Start Learning Search Engine Optimization Today!

After a few days off this past week, I wanted to share with you a great SEO Guide I found from Dan Thies, it’s a 100 page, free PDF guide aimed mostly at SEO beginners.

Dan Thies is an experienced and well known SEO/SEM Consultant. He is the author and publisher of “SEO Fast Start” E-book.  He has now updated and released this SEO Guide for free.

SEO Fast Start is a simple step by step guide to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization:

- Developing a keyword strategy to target the right searchers

- Building a well structured Website

- Creating good content and doing basic “on page” optimization

- Promoting your site to get links from the rest of the Web

- Avoiding technical issues

Go on and download the SEO Fast Start E-book, it’s a valuable guide to get into the basics of Search Engine Optimization.

(Update, SEO Fast Start is still a PDF file that you download in a .zip file, but it’s ok, it works fine)

Free Guide to Social Media.

In terms of SEO/SEM, Social Media can be defined as a group of online platforms and tools, which have to be taken into account when thinking of starting a Search Engine Optimization and Marketing campaign.

There is a whole lot of new techniques and opportunities to optimize and market our sites with Social Media, we must learn what this is all about, how can we optimize our sites for social media, what are the different types of Social Media sites, what places can we use to market our sites and what is the proper way to do it…

Spannerworks.com presents a great free guide to Social Media, is a PDF document,, where you can find information to start with and get the basics of it. It’s really worth the read.

The Idea behind Social Media is to participate, share, and communicate. It’s about making the Web a social place, where everyone has the chance to participate and join online dialogues on any thinkable subject.

If we look back at the Web before Social Media, it used to be a one way dialogue place, where users where just recipients of information, with very limited options to participate. Today the Web is built with the participation of users, who have the chance to share their knowledge and experiences online.

The guide makes reference to the most important categories for Social Media:

Blogs: Online Journals to write and share information. Blogs are user-generated Websites with a Journal format; they are an easy way to have your own site on the Internet. The most common platforms are: Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Typad.com, Movabletype.com .

Social Networks: Websites integrated usually by individuals or Organizations, gathered around specific subjects and interests. Some of the most known places are: Myspace.com, Hi5.com, Friendster.com .

Content Sites (Folksonomies): Websites to share content online on different topics and interests. Some of the most recognized places are: Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Netscape.com, Youtube.com, Flickr.com.

Wikis: Websites that allow you to build, edit, add, and remove content to a specific page on the site. Some of them are: Wikipedia.com, Wikispaces.com, Wikia.com.

Podcasts: Websites that let you add audio and video files, like Podomatic.com, Podcast.com.

Forums: Websites that allow you to initiate ask questions and participate in discussions on different topics of your interests, some examples are: Fonefunshop.co.uk, Gamehours.com, etc.

So I invite you to check the Basic guide on Social media from ICrossing.com, it’s a PDF document and a good source of information to start getting into the basics of Social Media.

I found a great article at seomoz.org, about Google’s Ranking Factors, it’s a must read. Top SEO Practitioners like Aaron Walls, Bill Slawski, Jill Whalen, Michael Gray, Danny Sullivan, and others voted on the factors they estimate are the most important used on Google’s Ranking Algorithm to determine the placement of a web site in the search engine result pages (SERP’s) when an Internet user is doing a specific search. Google’s Ranking Algorithm is the mathematical formula they use to calculate which results to display and that are most suitable to the searcher query.

Ranking factors are attributes present in a Web page and are used to tell Search Engines what the web page is about and by which search engines determine the importance of a Website based on the website’s relevance and related keywords…

So seomoz.org gave to the task, this is their second and most updated version of the ranking factors. They are presented in several categories, each evaluated in several related components. The following are the most significant factors taken in account for the evaluation of factors that are considered to be important when doing SEO for a Web Page:

Keyword Use Factors:
- Keyword use in title tag
- Keyword use in the body text
- Keyword use in H1 tag
- Relationship of body text content to keywords
- Keyword use in domain name
- Keyword use in H2, H3, H(x) tags
- Keyword use in URL
- Keyword use in alt tags and image titles
- Keyword use in bold/strong tags
- Keyword use in meta description tag
- Keyword use in meta keywords tag

Page Attributes
- Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
- Quality/Relevance of links to external Sites/Pages
- Age of document
- Amount of indexable text content
- Quality of the document content (as measured algorithmically)
- Organization/Hierarchy of document flow (i.e. broad > narrow)
- Frequency of updates to page
- Number of trailing slashes (/) in URL
- Accuracy of spelling & grammar
- HTML validation of document (to W3C Standards)

Site/Domain Attributes
- Global link popularity of Site
- Age of Site
- Topical relevance of inbound links to Site
- Link popularity of Site in topical community
- Rate of new inbound links to Site
- Relevance of Site’s primary subject matter to query
- Manual Authority/Weight given to Site by Google
- Top Level Domain extension of Site (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc)
- Rate of new pages added to Site
- Number of queries for Site/Domain over time
- Verification of Site with Google Webmaster Central
- Historical performance of Site as measured by time spent on page, clickthroughs from SERPs, direct visits, bookmarks, etc.

Inbound Link Attribute
- Anchor text of inbound link
- Global link popularity of linking Site
- Topical relationship of linking Page
- Link popularity of Site in topical Community
- Topical relationship of linking Site
- Age of link
- Text surrounding the link
- Internal link popularity of linking page within Host Site/Domain
- PageRank (as measured by the Google Toolbar) of linking page
- Domain Extension of linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc)
- Temporal link attributes (when in time the link was created/updated)

Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes
- Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
- Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
- External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
- Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
- Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)
- Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
- Very Slow Server Response Times
- Inbound Links from Spam Sites
- Low Levels of Visitors to the Site (Measured via Toolbar, Clicks in SERPs, etc.)

The above list of factors was given to top SEO Practitioners to evaluate each of them in terms of the significance in Google’s Algorithm to display results in its SERPs. So go on and read it; it’s a must read article if you want to know the insights and what the top Search Engines Optimizers’ results of the evaluation was.

This is a list of essential search engine optimization strategies, you will probably learn some other in the long run, but right now I want to give you a list of the initial SEO techniques you have to have in mind when thinking on building your own website.

These practices will increase your chances of getting indexed by Search Engines, better rankings in the search engine’s result pages (serps) and possibly increase the amount of traffic to your site.

SEO is about a series of techniques you do to your website in order to improve the quantity and quality of visitors.

Here are some of the most important practices:

1- Get your own domain name (preferred if it is .com, is the most used on the Internet and people are already used to it). You can check Godaddy.com, to buy your domain name, they’re a Company with good reputation online.

2- Get your own, reliable hosting (a place where your web page is stored to be permanently available to visitors) for your site. A couple of hosting sites you can check are: Dreamhost.com or Pair.com.

3- Do a thoroughly keyword research to find out which are the most important words you should be using in your site, related to your main topic.

4- Add Titles, keywords and descriptions on the head of your page code. Each should be unique and related to the page.

5- Add a robots.txt file at the root of your server: e.g.: http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

6- Add a Sitemap page to your site: It should contain each page of your site, is like and index for your site, it will help guide visitors and search engine robots for better indexing.

7- Use CSS (cascading style sheets) to arrange the presentation of your Web site. It’s used to define colors, font and layout. This will help you improve the ratio of text/code of your Website, you want to have more text than code.

8- Use your keywords to describe the images in your site: alt tags.

9- Make sure you use H1 and H2 tags for the headings and subheadings of your site, using your keywords.

10- Write articles including your main keywords. Don’t worry about keyword density or frequency, what’s most important is that your article is compelling and useful to your visitors.

11- Link to relevant, quality sites using contextual links (using the keyword of your site).

12- Make sure you don’t have broken links in your site.

13- Try to use bread crumbs on the top of your pages, to make sure your visitors know where they are in your site, e.g.: Home > Marketing > Link Building. This will tell them they are reading an article of the link building section of the category marketing.

14- Get rid of java scripts in the code of your page and put it in an external file.

15- Build 404 pages (when someone reaches to a page that is not found in your site it will show the visitor a custom message instead of getting an error page and loose that visitor). For instance the message could say: Sorry the page you have reached does not exist, please go to our home page: http://www.yoursite.com .

16- Once this is all done submit your site to major Search Engine and Directories and start building links to your site, of course that’s a subject for another post.

You will find a lot more techniques to add to your SEO list of basic practices, but for now these ones will help you get started. Good luck.

I found a great article at: Publising2.0 of Scott Karp, discussing SEO and its practices: The truth about SEO.  Scott exposes its position about SEO, mentioning that “there’s an imbalance of value between publisher and consumer” referring as how through SEO many sites without high quality value for the user get to top rankings in the Search Engines result pages. Check the article it’s really interesting.

But what called my attention was the challenge Scott gave to visitors about posting in the comment section a list of top 10 SEO Pratices.  Some of the top SEO Practitioners took the challenge:  Aaron Walls, Danny Sullivan, Searchenginewatch, etc.

Here is a great list of top 10 SEO Practices Aaron Walls contributed with:

 - Preventing search engines from indexing low quality (duplicate content, user tags, etc) or low information web pages (so that more of your link authority is focused on the high quality pages).

- Writing page titles that satisfy search engines and searchers and are interesting enough to be linkworthy.

- Researching keywords to determine how deep one can profitably go covering a specific topic.

- Encouraging social interaction, consumer feedback, and integrating user feedback into the site in a meaningful way.

- Creating self reinforcing authority ideas, improving mindshare, and brands that build links.
- Requesting links or coverage on high quality websites.

- Buying relevant advertising that may lead to indirect links or directly improve your trust scores (for example, Google recommends submitting sites to the Yahoo! Directory).

- Look as search logs from search engnies and internal site search to see how well your content satisfies those demands, and using keyword modifiers and semantically related words to help the page rank for more related phrases (a page which is too focused on a core term but lacks supporting vocabulary may get filtered out of the search results).

- Create additional content where your site is lacking, or in related fields that relate to profitable fields.

- Restructure a site’s internal link structure to ensure important content is getting indexed and place emphasis on popular or profitable pages.

- Correct search engine indexing or ranking problems caused by content management system issues, site hacking, or other potential problems.

- Linking within content to drive conversions.

- (For ad driven sites) Balancing ad revenues with site credibility and forward linkworthiness.”

I think this list pretty much includes the basic SEO steps to have in account. You should go and read the whole article, there is a few other comments that are worth reading too: Danny Sullivan, Pete Wailes , etc.

Having a Blog today has become very important if you are interested in starting your own Business Online. Blogs are a simple way to publish to the Web, they are easy to maintain, you can easily start contact and communicate with others on the same field you are at and are a great tool for Online Marketing.

At SEO Practices we want to share with you a nice list of some of the best resources for you SEO newbies, it will guide you through blogging step by step:

Get your Own Blog:

Choosing the right blog platform is very important if you want to stand from the crowd, you can either host it on Blogger, Word Press, Type Pad or on your own domain (most recommended). Of course if you are just starting to find your way around the Internet any hosted solution on any of the CMS mentioned bellow will do to begin with:

Word Press
Blogger from Google
TypePad 
Movable Type

Starting your Blog:

I’m very aware of my own limitations as a blogger and strongly believe that it is only by researching, reading and practicing that we get to know anything. So I encourage you to start going through the resources on this guide and working on your own blog.

Blogging for Beginners
Guide to Building, Customizing, Promoting, and Monetizing your Blog
21 Tips to a Successful Blog Launch
Blog Usability: Top Ten Design Mistakes
21 Tactics to Start your Blog

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs:

SEO for Blogs is about preparing your blog so Search Engines are able to index it easily and therefore to improve the chances to be found by Internet Users. In Wikipedia is defined as: “marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding”. So lets not get too complicated and read the following resources:

SEO Best Practices for Blogs – Problogger
Blog Optimization
Search Engine Optimization Tips and Resources for Blogs
Optimize your Blog

Finding and Writing Content:

There are four basic characteristics that a piece of content must have:
-Uniqueness
-Related to your topic
-Usefulness
-Quality

Here are some of the best resources related to best practices for writing content and how to find it:

10 Web Tools to Help Generate Blog Content Ideas
How to Write Magnetic Headlines
29 Topics and Sentence Starters for Your Next Blog
5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang

Promoting your Blog:

How to make your blog noticeable, it’s about bringing readers to your blog, weather you are generating leads, selling a product, or offering a subscription to a newsletter or a download, you want visitors to come to your blog and take an action. Promoting is about letting others know your blog exists. Check some of the best resources with tips, ideas and tools of how to promote your blog:

25 Tips for Marketing your Blog
How to get traffic for your blog
23 Ideas for Finding New Readers for your Blog
Blog Promotion Tools

Blog Useful Tools:

Here is a list of resources of useful tools that will help you enhance the look, functionality and security of your blog:

Add a Styled Flickr Photo Stream to Your Blog
Backup Your Blog
Make your Own Feed Button
Share the Blaughter: Put a Comic on your Blog
What bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox
Social Bookmarks for your Blog

Social Networks for Blogs:

You can get you blog noticed on the Social Networks, those are sites where thousands of Web Navigators participate, looking for information, news, entertainment, games, etc, and most important deciding which ones they have found are the best resources. Check some of the following:

Social News Network
Social Bookmarking Site
Search, Surface, and Organize Blogs
Find Out who is Reading your Blog
Subscribe to and Manage to lots of Web Information