eBook of the Week: The Free Beginner's Guide to SEO

23 Dec 2013

Moz has The Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO. I’m a sucker for anything free, so I read it. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Google also has their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. If I have a website and want people to visit it, what can I do to my website to make Google find me and put the links to my website ahead of other website? Being good at SEO translates to bringing more traffic, which in turn should bring more users.

Search Engines Google

The other search engines don’t matter since over 90% of the search traffic comes from Google.

Relevance

If users like your website, then it should be ranked higher. The goal is to provide the best user experience and the rest shall fall. Except for using AJAX for everything. Google doesn’t execute Javascript, so any text information needs to be in static HTML.

Thieves

Be aware of other people trying to steal your content. Use full domain in links, so when people steal your content, it will still link back to you.

This is a summary of my readings

• Title and H1 should include query terms with query terms closer to beginning of tag
• Titles should be less than 65-75 characters.
• Each page should have unique relevant content. If not, use rel=”canonical”
• Information hidden behind search boxes should be reachable through links
• Your entire site should be crawlable. No orphans.
• Make use of since that shows up on search page.
• No pages with blank content.
• Don’t link to too many pages since crawlers will only crawl a certain number of pages
• Don’t hide things behind user accounts since crawler will not sign up for your website.
• Social signals matter. Google +1, Facebook likes, etc.
• Number of unique links back to your website
• Keyword density does not matter. Don’t be spammy.
• Include clean keywords in url structure.
• Make use of alt tag for images. This is also good for blind people.
• The top three search results get all the clicks.
• Results returned by searching “site:doman.com” will yield unreliable results. The number of pages returned fluctuates wildly
• Know the intent of the searches.
• Use robots.txt to make sure crawler spends time crawling where you want.
• Mobile sitemap format is changing, keep updated.
• Google Mobile and Desktop crawling are different.
• Don’t spend money buying links. Spend your money on improving the content.

Tools

• http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
• http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/search-engine-tools-and-services
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Adwords Keyword Planner

One should forget about SEO and create unique content that meets the users needs while making the content accessible to search engines.