Uploaded bySumeet Chadha
The Best Guide to SEO
This document provides an overview of search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. It discusses key on-page optimization techniques like optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and internal linking. It also covers off-page optimization strategies like building high-quality backlinks from other reputable sites. The document explains how search engines work by crawling the web, indexing pages, and ranking them based on relevancy and popularity algorithms. It emphasizes that good SEO takes time, effort, and following ethical "white hat" techniques rather than manipulative "black hat" approaches.
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The Best Guide to SEO
- 1. Sumeet Kaur Chadha TheBest Guide to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) *
- 2. Content Table • Introductionto SEO and SERP • What are Search Engines and how they work. • On Page Optimization • Off Page Optimization and Link Building • What are Keywords ? • Local SEO • Duplicate Content • SEO Design and layout best practices • Google Penguin & Panda • Over optimization hurts • White hat vs. black hat SEO • Mobile SEO
- 3. What is SEO? SEOis short for search engine optimization, and it is a part of SEM(Search engine marketing). As the term implies, SEO is all about optimizing a website to gain maximum visibility within the search engine results. As we will see, SEO takes time and effort. Do not be fooled by e-mails turning up unannounced in your inbox, promising instant SEO results. If you want to get more customers the obvious way to do it is by getting your website found easily in Google.
- 4. TIP TIME You donot need heaps of technical experience in order to promote your website. What you do need is common sense, attention to detail and the time to actually do your SEO properly. Good SEO takes effort and good SEO takes time
- 5. What is SERP? Whatis SERP? A search engine results page (SERP) is the listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.
- 6. Is Good SEOpossible, Why not Good SEO is a combination of common sense, solid technical knowledge and careful attention to detail. There is no magic to SEO and there are no guaranteed results. It is important to realize that Google makes changes to the way that websites are displayed within the SERP and that it makes these changes on a daily basis.
- 7. Different search engines There are many different search engines available today the most famous of which is Google. Other examples include Bing from Microsoft and Yahoo. It is important that if you are promoting a website you make sure that each individual search engine is aware of your particular website. The easiest way to do this is to search each search engine using your company name and see if you can find the website.
- 8. How search engineswork? The first thing to realize about search engines is that they only know about websites that are submitted to them directly or that they have found when searching the web. Search engines use automated software called spiders or crawlers to search through websites on the web and then indexes the results in giant databases.
- 9. The Popular searchengines •Google: most popular search engine in most countries •Yahoo: dominant search engine in the United States •Bing: popular search engine in the United States, owned by Microsoft. •Baidu: dominant search engine in China •Yandex: dominant search engine in Russia •Naver: dominant search engine in Korea •Wolfram Alpha: search engine for computational knowledge
- 10. Robots, spiders andcrawlers A search engine such as Google has automated software referred to as robots, spiders or crawlers, which will search the Web looking for new websites, or new pages within websites. The search engines will also search for pages that have been updated and modified since the last time they were crawled by the search engines. For this reason it is a good idea to update your website with new content every so often, because this is exactly what the search engines are looking for. Crawling: This task is completed by Crawler, Spider ( GoogleBot in case of Google). Indexing: Creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database. Processing: Search engine compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Check Relevancy: Search engine calculates the relevancy of page to display as per various algorithms.
- 11. SEO Search Results RetrievingResults: This is the last step where the result is displayed for the best matched result. What is Search Engine Rank? SEO is the process of designing and developing a website to attain a high rank in search engine results. A page rank is calculated by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine results. If a search engine is putting your webpage on the position one, then your web page rank will be number 1 which is the highest.
- 12. Organic vs. InorganicSearch Organic Search Inorganic Search The organic results, also referred to as natural results, are displayed beneath the paid for results. There is no charge for having your web pages displayed within the organic results section. The order in which web pages are displayed within the organic section is determined by a series of complex algorithms used by Google to rank websites. Search engine optimization is all about getting your website to be displayed as high as possible within the organic results section of the search engine results. When Google displays the search results, you will normally see what are called ‘paid for’ or inorganic results displayed at the top of the page and sometimes down the side of the page. The ‘paid for’ results section is normally lightly shaded and is frequently labeled as ‘sponsored’ links or advertisement. If you want your company to be displayed within the ‘paid for’ results section, then you need to register with Google, and take part in a global auction.
- 13. On Page Optimization On-Pageoptimization refers to any changes that you make to the actual content of the website. This on-site optimization may relate to the text that your visitors can see when they visit your website or it may relate to the code behind the website that the search engine will see, but that your visitors will not necessarily view. For example, as we will see elsewhere, within the ‘head’ section of the HTML code for each page of the website, you may optimize the title, meta-description and Image Alt Tags. There are also many other on- site optimization opportunities, such as using header tags, URL Structure, Internal links, Keyword Usage and Sitemaps. Most on-page optimization factors are related to "Relevancy"
- 14. On Page Optimization •TitleTags: Shown as the headline in search results. •META descriptions: This description is shown in search results. •Header tags: Break the information of a page into hierarchical order.(H1 directly influence rankings) •URLs: Very important for relevancy and for users, Keep them short and include keywords in them. •Alt Text: To derive meaning from images. •Internal links: Help search engines understand the sections of a website. •Sitemaps: Tell users and search engines the structure and hierarchy of a website. •HTML sitemaps – for humans •XML sitemaps – for search engines
- 15. On Page Optimization •NLP- "Natural Language Processing"aims to understand the meaning behind website copy. Use synonyms and related or common words when writing online •Robot Meta tag: The important metatag that you may need at times. Eg : <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">, you can tell a spider or a robot that you do not want some of your pages indexed, or that you do not want your links followed.
- 16. On Page Optimization- DO'S DO'S: •Effective content structure. •Pages must be bot accessible for search engines to be understandable.(Avoid Flash etc) • Make content social and sharable •Ensure your website is multi-device compatible
- 17. On Page Optimization-DONT'S DONT'S: •Keyword stuffing and meta tag stuffing is no longer an effective SEO tactic. •Hidden text intended only for search engines is easily detected as a spam tactic, and will have a negative impact on rankings. •Say No to cloaking : Showing one thing to search engines and other to users. •No Repetitive anchor text (highlighted text) in the content and links.
- 18. On Page Optimization- DONT'S Page Hijacking: This means Creating a rough copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original and when the user comes on that website, he is redirected to unrelated or malicious websites. Creating Mirror websites by hosting multiple websites all with same content but different URL's.
- 19. Off Page Optimization& Link Building Offsite search engine optimization takes place outside of your website and consists of numerous activities, such as requesting links from other websites to your website. In addition this now includes activities ranging from posting videos on YouTube through to setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts. The single most important offsite activity is the acquiring of links from other websites, to your website. There is as such no one size fits all concept of link building. Most of the off-page optimization factors are related to "Popularity".
- 20. Off Page Optimization& Link Building Principles of Link Building: •Always Create Link worthy content: Make content that real people will want to read, share and reference in link. •Do some Proactive offsite engagement: Engage on other websites with people involved in the same topic. •Use your Offline Relationships: Use your real-world network to find link-building opportunities. •When looking for link opportunities make sure the source of links are reputable.
- 21. You Should KnowThem •Link Equity: It is the value of the link. •Inbound Links: The Links that come to your site, they are very useful. •Outbound links: The Links that go from your site, always be very careful and link to the sources you trust. What is Rel = "no follow" ? Links with this attribute do not impact search rankings. eg: < a rel = "no follow" href = "http://www.abc.com"></a>
- 22. What about theQuality of the back links A very important factor within your SEO efforts is securing as many back links as possible to your website. Ideally these back links should be one way links from other websites to your website. Reciprocal links are where you share links with another website so that they will link to your website in exchange for a link from your website to their website.
- 23. What about theQuality of the back links Reciprocal links are far less valuable than one way links. Even more important than the number of links, is the quality of the links from other websites, to your website. A link from a website with a high PageRank is much more valuable than many links from websites with a PageRank of one or two. Cross Linking: Is considered as one of the best known practice that can come handy to yield high search engine rankings, by leveraging several domains owned by you.
- 24. Link Building -Dont's •SPAM : Do not build spammy links which are not legitimate. They will definitely add a negative value. •DON'T BUY LINKS: Search engines don't approve of buying links and it is very difficult to calculate ROI. •DON'T ACQUIRE RECIPROCAL LINKS: Links should happen naturally, and unnatural links are not worth the time. One way links usually perform better.
- 25. Thinking about keywords Whenyou first design a website you need to sit down and draw up a list of keywords and phrases that you expect your visitors to use when searching for your website. It is important that you involve non- experts in the creation of your keyword list. For instance, if you have a technical understanding of your particular product or service, you may be tempted to use a technical term within the search phrase. Many of your customers may use search phrases you did not expect them to use.
- 26. Google Keyword PlannerTool: Google provides a free research tool as part of a Google AdWords service. You can use this to help investigate which keywords are important for your website. Best of all the service is totally free. To use the service, simply search Google using a phrase such as ‘Google keyword tool’ and you should see the relevant pages displayed. It is worth creating a Google account, which again is free, and will make the use of the Google keyword tool easier for you. Example: Keyword ideas for : "handbags noida"
- 27. Thinking about keywords Usingkeyword phrases within a website : The domain name or URL is the address of your website. For instance the URL for Microsoft’s home page is: http://www.microsoft.com The URL is an opportunity to include an important key word or phrase. Keep two to three words in your domain name that will be easy to memorize and remember not to use dashes or hyphens in the name. Use local place names in the keywords: If you are interested in attracting local customers you should make sure that your website pages display the name of your town, city or local suburb that you’re interested in. If you are interested in state- wide business , make sure the name of the state is listed within the website.
- 28. Best Places toput Keywords •<title> tag - between 50-68 characters •<meta name="description"> tag - 140 – 150 characters. •<meta name="keyword"> tag approx. 200 characters •<h1> header tag •<a href="http://abc.com">keyword</a> link tags •<body> tag •<alt> tag •URL or website address •Comments tag
- 29. Word Stemming Word stemmingis a feature used by google, which allows all forms of a word like verb, singular, plurals, or similar words returned for a given search query. if someone types in "EMI plans", not only the pages that are optimized for that phrase but the pages that contain all variations of that phrase are returned. For example, "EMI plan", "EMI planning", "EMI planner".
- 30. TIP TIME Useful Tip: Having keywords in the first heading and in the first paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are the best. Hope you have some understanding on keywords now and are ready to brainstorming to identify correct keywords for your site.
- 31. Local SEO A facilitythat many companies overlook is the creation of the Google places page for your business. When people perform local searches within Google, it will display a small number of localized results that Google believes matches the search criteria.In many cases the local search results are shown at the top of the page ahead of the rest of the organic search results. It is vitally important that you optimize your company so that it shows up in local search results.
- 32. Local SEO Mobile devicesand location technologies have enabled search engines to provide personalized location-based search results. Mobile devices account for over 50% of searches online. Name, Address, Phone Number: •On your website, specify one name, one address, and one phone number •On every citation online, make sure the name, address, and phone number is identical •Consistency with spelling and formatting is crucial •Be very careful to format everything exactly the same, letter for letter Directories are helpful for local SEO. o Citations from legitimate directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, and others are valuable
- 33. Avoid Duplicate Content Mostcommon problem is SEO is duplicate content. When a piece of content lives in two places online, search engines have trouble figuring out which to rank highest. For Eg: similar blog posts, linking a product page from email, social media etc .The search engine gets confused. Fixing Dupilcate content can be very technical. Possible solutions: Remove and redirect : Remove unnecessary version and redirect traffic to the version you would like to rank.Redirect link equity to single version. Eg: 301 redirect - to redirect the user from an old page URL to a new page URL. •Use Rel = "Canonical": This is the best way to solve this problem as this code points the search engines to the original source. •"Noindex follow": noindex means the page will not be indexed. “follow” means the links to this page will still count
- 34. Design and LayoutBest Practices A good design is a part of website algorithm, and effects all our SEO efforts. If you make your site too complicated, then the search engine would not be able to parse the content of your site properly, and finally indexing would not be efficient, which results in a low rank. Here are some design best practices: 1. Clickable logo : This is a human expectation and Search engines can follow it. 2. Click worthy links: usually blue colored and underlined. 3. Standard location of navigation:Top or vertical throughout. 4. The actual page content should have a keyword density of about 10% and should weigh in at about 200 words. (Keyword density is the percentage density of a particular phrase or keyword available on a website compared to the total number of words on the particular page.) 5. Use a column based layout 6. Goal oriented design 8. Say No to Frames : They are search engine enemies. 7. Multi device friendly
- 35. The Sandbox What isGoogle Sandbox ? This is the place where the fresh and less authoritative sites were kept for a certain time period, till their establishment in the search results. This may happens due to the building of so many links within a short time span.
- 36. LSI - LatentSemantic Indexing LSI : This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or to its similar context. For example, if you are searching something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race etc. Looking for articles about “Sachin Tendulkar" in the same database brings up many stories about the cricketer, followed by articles about major cricket matches that don't mention his name. Constraining the search to days when no articles were written about him still brings up stories about cricket matches and well-known players. LSI is 'smart' enough to see that that Sachin Tedulkar plays cricket.
- 37. Webmaster tools Webmaster toolis a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR etc. It is now called as "Search Console" .
- 38. Toxic Backlinks Toxic backlinksare the unnatural links that harm the search rankings of a website. Google’s Penguin update focuses on penalizing the websites that have a bad backlinks profile. You may get a Google Webmasters warning related to toxic backlinks profile of the website . Can I neutralize a toxic backlink to my site? Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to ‘ Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘ Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’. Lot of Other tools to check toxic backlinks are : Ahrefs, Majestic SEO or SEOmoz to get a complete list of backlinks.
- 39. Have you heardabout Penguin and Panda Again if you do some research, you will find there are a lot of unhappy website owners out there, who suffered badly when Google Penguin and Google Panda were released. The reason for this is that these particular modifications to the way Google works were aimed at low quality websites many of which did not adhere to the basic standards for website promotion specified by Google. There are no shortcuts when it comes to search engine optimization. If you want to be well-positioned in the Google search engine results then you have to play by Google’s rules.
- 40. Penguin and Panda Google representatives have gone on record stating that they change the search algorithms on average more than once a day. The Panda update identified websites with low-quality content and removed some of these sites from Google’s index. The Penguin update focused on penalizing sites with low-quality links. Websites who had bought links or participated in link farms or link schemes were penalized or removed from the index. Keyword research is now more guesswork than science.
- 41. Over optimization willdo more harm Google is getting smarter by the day and will look at how your website is put together and it will look at the code behind the scenes. Whichever route you take there is always the danger of over optimizing your website. Google expects you and in fact encourages you to perform a sensible amount of SEO, however if you overdo it Google will actually penalizes the website. Where that line is, is something of a moving target but basically you can use common sense and this will normally keep you in good stead with Google. An example of overdoing it might be to have exactly the same keyword used as your title and description on every single page, and then repeating this word over and over again within the text displayed within your website.
- 42. Over optimization hurtsJust like Overeating Example : Hi, our new fashion site is all about fashion because we are masters in fashion including all types of fashion. We believe we are the best fashion company in India. You will not find a fashion company offering a better fashion anywhere over the web. Okay so maybe the paragraph above was a slight exaggeration but you get the idea. Be subtle when trying to promote your website. SEO is still an incredibly powerful free channel.
- 43. White hat vs.black hat SEO White hat SEO uses techniques that are acceptable to Google and other search engines, while Black hat SEO ( Spamdexing) uses techniques that go against the terms of service published by Google and other major search engines. If you employ an SEO company that uses black hat techniques you may find that instead of being easy to find, your website may disappear from search engines altogether as search engines such as Google, will lay a penalty on websites that use techniques that they consider attempts to spam their listings. There are numerous examples of companies who have been de- listed by Google or have had the search engine results moved down the page compared to their competitors. Even large well-known companies such as BMW have had their details removed altogether from Google when they use techniques that Google disapproved of.
- 44. SEO – Thiscan Harm you Here is a brief review of activities that can harm your SEO: ✓Buying in links ✓Using excessive keywords within picture ‘alt’ tags or in your text ✓Excessive doorway pages (Gateway pages) ✓Duplicate content ✓Broken links ✓Links to, or from ‘bad’ websites ✓Reciprocal links ✓Spelling Mistakes ✓Poor content ✓No freshness ✓Poor loading Speed
- 45. What is MobileSEO? Mobile Search Engine Optimization is the process of designing a website to make it suitable for viewing on mobile devices of different screen sizes which have a low bandwidth. A mobile friendly website has the following features : •A very Responsive design. •Use of appropriate fonts, colors and layout and easy to read on a mobile device without having to zoom. •An easy navigation using links and buttons easy to operate using a finger. •Very lightweight and takes less bandwidth and time to load on mobile network. •The most important links are displayed on the Home Page so that they get enough visibility.
- 46. You can dothe Best SEO Since now you have realized the simple truth that the best person to promote your website is YOU as know all about your business. You know what your clients want. All you need are right skills to actually make this happen. Don’t let anyone tell you that search engine optimization is difficult because it is not. You just have to make sure you do it in the right way, using the right techniques and soon enough you will get the right results that you are looking for.
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