Free Search Engine Optimization Guide

Click here to download a copy in .pdf format.

In an attempt to empower you and help your website rank better with Google and the other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing(Microsoft), we wrote this free search engine optimization(SEO) guide to help you succeed in the search engine arena. We're confident that if you follow these guidelines, you'll know more about SEO than 99.9% of the population, your search engine rankings will improve substantially, and you'll experience more traffic and business as a result. We wish you much success!

1.) Integrate Your Most Popular Phrases Into Your Domain Name

For example, if your website is about search engine optimization, a domain name such as www.searchengineoptimization.com would be ideal. Having your key phrases in your domain name greatly improves your chances of success with the search engines!

2.) Integrate Your Most Popular Phrases Into Your URLs

If you already have an established domain name that does not include your most popular phrases, you want to include your key phrases as close as possible to the domain name and have this key phrase occur frequently throughout your site. For example, a vacation rental site featuring many locations might have URLs such as http:/www.crazycribs.com/vacation-rentals/san-diego.html or http:/www.crazycribs.com/vacation-rentals/santa-barbara.html.

Notes About Search Engine Optimization and URLs:

• The search engine crawlers are like little robots that come to your website periodically looking for new and updated information. These search engine crawlers are looking for a consistent theme throughout your site, so you want to use your key phrases in as many URLs as possible. One or two pages just won't cut it.
• Don't overdo it! For example, having URL and domain name combinations such as http://www.vacationrentals.com/vacation-rentals/vacation-rentals.html could get you flagged as a search engine spammer, which of course you're not.
• Start slow with just one instance of your key phrase in the URL and escalate over time if needed.
• Use dashes (-) instead of underscores (_) to separate words after the domain name in your URLs. Dashes are typically viewed as a space between words by the search engines, whereas underscores are typically ignored, resulting in "vacationrentals". Having the two words separated by a dash will work better with the search engines than having them mashed together.
• Do not use dashes in the domain name itself if you can help it. Although it's advisable to separate the words after the domain name with hyphens, it's considered a best practice to keep the domain kept as one whole word. For example, http://www.vacationrentals.com will most likely work better for you than http://www.vacation-rentals.com.

3.) Integrate Your Most Popular Phrases Into All Of Your Page Titles

An example title tag for the vacation rental site might be: <title>Vacation Rentals – Holiday Vacations – Vacation Homes – VacationRentals.com</title>

Notes About Search Engine Optimization and Page Titles:

• In the above page title, notice the word "vacation" or "vacations" is being used four times. "Rental" or "Rentals" is being used twice. Using the key phrases more than once will increase your keyword density and will increase the odds of you ranking well with the search engines. Again, don't overdo it! If you use your keywords too many times, you may be penalized by Google and the other search engines for spamming.
• Use unique page titles on all pages throughout your website. Each page title should be unique and accurately represent the material on the page.
• Avoid duplicate page titles. Change the order of words and use spelling alternatives to present variations in the text while maintaining a consistent theme throughout your site. For example, one page title might say "About Crazy Cribs Vacation Rentals". Another page title might say "Find Vacation Rentals at Crazy Cribs Vacation Rentals".
• Keep your page titles down to 7-9 words.
• Put your most popular phrases at the beginning of the page titles. This is especially important on the homepage.
• Use dynamically generated page titles for database-driven websites. If you're creating a dynamic website with dozens or hundreds of pages, make sure your web developer can dynamically write out unique, keyword-rich page titles for every page on your website. Such a page title might look like this:

• For dynamic websites ask your web developer if they can include Page Title and Meta tag inputs in the admin tool too. This way you can add custom page titles and Meta tags to various pages when time and resources become available.

4.) Integrate Your Most Popular Phrases Into Your Text

Every page on your website should have your most important phrases on it. This is especially important on the homepage, so if you want to be found for search engine optimization you absolutely must say "search engine optimization" on your homepage, preferably 3-5 times for starters.

Notes About Search Engine Optimization and Website Text:

• Include your most important phrases in the website text at the beginning of the page and again at the bottom.
• Shoot for having your key phrases 3 times in the actual body copy on each page for starters.
• An easy way to integrate keywords into every page is to include your company name, text-only navigation, and copyright information in the footer of every page. With dynamic or templated websites, this can usually be done in just a few minutes by editing a single includes or footer file. An example website footer might look like this:

5.) Make Your Website A Content-Rich Resource.

Continually add keyword-rich content to your website to make it an authority on a particular topic. As you add more and more content to your website it will become more attractive to people seeking out information on your topic and people will be more likely to tell others about your great site. As search engine crawlers visit your site, they will keep encountering new material, which will encourage them to visit more frequently. The more frequently the search engine crawlers visit, the better.

6.) Get Links From Quality And Relevant Websites (Link Building)

Generally speaking, the more websites that link to you, the better. As more people link to you, you'll naturally get more traffic, which helps boost your web traffic. What's even more important is that Google counts every link to your website as a vote of sorts and if you get a lot of good "votes" from Google, your website will get a higher Page Rank and will come up higher on the list when people search Google for your particular product or service.

Since Google generates far more traffic than any of the other search engines, including Yahoo, Bing(Microsoft), and all the other search engines combined, being high on the Google search engine results is what it's all about! Not so fast! It is better to have ten links from really popular, quality, and relevant websites than it is to have links from 100 mom-and-pop sites containing irrelevant content. Spend your time and energy pursuing links from quality sites that matter.

Notes About Search Engine Optimization and Link Building:

• Stay away from link farms that claim to get you links from dozens or hundreds of websites. Many such links are considered "bad neighborhood" links by the search engines and you can get penalized for associating with them. Although it's pretty slow-going, it's best to hand-select quality, high Page Rank websites and approach them one-by-one.
• You can download the Google Toolbar for free from toolbar.google.com. This allows you to see a website's Page Rank at the top of your web browser when you're visiting their website.
• When looking for sites to link to you, consider approaching sites with a Page Rank of 3 or higher for starters. The higher the better. Ten is the highest Page Rank and is reserved for mega sites like Google and Yahoo.
• Not only do you want links from popular websites that have a high Page Rank, but you want links from sites in related industries. If you're a doctor, you want links from various medical sites. If you're a travel company, you want links from various travel-related sites. When you have links from like-businesses, Google can more easily identify you as being of a particular theme and can boost your page rank accordingly.
• You may want to create a links page on your site so you can reciprocate and offer a link to the person whom you're asking for a link. If you scratch their back, they'll be more likely to scratch yours.
• Make sure sites linking to you include your keywords in their descriptions and links. An example link would look something like this:

Click Here to Learn More About Search Engine Optimization

7.) Use Keyword-Rich Meta Description Tags On Your Main Pages

Meta tags are pieces of HTML code that can be added to the <head> section of your web pages. The two most popular Meta tags are Meta Description tags and Meta Keyword tags. There are some conflicting views about whether or not to use Meta tags and whether they actually help your search engine positioning. Regardless of whether or not it helps with your search engine positioning, you should use the Meta Description tag because this is what frequently appears below your website URL in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Using the Meta Description tag gives you a chance to include your keywords, it MAY help boost your ranking, and can help sell your product or service. It's a good best practice.

Notes About Search Engine Optimization and Meta Descriptions:

• A Meta Description tag should be a well written, straightforward sentence that contains your keywords and the major feature/function/benefit of your business and the page that's being featured. For example, a Meta Description tag might read as follows:

<meta name="Description" content="Crazy Cribs Vacation Rentals offers the world's largest
selection of FREE vacation rental listings, villas and beachfront properties.">

• These days, the general consensus is not to bother with Meta Keyword tags because they provide little or no value. Some people still use them, but we don't bother and we still get great results without them.
• When it comes to Meta tags, you should focus on the top, most important pages of your website first. The homepage is always most important. As you get into dozens or hundreds of pages, this can quickly become a daunting task that provides questionable value, so don't get too hung up on it. Just focus on the top, most important pages for starters then move on to the second and third-tier pages as time permits.
• If you're building a dynamic website, you should ask your web developer if they can include Meta tag inputs, along with the Page Title inputs (mentioned above) in the admin tool. This way you can add custom page titles and Meta tags to various pages when time and resources become available.

8.) Rewrite Dynamic URLs With dynamic (database-driven) websites that have dozens or hundreds of pages

Your web developers or programmers can/should rewrite the dynamic URLs into something that's keyword-rich. By default, your website URLs may look like: http://www.crazycribs.com/?osc_id=4319&src=QB0408&ID=0043567. Such URLs don't include your keywords and are not considered search engine-friendly. Using some rewrite technology such as Mod_Rewrite (Apache), you can make the above dynamic URL look like this instead. http://www.crazycribs.com/vacation-rentals/beaches/santa-barbara.html Using rewrite technology will have a huge impact on the search engine effectiveness of dynamic websites!

9.) Reduce "Code Bloat" on Your Pages

The cleaner the code on your website, the faster your pages will load and the actual html text on the page will be given greater emphasis. In other words, if you say "search engine optimization" five times in 20 lines of code, those phrases will stand out much more than if you use 10,000 lines of code. As you use more programming code, you dilute the value of the actual verbiage on the page.

Notes About Search Engine Optimization and Code Bloat:

• One way to reduce code bloat is to move as much programming code as possible to external files. In other words, instead of having 200 lines of JavaScript code embedded on a web page, slowing down load times and diluting keyword emphasis, this code should be moved to an external .js file. Going this route, you'll have just a single line of code calling that file from within the HTML document. Your web developer will most likely know what I'm talking about
• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading style sheets are external files that control various type and formatting attributes of elements on a web page. Some people include all of the font, table and color-type formatting right inside the web page, which can add hundreds of lines of extraneous code, which will only dilute keyword emphasis and slow down page load times. Moving all of the formatting attributes to an external .css file can also speed up load times and make your website much more search-friendly.

10.) Use Keyword-Rich Alt Tags

All main images on your website should have alt tags that include variations of your keyword. You can't do this for every spacer or placeholder graphic on your website, but all page headers, featured products, and various prominent images should have alt tags, whenever possible.

Notes:

• Don't just say something like "Search Engine Optimization" for every single Alt tag because you could get flagged as a spammer and get penalized by the search engines. The alt tag for the header graphic might say "Search Engine Optimization Header Graphic". The main or featured image on the homepage might read "Search Engine Optimization Example 1".
• As a general rule, shoot for including your key phrases in your alt tags 3 times per page.

11.) Use a Reputable Web Host and Measure Performance Often

Have your website hosted with a reputable service provider who can offer you 99%+ uptime. This ensures that when people visit your website, they will see your website instead of a 404 Page Not Found Error. Furthermore, if search engine crawlers visit your website and it happens to be down, you can get penalized and your search engine rankings can drop substantially for weeks or more. The bottom line is, you want your website to be up 100% of the time for your visitors and search engines.

Notes Regarding Search Engine Optimization and Web Hosting:

• Most websites are hosted on a shared server. In other words, your website may be hosted along with dozens of other websites on a single computer. Smaller web hosting companies may overload their servers, resulting in poor performance and unreliability. If your website is critical to the operation of your business and you get a substantial amount of traffic every day, you should speak with your hosting company about a dedicated web server or virtual dedicated server. Although more expensive, these types of hosting arrangements are typically much faster and more reliable. You can usually sleep better at night too.
• Invest in a 3rd-Party Monitoring Service to routinely check your website's uptime, download speeds, DNS resolution and things like that. For about $20/month you can have your website's "ping, power and pipe" monitored once every fifteen minutes. This will alert you if there are any website issues and let you know if your site goes down.

12.) Use Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools offers a free suite of diagnostic tools that provide you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google. You can see how Google crawls and indexes your site and learn about specific problems such as broken pages or problems with redirects. Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

13.) Have a Site Map and Text-Only Navigation

Some search engine crawlers have a hard time indexing all of the pages on a website because of how the site has been coded. Because of this it's a good best practice to have a simple Site Map included in the text-only navigation at the bottom of all your pages. (See the Page Bottom example in #4 above for an example.) The text-only navigation and Site Map act as doorways that allow search engine crawlers to more easily find your website content.

Use Google's Webmaster Tools for guidelines on Site Map creation. Once your site map has been created according to the Google guidelines, you should submit it to Google via the Webmaster Tools. This will help Google know more about your web pages and gives you more control over how your URLs appear in the search engine ranking pages.

14.) Use 301 Redirects When Launching a New-and-Improved Website

When launching a new website that replaces a previous version you should use 301 Redirects to tell the search engines that your pages have moved. Doing so will retain your hard-earned Google Page Rank and your search engine positioning should stay more or less intact. If you do not use 301 Redirects when launching a new/replacement site, search engines will still have your old pages contained in their index, and both search engines and visitors seeking out your content will encounter broken pages when they try to visit your site. This will result in lots of 404 Page Not Found errors. When this happens your search engine rankings will most likely drop.

Well, I'd say that's certainly enough to keep you busy for awhile. There are several other things you can do to help with search engine optimization, but the main things that will have the biggest impact on your search engine ranking results are outlined above. I'm confident that if you follow these guidelines, your search engine rankings will improve dramatically and you'll experience more traffic and business as a result.

No Guarantees:

With the above said, there is no "silver bullet" and there are no guarantees that you'll be listed at the top of Google. Depending upon demand and the amount of competition you have, it could take anywhere from a month to a year or more to achieve decent search engine ranking results. Search engine optimization does not happen overnight and it should be considered an ongoing process of tweaking your website over time to make it more attractive to the search engines. The keys to search engine optimization success are to A.) Follow-best practices outlined above, B.) Don't participate in any unethical "Black Hat" search engine optimization methods, which could get you banned from Google, and C.) Stay at it over time.

Buying Your Way To the Top:

Finally, you can get instant visibility at the top of Google with a search engine marketing(not the same as search engine optimization) campaign using Google Adwords. Going this route allows you to bid on various phrases and your advertisements will be displayed at the top of the Google search engine results. This is a great way to get immediate visibility on Google, but it can be rather expensive and isn't for everyone. Furthermore, if you don't know what you're doing, you can burn through a lot of money very quickly on extremely unqualified traffic.

If you'd like to know more about Google Adwords or need assistance setting up a search engine marketing campaign or search engine optimization campaign, we encourage you to contact us today for help. If you have any questions or comments or need help with anything, feel free to contact me directly any time. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you.

Eric Petersen
Founder/President, Mission Web Marketing
e: eric (at) missionwebmarketing.com
Phone: (805) 696-9320
c: (805) 452-4048