www.” and the one with “www.”.You will have to redirect the one without “www.” to “www.” one or the other way, depends on what you planning.

To do this if you are on linux hosting server add this code to the .htaccess file in your root directory:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

where yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com values your replaced with your site

name.

3. Optimize your site and content.

1. Start optimizing your site by adding a different title on each page, and if possible some of the keywords in these titles. Something like “Your Site NAME – Shopping List” or “ Your site name – Games list : PC Games”.

2. Add your meta description, and be sure to add one or more of keywords in it.

3. Add your meta keywords, it won’t help as much as few years ago, but every little optimization helps. Also remember that everyone will be able to read this keywords, with basic knowledge of html(view page source on your browser)

4. Add alt tags on images, good for image searches on Google images search engine.

5. Remember to highlight your keywords, with headings, bold, and italics html tags.

6. Develop your sitemap.xml and submit it to Google, for a better indexing of your site. A good trick is to control the indexing of your through this sitemap.xml and robots.txt.

First I recommend buying the xml sitemaps generator from XML Sitemaps it cheap and does great, and make a sitemap.xml with that generator and configure it to crawl specific pages you want, or you can use the free version which is decent, but not much control for it.

Second have in root of your site, a file named robots.txt. With this file you can forbid some parts of your site to be crawled.

Add these lines to the file.




User-agent: *

Disallow: file.php

Disallow: /directory

 

User-agent: * refers to all crawlers

Disallow: file.php (this specific file won’t get crawled, indexed)

Disallow: /directory (this specific directory won’t get crawled, indexed)

7. To optimize your content, use your keywords on each article you write, add to the site. For example if you add a 200 characters article add 10% of this, your keywords, where it makes sense.

4. Link building.

I. Internal Linking

To get authority and popularity for your site you will need a link strategy. Before you do this create your link structure internally, to distribute link juice to the internal pages, by using rel=”nofollow” on the links you don’t want to receive authority, and headings, bold, alt tags, on images with links, or links for your the secondary pages. Remember to use the correct anchor on your links, because that is the keyword. For example on the main menu, you’ll have a link with headings, or bold, that directs to a game list. You will use let’s stay:

<b><a href=”gamelist.html”>Game Lists</a></b>

In this line we tagged the keyword “Game List” with <b> to make it important for the crawling bot because after all it one of the main features of our site, and also added the anchor “Game List” which is basically the one keyword from our list.

Remember to add no follow on links to internal pages that are not important, like “About Us”, “Privacy Policy” etc, by using rel=”nofollow” (which tells the crawling bots not visit that page).

Example : <a href=”aboutus.html” rel=”nofolllow”>About Us<a/>

II. Backlinks

Now that we created the internal linking structure lets create some backlinks. Backlinks are links from other sites to your site with your keyword in achor or just the www. link.

Each quality link will add authority for your site and you will raise in Google rankings for those keywords. Now don’t get crazy and spam or ask for link exchange from any site. Learn this Quality > Quantity ALWAYS!.

To build your backlinks, start by doing link exchanges with sites from your niche. From example if you own a games site, start doing with link exchange with other games sites, not medicine or directory or god knows what else.

A few good linking buildings strategies are:

1. Link exchanges with quality sites of your niche. Usually contact the webmaster and ask for a link exchange. They are two types of link exchanges, site wide and normal.

Site wide means that the link of your partners it will be present on all pages of your site, and normal one, only on one page, usually partners, or link page. Remember too many out-bound links will hurt your site, so don’t get crazy, out-bound as in links to other sites, though on those that they are not linking to you, but want them on your site, you can add rel=”nofollow” and it will be ok, but don’t do this on your partners, without letting them know.

2. Submit your site to quality free directories, and premium ones, don’t exaggerate on this, you got to spot them which ones are good, so you don’t waste your money and time.

3. Write quality articles, and submit them to Article Directories, and use your keywords in the author box.

4. Submit your content AFTER IT GETS indexed by Google, to quality social bookmarks, and social networking sites.

5. Create videos with your logo and url link to the site displayed in them, and submit them to the videos sites.

6. Create unique content that will make others to link to you.

7. Submit press releases about your new products and news to press releases sites.

A more detailed article about link building will follow soon.

5. Design

It important that your site to be easy to navigate website, and also easy to read, without too many ads, and animated gif, or flash sections (flash doesn’t get indexed by crawlers, unless you use some tricks, which are hard to develop).

Have a decent loading speed for your site, so your visitor won’t close the page, before it loads, also have decent design. If you don’t have great design skills, then create a simple design, but easy to read and navigate. At the same time you can use a cms. CMS is a content management system, basically a site engine that helps you create and administrate your site, but they are limited, and without some html-php knowledge you wont make it to far if the cms doesn’t have the right features.

6. Analyze your progress.

After all this optimizations that basically will never end, you have to promote your site always to stay in the rankings, you will want to analyze your progress.

You can use these tools for serp ranking, keywords ranking, and visitors’ statistics.

Shoemoney serps script

Multiple Search Engine Result Position SERP tool

Also remember to create a Google webmaster account, and analytics account. With these tools that Google provide you will find great information about your backlinks, errors on your site, indexed pages, and other SEO related statistics, and also with analytics you will be able to monitor your unique visitors and their activity on your site. These are free tools:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Ending note

This article was created from what I learned in the latest years, from different sources. I wrote them to remind me the basics, by keeping on this blog, and also for helping others to learn some tips on SEO. In the following days I will add more articles, on link buildings, article directories, social bookmarking, and other Web Promotion related topics.

Have a good day.

Tags: 301 redirection, google, keywords, link building, robots.txt, SEO, web promotion

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 3:38 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.