Search Engine Optimization -- Master Tutorial
I have seen a lot of good tutorials about search engines and how to optimize your site to suit them, but very quite few of them are extensive, meaning they don't cover all the points needed, plus they are not 100% perfectly newbie-friendly, meaning a person new to the webmastering field making a website for the first time should be able to easily comprehend all the mentioned points. I have been in the webmastering field around 2-2.5 years and have done a lot of research on this subject and learnt a lot. Here, I will try to explain the art of mastering search engine optimization, (yes it is an art) in simple terminology and cover all the required points. If you don't have the patience to read through all this, then check out the quick tips provided at the bottom.
Firstly, what is search engine optimization? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of customizing your site to make it as search engine-friendly as possible.i.e customizing /tweaking your site so that when a bot (Bot/Robot/Spider is a piece of software that visits all websites adds information about it to a search engine's database) from a Search Engine visits your website, it must be easily able to index all your pages (add your pages to it's database) and also such that when a person searches for a term that your website contains, your website will rank higher than it's contemporaries and will be displayed higher up. Simply put, the main aim of Search Engine Optimization is a higher ranking for your website in all search engines so that you will get more visitors. That's all, no more! Why is SEO important? Researchers claim that 85% of the traffic to any website is through search engines especially the prime ones like Google, MSN and Yahoo!. Therefore SEO is damn important to any website. If you want your website to be popular, then your site should have a higher ranking at all search engines and that is possible only through Search Engine Optimization. If your website occupies a good position in the major search engines, it is 100% sure that your traffic will increase greatly. Search Engine Optimization is fairly easy if you have some basic knowledge of the internet, some creativity and good knowledge of the English language, the subject you are dealing with and also HTML. So Gear up for the ultimate tutorial in Search Engine Optimization which will boost your knowledge and your website's rank greatly and make it really famous and will also quench all your doubts in this topic.
The first and foremost important thing is your server. Make sure that your website is hosted by a reliable, stable server. Googlebot or any other robot for that matter will visit your website regularly. If once, when the bot visits, your server is down, then your position in that search engine will surely slide greatly. To avoid those, make sure you choose a good, dependable host with stable servers. Okay, now that that's over, lets go to your website's HTML Code. Make sure you use simple and clean coding in your website and make sure none of your links are broken. Your code should be 100% Valid HTML and use decent amount of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), that reduces the amount of formatting tags you require. To check your page's HTML Validity goto HTML Validator & Here for CSS Validity. Please note that Valid HTML & CSS are not mandatory for SEO but generally are good practice followed by all. Also, clean coding will allow Search Engines to concentrate more on your content. For 100% Validation all you need to do is to close all tags that you open and also use "alt" attributes for image tags. Another thing is that you should cut down on the amount of direct Javascript Coding on your page and put it in an external .js file and link from your page. Bots can't read Javascript and this may confuse them sometimes.
2 Codes within the head tags have a significant impact on your bots. They are the title tag and the meta tags.
Format: <title>[Enter Title Here]</title>
The title simply implies that you have to type out a title for your webpage for visitors to see. Firstly, your title tag must never be bigger than 65 characters. Search Engines like websites which have short and sweet title tags and to be liked, yours must be short too. However, it must be a able to brief out a decent description of your whole web site in just 5 - 6 Words. The Elements of your title tag are simply simple, your website's name and 5 sweet words describing your website in a nutshell. Most Importantly, your Top Keywords SHOULD be present in the Title Tag.
For example: if your website is "www.gamepedia.com", which provides the information about all games, then your title tag can be something like "GamePedia: Your Pitstop for Game News, Reviews & all of the Game World". Your title tag must be attractive to catch the eye of all your visitors but at the same time should be able to tell a search engine what your site is all about. The above is valid if you use PHP or SSI (don't we all), if you don't, then all you have to do is have a nice title tag in each page describing that particular page and the title above for the main page.
The other most important tags are the "Meta tags". Meta tags are tags which you insert within the "<head>" & "</head>" tags which allow you to describe everything about your website and it's content. At this stage, four meta tags are very important for us. The first is
<meta http-equiv="content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
This tag tells that almost all of the content of your website is in Simple Text and HTML and that you follow the "ISO-8859-1" character set which is generally followed by many websites. Many a time, I have heard people say that this meta tag is useless but it is generally good practice to use this, validates your HTML and also tells bots that the website is in HTML. This does not have too much of an impact on your rating or anything but you must not neglect this tag.
The next tag is:
<meta name="keywords" content="[Enter Keywords Here]">
This is one of the most important meta tags that is an absolute must for each and every website. Whenever a robot visits your website, it indexes these keywords in relation to your website. So, every single keyword in relation to your website SHOULD be mentioned here. Give lots of keywords here (size doesn't matter) describing your site's content so that your site shows up even one of them is searched for. Try almost all possible combinations, for example just because "Cell Phones" and "Mobile Phones" mean the same, it doesn't mean it's enough to include one of them in your keywords. Including both of them is more useful as some users may search with the former as their query and some as the latter. Separate each keyword by a Comma. Let us take GamePedia as an example again; this is how it's Meta Keywords tag should look
<meta name="keywords" content="GamePedia,Games,Technology,Action Games,Adventure Games,Strategy Games,FPS,First Person Shooter Games,Computer Games,Playstation,XBox, GameCube,Gameboy,Nintendo,EA Sports,Microsoft,Review,FAQ,Walkthrough,Guide,Tuto rial,Popular Games,News,Releases,Rating,Contests">
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Your site can and should contain loads more keywords so that it loads for every possible combo. If you want professional help with your keywords or if you are not very creative or if you want to check if you have covered all possible keywords, then try
Good Keywords
PageRank also offers Keyword Analyzer for your site. Here is another thing that you must give importance too. Usually many SEO's consider stuffing Keywords as bad practice but for many who use PHP's Include Tag for their Pages will have to give all possible keywords for their site as the same tags will appear in all pages. However, if you pretty good in PHP and/or MySQL, then you can develop a simple script which will check the page and then give keywords to that particular page alone relating to the page, which will give you a great density.
Now that you've got your keywords right, it is always good to consult a third party. Keyword density is derived by dividing the frequency of that word by the total words on the page. Frequency is a major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages. This can turn into a balancing act as too high a density can be considered spam by some engines. Usually you are safe if your keyword density falls between 2 - 5 %.
I am always free for Email but then there are websites which also provide you this Service.
PageRank's Keyword Density Checker
But wait there's more. For a certain Topic like Xbox Gaming there are lot of paydirt keywords, that is those keywords which are most searched for. If you have those keywords on your site, then you sure will be there when people search for important Keywords. All you have to do is simple, goto Overture Keyword Suggestion and search the main theme of your site, eg: Xbox. Then Overture will show you the most searched keywords related to Xbox and Xbox Gaming. Make sure you get all of the top keywords in your site and have content suited to it.
<meta name="description" content="[Description about the site]">
This is the 2nd most important meta tag. Search Engines index your site description in their Database and will use it when people search using specific or lot of terms. Let the description be to the point but at the same time contain all the important points. Hope you get what I mean. Max limit should be 255 characters. Here's what GamePedia should contain
<meta name="description" content="GamePedia - The Ultima Zone for your latest Game Reviews, News, Trailers, Cheats, Ratings, Discussion for all Console Games ~ PS2, GBA, XBOX all Genres and much more..">
It can be more but make sure you don't cross your limit.
<meta name="robots" content="Index,Follow">
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this tag but all I will say is it is good practice to use this. None of the major Search Engines consider this tag and they automatically follow all your links, but still some old Search Engines still follow this method and it is good to be No#1 everywhere.
However this tag has other uses, especially if you don't want Search Engines to index a page [maybe one where you share illegal stuff with your friends ]. Then this tag can be changed as follows.
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> - Indexes the Page and follows all links from that Page
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> - Won't Index the Current Page but still will follow all links from it.
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow"> - Indexes the Page and won't follow any links from the page
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> - Doesn't Index the page nor does it follow any link from that page.
Here's another meta tag which you could use jus to identify yourself as the site Webmaster. Search Engine don't care about this at all.
<meta name="author" content="Jonathan Bewley">
Let's move to the content of your site. Before anything, it is good to have a copyright at the bottom/ top / anywhere in your site. It could be a simple 2 lines but the key point is that you could add a description of your site along with it which would tally with your most important keywords. This way, the Search Engine will see that the same keywords are present in the web page itself and thus when those particular words are searched for, your site will appear.
GamePedia is © 2005 - 2006 Jonathan Bewley. All content, images, etc belong to us until mentioned otherwise. GamePedia is the home of the net's best Game Reviews, Cheats, Images, Previews, Walkthroughs, Guides for all Genre Games (Action, Adventure, Strategy, FPS).
You also don't need to get a hundred domains for your site. A single, simple .com/.net/.org/.info will just do the trick. Another bit of useful advice is that you shouldn't use a URL Cloaking/Masking service like dot.tk, it's better outright if you use the Sub-domain given by your host other than this.
Now, let's get to your main page & it's content. Always ensure that the size of your source code doesn't exceed 30kb. This doesn't include the images that load in the page, only the source code, which you can check in your system. Bots get confused when the pages are too big and also read them incompletely. Next, let's look at the links in your page, the total number of links in your page should be around 35-40, a max of 50-60 is Ok but definitely not more than that. This is because the bots again are programmed to read a specific amount of links and they will mostly read the first 50/60 Links depending on the bot. Also, while concentrating on your content, be sure to include your top Keywords (that you have specified in the Meta Tag) in your page, atleast 2 or 3 times. This is a definite Must and will surely help you. Make sure these keywords are 100% relevant to your site and the most important ones that you concentrate on. Also make sure that you have a 404.txt error page in your website so that neither users nor Bots encounter that "Cannot Find Page" page, which leaves a negative impression on your site.
For every link and image tag in your page specify the alt/title attribute. For Images, these are dead important and I can't stress their importance to you more than this. Robots can't view images (Duh!) and they rely on the alt attributes of the image tag to categorize the image in it's database. Give a Crisp, "Perfect-For-The-Image" Alt tag defining the image perfectly. Suppose GamePedia has a image of the Title Screen of Age of Empires, then here's how the image tag should look.
The alt attribute is also compulsory for 100% HTML Validity.
Before looking at the attribute, I must again emphasize on the importance of Short URL's especially to all your important pages. Search Engines certainly don't index URL's like,
*gamepedia.com/index.php?id=242?news=yte&comments=120. A Short simple URL will do the work here. If you use PHP, make sure you use only a maximum of 2 Id's like, *gamepedia.com/index.php?id=news242&comments=120. If it is mandatory for you to use a long PHP URL due to 2 or more parameters, then I would recommend you to use a neat Apache Mod called "Mod_rewrite". This should be typed in your .htaccess file and has the ability to convert all URLS like the one above the one above to a form like *gamepedia.com/id/242.html. It is this kinda simple HTML URL that all Search Engines prefer and give more preference.
The title attribute after the Link is not mandatory but still it can help in further identification of your link or that particular page. Here's an example:
<a href="aoe.php" title="Age of Empires I Page">
Now, I am going to discuss about a very important factor which determines your rank in all Search Engines, ie. PageRank. PageRank is defined simply as the rating of your website out of 10, in a search engine which will determine your position when displaying results. It was first used and followed by Google, and now many other major search Engines follow this cool technique. PageRank depends of 2 simple things - The Number of Pages of your site that the Search Engine has indexed and number of unique sites that link to yours, the latter being more important. The Big G uses a complicated algorithm for assigning a site a PageRank which changes every month but still the factors are the same.
Firstly you MUST manually submit your website to atleast 10-12 Search Engine as soon as it is opened, so atleast your link will be there by 1 month. I will recommend the majors, Google, MSN, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite, Lycos. However, if there is a site already indexed by a Search Engine Linking to you, then you might get indexed faster. This is because, when you manually submit, it is only added to a queue but when the Bot scrolls the already indexed site, it will automatically go and add your site.
Normally, bots can follow all the links in your site to reach each and every page but still a good safety measure is by creating a sitemap. There are 2 Kinds of Sitemaps - One for your visitors and one for Google. The former, must be made in simple HTML and must just show all the links in your site along with a short mention about each page so that if someone wants to find a particular page in your site, they can do it with ease. This Sitemap should be submitted to every single Search Engine, other than Google and you can be sure that they will index most of your pages. If you own a forum, then get a mod/extension which has a built-in Sitemap script. Many Forum scripts like vBulletin, PhpBB, etc offer such mods. They are automatic and will add a page to the sitemap as soon as a new one is created in your forum. Submit this sitemap to Search Majors - Yahoo, MSN & AJ. If your forum script doesn't have one, then request it from the creators/modders or port over to another forum script. I'm serious. In your sitemap, make sure that you link to your website by their full URL like *gamepedia.com/home.php?id=abc/abso instead of home.php?id=abso. This should also be followed in your Home Page for Good Practice.
Now, the Big G has a special sitemap service for Webmasters and all you need is a Google ID (Gmail! Don't have one? Email me). This encourages the formation of a XML Sitemap using Simple XML Protocol. You don't need to have any XML Knowledge for this. Google provides all the info for this @ *google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.htm . Oh! Make sure that you have your sitemap at *yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Sounds simple doesn't it, it really is. You can be sure that 99% of your pages will be indexed by Google, and if it encounters any problems with the pages in your site, it will show the same in it's errors page. Now, with that behind me, I must also emphasize on regular updating of your site. The more regular, your pages get updated, the better ranking you have a chance of getting. No Search Engine likes websites which are stagnant for more than 2-3 weeks.
Type "site:yoursite.com" in Google and other major SE's to see which of your pages have been indexed by them. Manually submit your other pages to them all.
Also, have a good counter service like StatCounter or Google Analytics which show you, the keywords by which users enter your site after searching. Make sure you give more importance to those keywords and make sure your site comes on top when searching for them. Also, constantly monitor your log files to make sure that your site is devoid of errors and to see which are your most popular pages.
Let's get to the most important part, the one that you have all been waiting for, Yup! Linking. PageRank's most important factor is the number of unique websites that link to you, absolutely! So, I'm not asking you to go and beg half the sites in the net to link back to you, there are neat techniques you can use. Firstly, you won't get a high PageRank for any site that links to.
1) That site must be somewhat similar to yours or have same basic category
2) The site must have a good PageRank.
Firstly, when your site is ready, presentable and has a good amount of content, you should submit it to Web Directories. Web Directories are similar to Search Engines except that they are just a repository of Web Sites and not each page of a site. The Most important Directories are ODP/DMOZ and Yahoo. Both accept free submissions and have a PR 9 (PageRank). However, both are Human-Edited and you must submit your site in the RIGHT Category. Their Editors don't tolerate wrong cat submissions and they will probably remove your site for that. Give a decent description of your site in their submit page, Don't advertise and give simple, strong keywords. Now, you will soon know, when your site is listed by checking it up regularly. ODP is even more important as many other Directories like Google (PR 8), Alexa (PR 8) and others derive their links from it. Infact, you will probably get many more links due to Dmoz alone. However, the editors there are strict and make sure you find the right category and then submit your site by clicking "Add URL" in the page of that category. For example, GamePedia Will probably come under:: *dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Console_Platforms/News_and_Reviews/
There are other good directories in the net like BOTW, Jayde, Sootle, Gimpsy, WebDirectory and LookSmart. Please note that it's not worth paying about $50 to get listed in a directories when the best of the bunch are free. As soon as you get listed in a directory, make sure that you add that particular webpage with the link to your site in some major search engines. Manual submission will be hard on your time and bandwidth but I promise, the hard way WILL deliver the goods.
Those are methods to get listed in directories, which will get you a good PR but the point is that you must also get listed in sites which are similar to yours. This is by using a system of mutual affiliation. What is affiliation? It is the partnership co-operation in which 2 or more sites link to each other. You should affiliate with websites which are quite similar to yours and having a mediocre or high PageRank. Most good sites don't accept sites with illegal content as Partners, so beware of this! If yours is a forum, then another neat thing which you could do is to partner with websites so that your forum becomes the official forum of that website and in return, you'll probably have to give an Administrator position to the website owner in your forum. This is double-advantage for forums, you get a lot of links and at the same time, good amount of visitors of that site as your members. Join Networks which will serve as a collection of links to a particular topic and also toplists/topsites/Top 500's and whatever name they go by.
Also, you should link to your site from your blog, request this from your friends, it would help if they've got a blogger blog more than one from another service (As Blogger, owned by Google has a PR10) and also advertise about it in other forums, sites, etc and request your site/forum staff to link to your site from their blog/site/profile, etc.
Many sites probably link to you right, but still shouldn't the Search Engines know about this. So Goto the Add Site Page of Search Engines and add all those pages which link to you. To find out the sites which link to you, try "link:yoursite.com" and find out the sites which link to you. Try this in other Search Engines and if a SE has a page which the other doesn't then submit that page to the other search engines.
There's one small thing that I must tell you about. Google reads *gamepedia.net and www.gamepedia.net as different sites. So, probably the URL that you advertise will have a higher PR than the other one. (ie, www or http). However, there's a simple Apache Mod which allows you to redirect www.gamepedia.net automatically to *gamepedia.net, so that way there will be uniformity all around your sites and users using www won't feel left out by Search Engines or vice-versa. This must be typed in the .htaccess page.
Here's the code to redirect www to http
And Here's Vice-Versa, http to www
Now, you've done all that but you'll probably be asking yourself "Can I check my PageRank?". Well, yes you can. There are sites which use Google's (Complex) Algorithm to find out your site's PageRank. But wait, there's even a Google Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox and other browsers, which will help you find your PR, neat isn't it. A really great site which shows your PageRank is PageRank. It will show you your current PageRank and it also has many other neat services for SEO'ing your website. Another extremely useful site is , which not only shows your PageRank but also roughly calculates your PageRank, next month. Amazing! Yup!
Something important comes here, Don't use a BackLink service which promises to get your PR up in a jiffy cause they may just do the opposite. Google and many other SE's have identified many BackLink Services and have put in their Blacklist, so a link from them might just give you a negative Point. I'm serious here.
Here's another pet peeve, but be careful about this. If your site is pretty good, and it covers one/two topics extensively, then go to WikiPedia and Search for that particular term(s). At the end of the Page, there will be a place called "Related Links". There add 3-4 sites of that topic along with yours. It's okay if you give more coverage to your competition. Don't start celebrating already. The recently edited pages will be constantly monitored by Editors at WikiPedia and if they think the site is not relevant, they'll probably remove it. If they do, don't keep on submitting. Improve your site and do it after one month.
Here are the only websites which have a PR 10 - *en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_with_a_high_PageRankNext
I think that's all I need to cover. I've probably covered almost all the points that you need to know for GOOD Search Engine Optimization and bringing your site on top. You'll probably ask me, if everybody tries SEO then who'll be at the top. That will be a battle of the efforts, with the one whose done Better Optimization ranking higher.
The bottomline is that Search Engine Optimization is pretty easy even though it is time-consuming. Perhaps, it still hasn't attained popularity due to non-awareness. The aim of this tutorial is just that, to spread the methods and tips and pet peeves among every single Webmaster so that Professional SEO's can be challenged by individuals like you and me. Make sure that you share this tutorial with all your friends.
Tutorial Copyright © Retro. Email Address :: pgswebmaster@gmail.com. This tutorial can be posted anywhere and everywhere you want but please do not remove these 3 lines of Copyright, that's all I ask from you. Don't claim it as your source, or I might just sue you.
For those who haven't the patience to go through the full Tut, here are the Chief Points that I cover::
~ Retro
I have seen a lot of good tutorials about search engines and how to optimize your site to suit them, but very quite few of them are extensive, meaning they don't cover all the points needed, plus they are not 100% perfectly newbie-friendly, meaning a person new to the webmastering field making a website for the first time should be able to easily comprehend all the mentioned points. I have been in the webmastering field around 2-2.5 years and have done a lot of research on this subject and learnt a lot. Here, I will try to explain the art of mastering search engine optimization, (yes it is an art) in simple terminology and cover all the required points. If you don't have the patience to read through all this, then check out the quick tips provided at the bottom.
Firstly, what is search engine optimization? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of customizing your site to make it as search engine-friendly as possible.i.e customizing /tweaking your site so that when a bot (Bot/Robot/Spider is a piece of software that visits all websites adds information about it to a search engine's database) from a Search Engine visits your website, it must be easily able to index all your pages (add your pages to it's database) and also such that when a person searches for a term that your website contains, your website will rank higher than it's contemporaries and will be displayed higher up. Simply put, the main aim of Search Engine Optimization is a higher ranking for your website in all search engines so that you will get more visitors. That's all, no more! Why is SEO important? Researchers claim that 85% of the traffic to any website is through search engines especially the prime ones like Google, MSN and Yahoo!. Therefore SEO is damn important to any website. If you want your website to be popular, then your site should have a higher ranking at all search engines and that is possible only through Search Engine Optimization. If your website occupies a good position in the major search engines, it is 100% sure that your traffic will increase greatly. Search Engine Optimization is fairly easy if you have some basic knowledge of the internet, some creativity and good knowledge of the English language, the subject you are dealing with and also HTML. So Gear up for the ultimate tutorial in Search Engine Optimization which will boost your knowledge and your website's rank greatly and make it really famous and will also quench all your doubts in this topic.
The first and foremost important thing is your server. Make sure that your website is hosted by a reliable, stable server. Googlebot or any other robot for that matter will visit your website regularly. If once, when the bot visits, your server is down, then your position in that search engine will surely slide greatly. To avoid those, make sure you choose a good, dependable host with stable servers. Okay, now that that's over, lets go to your website's HTML Code. Make sure you use simple and clean coding in your website and make sure none of your links are broken. Your code should be 100% Valid HTML and use decent amount of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), that reduces the amount of formatting tags you require. To check your page's HTML Validity goto HTML Validator & Here for CSS Validity. Please note that Valid HTML & CSS are not mandatory for SEO but generally are good practice followed by all. Also, clean coding will allow Search Engines to concentrate more on your content. For 100% Validation all you need to do is to close all tags that you open and also use "alt" attributes for image tags. Another thing is that you should cut down on the amount of direct Javascript Coding on your page and put it in an external .js file and link from your page. Bots can't read Javascript and this may confuse them sometimes.
2 Codes within the head tags have a significant impact on your bots. They are the title tag and the meta tags.
Format: <title>[Enter Title Here]</title>
The title simply implies that you have to type out a title for your webpage for visitors to see. Firstly, your title tag must never be bigger than 65 characters. Search Engines like websites which have short and sweet title tags and to be liked, yours must be short too. However, it must be a able to brief out a decent description of your whole web site in just 5 - 6 Words. The Elements of your title tag are simply simple, your website's name and 5 sweet words describing your website in a nutshell. Most Importantly, your Top Keywords SHOULD be present in the Title Tag.
For example: if your website is "www.gamepedia.com", which provides the information about all games, then your title tag can be something like "GamePedia: Your Pitstop for Game News, Reviews & all of the Game World". Your title tag must be attractive to catch the eye of all your visitors but at the same time should be able to tell a search engine what your site is all about. The above is valid if you use PHP or SSI (don't we all), if you don't, then all you have to do is have a nice title tag in each page describing that particular page and the title above for the main page.
The other most important tags are the "Meta tags". Meta tags are tags which you insert within the "<head>" & "</head>" tags which allow you to describe everything about your website and it's content. At this stage, four meta tags are very important for us. The first is
<meta http-equiv="content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
This tag tells that almost all of the content of your website is in Simple Text and HTML and that you follow the "ISO-8859-1" character set which is generally followed by many websites. Many a time, I have heard people say that this meta tag is useless but it is generally good practice to use this, validates your HTML and also tells bots that the website is in HTML. This does not have too much of an impact on your rating or anything but you must not neglect this tag.
The next tag is:
<meta name="keywords" content="[Enter Keywords Here]">
This is one of the most important meta tags that is an absolute must for each and every website. Whenever a robot visits your website, it indexes these keywords in relation to your website. So, every single keyword in relation to your website SHOULD be mentioned here. Give lots of keywords here (size doesn't matter) describing your site's content so that your site shows up even one of them is searched for. Try almost all possible combinations, for example just because "Cell Phones" and "Mobile Phones" mean the same, it doesn't mean it's enough to include one of them in your keywords. Including both of them is more useful as some users may search with the former as their query and some as the latter. Separate each keyword by a Comma. Let us take GamePedia as an example again; this is how it's Meta Keywords tag should look
<meta name="keywords" content="GamePedia,Games,Technology,Action Games,Adventure Games,Strategy Games,FPS,First Person Shooter Games,Computer Games,Playstation,XBox, GameCube,Gameboy,Nintendo,EA Sports,Microsoft,Review,FAQ,Walkthrough,Guide,Tuto rial,Popular Games,News,Releases,Rating,Contests">
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Your site can and should contain loads more keywords so that it loads for every possible combo. If you want professional help with your keywords or if you are not very creative or if you want to check if you have covered all possible keywords, then try
Good Keywords
PageRank also offers Keyword Analyzer for your site. Here is another thing that you must give importance too. Usually many SEO's consider stuffing Keywords as bad practice but for many who use PHP's Include Tag for their Pages will have to give all possible keywords for their site as the same tags will appear in all pages. However, if you pretty good in PHP and/or MySQL, then you can develop a simple script which will check the page and then give keywords to that particular page alone relating to the page, which will give you a great density.
Now that you've got your keywords right, it is always good to consult a third party. Keyword density is derived by dividing the frequency of that word by the total words on the page. Frequency is a major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages. This can turn into a balancing act as too high a density can be considered spam by some engines. Usually you are safe if your keyword density falls between 2 - 5 %.
I am always free for Email but then there are websites which also provide you this Service.
PageRank's Keyword Density Checker
But wait there's more. For a certain Topic like Xbox Gaming there are lot of paydirt keywords, that is those keywords which are most searched for. If you have those keywords on your site, then you sure will be there when people search for important Keywords. All you have to do is simple, goto Overture Keyword Suggestion and search the main theme of your site, eg: Xbox. Then Overture will show you the most searched keywords related to Xbox and Xbox Gaming. Make sure you get all of the top keywords in your site and have content suited to it.
<meta name="description" content="[Description about the site]">
This is the 2nd most important meta tag. Search Engines index your site description in their Database and will use it when people search using specific or lot of terms. Let the description be to the point but at the same time contain all the important points. Hope you get what I mean. Max limit should be 255 characters. Here's what GamePedia should contain
<meta name="description" content="GamePedia - The Ultima Zone for your latest Game Reviews, News, Trailers, Cheats, Ratings, Discussion for all Console Games ~ PS2, GBA, XBOX all Genres and much more..">
It can be more but make sure you don't cross your limit.
<meta name="robots" content="Index,Follow">
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this tag but all I will say is it is good practice to use this. None of the major Search Engines consider this tag and they automatically follow all your links, but still some old Search Engines still follow this method and it is good to be No#1 everywhere.
However this tag has other uses, especially if you don't want Search Engines to index a page [maybe one where you share illegal stuff with your friends ]. Then this tag can be changed as follows.
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> - Indexes the Page and follows all links from that Page
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> - Won't Index the Current Page but still will follow all links from it.
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow"> - Indexes the Page and won't follow any links from the page
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> - Doesn't Index the page nor does it follow any link from that page.
Here's another meta tag which you could use jus to identify yourself as the site Webmaster. Search Engine don't care about this at all.
<meta name="author" content="Jonathan Bewley">
Let's move to the content of your site. Before anything, it is good to have a copyright at the bottom/ top / anywhere in your site. It could be a simple 2 lines but the key point is that you could add a description of your site along with it which would tally with your most important keywords. This way, the Search Engine will see that the same keywords are present in the web page itself and thus when those particular words are searched for, your site will appear.
GamePedia is © 2005 - 2006 Jonathan Bewley. All content, images, etc belong to us until mentioned otherwise. GamePedia is the home of the net's best Game Reviews, Cheats, Images, Previews, Walkthroughs, Guides for all Genre Games (Action, Adventure, Strategy, FPS).
You also don't need to get a hundred domains for your site. A single, simple .com/.net/.org/.info will just do the trick. Another bit of useful advice is that you shouldn't use a URL Cloaking/Masking service like dot.tk, it's better outright if you use the Sub-domain given by your host other than this.
Now, let's get to your main page & it's content. Always ensure that the size of your source code doesn't exceed 30kb. This doesn't include the images that load in the page, only the source code, which you can check in your system. Bots get confused when the pages are too big and also read them incompletely. Next, let's look at the links in your page, the total number of links in your page should be around 35-40, a max of 50-60 is Ok but definitely not more than that. This is because the bots again are programmed to read a specific amount of links and they will mostly read the first 50/60 Links depending on the bot. Also, while concentrating on your content, be sure to include your top Keywords (that you have specified in the Meta Tag) in your page, atleast 2 or 3 times. This is a definite Must and will surely help you. Make sure these keywords are 100% relevant to your site and the most important ones that you concentrate on. Also make sure that you have a 404.txt error page in your website so that neither users nor Bots encounter that "Cannot Find Page" page, which leaves a negative impression on your site.
For every link and image tag in your page specify the alt/title attribute. For Images, these are dead important and I can't stress their importance to you more than this. Robots can't view images (Duh!) and they rely on the alt attributes of the image tag to categorize the image in it's database. Give a Crisp, "Perfect-For-The-Image" Alt tag defining the image perfectly. Suppose GamePedia has a image of the Title Screen of Age of Empires, then here's how the image tag should look.
The alt attribute is also compulsory for 100% HTML Validity.
Before looking at the attribute, I must again emphasize on the importance of Short URL's especially to all your important pages. Search Engines certainly don't index URL's like,
*gamepedia.com/index.php?id=242?news=yte&comments=120. A Short simple URL will do the work here. If you use PHP, make sure you use only a maximum of 2 Id's like, *gamepedia.com/index.php?id=news242&comments=120. If it is mandatory for you to use a long PHP URL due to 2 or more parameters, then I would recommend you to use a neat Apache Mod called "Mod_rewrite". This should be typed in your .htaccess file and has the ability to convert all URLS like the one above the one above to a form like *gamepedia.com/id/242.html. It is this kinda simple HTML URL that all Search Engines prefer and give more preference.
The title attribute after the Link is not mandatory but still it can help in further identification of your link or that particular page. Here's an example:
<a href="aoe.php" title="Age of Empires I Page">
Now, I am going to discuss about a very important factor which determines your rank in all Search Engines, ie. PageRank. PageRank is defined simply as the rating of your website out of 10, in a search engine which will determine your position when displaying results. It was first used and followed by Google, and now many other major search Engines follow this cool technique. PageRank depends of 2 simple things - The Number of Pages of your site that the Search Engine has indexed and number of unique sites that link to yours, the latter being more important. The Big G uses a complicated algorithm for assigning a site a PageRank which changes every month but still the factors are the same.
Firstly you MUST manually submit your website to atleast 10-12 Search Engine as soon as it is opened, so atleast your link will be there by 1 month. I will recommend the majors, Google, MSN, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite, Lycos. However, if there is a site already indexed by a Search Engine Linking to you, then you might get indexed faster. This is because, when you manually submit, it is only added to a queue but when the Bot scrolls the already indexed site, it will automatically go and add your site.
Normally, bots can follow all the links in your site to reach each and every page but still a good safety measure is by creating a sitemap. There are 2 Kinds of Sitemaps - One for your visitors and one for Google. The former, must be made in simple HTML and must just show all the links in your site along with a short mention about each page so that if someone wants to find a particular page in your site, they can do it with ease. This Sitemap should be submitted to every single Search Engine, other than Google and you can be sure that they will index most of your pages. If you own a forum, then get a mod/extension which has a built-in Sitemap script. Many Forum scripts like vBulletin, PhpBB, etc offer such mods. They are automatic and will add a page to the sitemap as soon as a new one is created in your forum. Submit this sitemap to Search Majors - Yahoo, MSN & AJ. If your forum script doesn't have one, then request it from the creators/modders or port over to another forum script. I'm serious. In your sitemap, make sure that you link to your website by their full URL like *gamepedia.com/home.php?id=abc/abso instead of home.php?id=abso. This should also be followed in your Home Page for Good Practice.
Now, the Big G has a special sitemap service for Webmasters and all you need is a Google ID (Gmail! Don't have one? Email me). This encourages the formation of a XML Sitemap using Simple XML Protocol. You don't need to have any XML Knowledge for this. Google provides all the info for this @ *google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.htm . Oh! Make sure that you have your sitemap at *yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Sounds simple doesn't it, it really is. You can be sure that 99% of your pages will be indexed by Google, and if it encounters any problems with the pages in your site, it will show the same in it's errors page. Now, with that behind me, I must also emphasize on regular updating of your site. The more regular, your pages get updated, the better ranking you have a chance of getting. No Search Engine likes websites which are stagnant for more than 2-3 weeks.
Type "site:yoursite.com" in Google and other major SE's to see which of your pages have been indexed by them. Manually submit your other pages to them all.
Also, have a good counter service like StatCounter or Google Analytics which show you, the keywords by which users enter your site after searching. Make sure you give more importance to those keywords and make sure your site comes on top when searching for them. Also, constantly monitor your log files to make sure that your site is devoid of errors and to see which are your most popular pages.
Let's get to the most important part, the one that you have all been waiting for, Yup! Linking. PageRank's most important factor is the number of unique websites that link to you, absolutely! So, I'm not asking you to go and beg half the sites in the net to link back to you, there are neat techniques you can use. Firstly, you won't get a high PageRank for any site that links to.
1) That site must be somewhat similar to yours or have same basic category
2) The site must have a good PageRank.
Firstly, when your site is ready, presentable and has a good amount of content, you should submit it to Web Directories. Web Directories are similar to Search Engines except that they are just a repository of Web Sites and not each page of a site. The Most important Directories are ODP/DMOZ and Yahoo. Both accept free submissions and have a PR 9 (PageRank). However, both are Human-Edited and you must submit your site in the RIGHT Category. Their Editors don't tolerate wrong cat submissions and they will probably remove your site for that. Give a decent description of your site in their submit page, Don't advertise and give simple, strong keywords. Now, you will soon know, when your site is listed by checking it up regularly. ODP is even more important as many other Directories like Google (PR 8), Alexa (PR 8) and others derive their links from it. Infact, you will probably get many more links due to Dmoz alone. However, the editors there are strict and make sure you find the right category and then submit your site by clicking "Add URL" in the page of that category. For example, GamePedia Will probably come under:: *dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Console_Platforms/News_and_Reviews/
There are other good directories in the net like BOTW, Jayde, Sootle, Gimpsy, WebDirectory and LookSmart. Please note that it's not worth paying about $50 to get listed in a directories when the best of the bunch are free. As soon as you get listed in a directory, make sure that you add that particular webpage with the link to your site in some major search engines. Manual submission will be hard on your time and bandwidth but I promise, the hard way WILL deliver the goods.
Those are methods to get listed in directories, which will get you a good PR but the point is that you must also get listed in sites which are similar to yours. This is by using a system of mutual affiliation. What is affiliation? It is the partnership co-operation in which 2 or more sites link to each other. You should affiliate with websites which are quite similar to yours and having a mediocre or high PageRank. Most good sites don't accept sites with illegal content as Partners, so beware of this! If yours is a forum, then another neat thing which you could do is to partner with websites so that your forum becomes the official forum of that website and in return, you'll probably have to give an Administrator position to the website owner in your forum. This is double-advantage for forums, you get a lot of links and at the same time, good amount of visitors of that site as your members. Join Networks which will serve as a collection of links to a particular topic and also toplists/topsites/Top 500's and whatever name they go by.
Also, you should link to your site from your blog, request this from your friends, it would help if they've got a blogger blog more than one from another service (As Blogger, owned by Google has a PR10) and also advertise about it in other forums, sites, etc and request your site/forum staff to link to your site from their blog/site/profile, etc.
Many sites probably link to you right, but still shouldn't the Search Engines know about this. So Goto the Add Site Page of Search Engines and add all those pages which link to you. To find out the sites which link to you, try "link:yoursite.com" and find out the sites which link to you. Try this in other Search Engines and if a SE has a page which the other doesn't then submit that page to the other search engines.
There's one small thing that I must tell you about. Google reads *gamepedia.net and www.gamepedia.net as different sites. So, probably the URL that you advertise will have a higher PR than the other one. (ie, www or http). However, there's a simple Apache Mod which allows you to redirect www.gamepedia.net automatically to *gamepedia.net, so that way there will be uniformity all around your sites and users using www won't feel left out by Search Engines or vice-versa. This must be typed in the .htaccess page.
Here's the code to redirect www to http
And Here's Vice-Versa, http to www
] Note: Replace "domain.com" with your domain.
Now, you've done all that but you'll probably be asking yourself "Can I check my PageRank?". Well, yes you can. There are sites which use Google's (Complex) Algorithm to find out your site's PageRank. But wait, there's even a Google Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox and other browsers, which will help you find your PR, neat isn't it. A really great site which shows your PageRank is PageRank. It will show you your current PageRank and it also has many other neat services for SEO'ing your website. Another extremely useful site is , which not only shows your PageRank but also roughly calculates your PageRank, next month. Amazing! Yup!
Something important comes here, Don't use a BackLink service which promises to get your PR up in a jiffy cause they may just do the opposite. Google and many other SE's have identified many BackLink Services and have put in their Blacklist, so a link from them might just give you a negative Point. I'm serious here.
Here's another pet peeve, but be careful about this. If your site is pretty good, and it covers one/two topics extensively, then go to WikiPedia and Search for that particular term(s). At the end of the Page, there will be a place called "Related Links". There add 3-4 sites of that topic along with yours. It's okay if you give more coverage to your competition. Don't start celebrating already. The recently edited pages will be constantly monitored by Editors at WikiPedia and if they think the site is not relevant, they'll probably remove it. If they do, don't keep on submitting. Improve your site and do it after one month.
Here are the only websites which have a PR 10 - *en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_with_a_high_PageRankNext
I think that's all I need to cover. I've probably covered almost all the points that you need to know for GOOD Search Engine Optimization and bringing your site on top. You'll probably ask me, if everybody tries SEO then who'll be at the top. That will be a battle of the efforts, with the one whose done Better Optimization ranking higher.
The bottomline is that Search Engine Optimization is pretty easy even though it is time-consuming. Perhaps, it still hasn't attained popularity due to non-awareness. The aim of this tutorial is just that, to spread the methods and tips and pet peeves among every single Webmaster so that Professional SEO's can be challenged by individuals like you and me. Make sure that you share this tutorial with all your friends.
Tutorial Copyright © Retro. Email Address :: pgswebmaster@gmail.com. This tutorial can be posted anywhere and everywhere you want but please do not remove these 3 lines of Copyright, that's all I ask from you. Don't claim it as your source, or I might just sue you.
For those who haven't the patience to go through the full Tut, here are the Chief Points that I cover::
- Stable Server
- Simple Small Domain
- No Domain Cloaking/Masking, Redirection
- Maximum two & or id= parameters in Domain Allowed
- Valid HTML & CSS
- Less/External Use of Javascript
- Title Tags
- Meta Keyword, Keyword Density
- Meta Description
- Copyright with keywords
- Source Size - 30 KB
- Keywords in Main Page
- Maximum Links in Page - 50 to 60
- Image alt= attribute & link title= attribute to be used
- Regular Updation
- Manual Submission to Search Engines
- PageRank
- Two Sitemaps
- More Sites linking to you
- Mutual Affiliation, Networks
- Submission to Directories - Dmoz, Yahoo
- link:yoursite.com & site:yoursite.com
- No Backlinks
~ Retro
So keywords should be first instead of site name.
