The Search Engine Optimization 101 guide

This new Google SEO 101 article gives you a free Video to watch and tells you the basics for how to get Google to know about your site, Index your site and how to SEO your site so Google will list your site higher when people search for information that is contained in your site!

Google and other search engine Basics

How Search engines work and why you need to know.

When you do a Google search in Google on “shoes”, Google searches the web and returns a list of results (Called the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs) from all over the web. But how does search engines like Google and Yahoo find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?

Basically Google crawls (Walks each of the pages) of the Websites that it knows about and indexes all the web pages it finds.

This creates a very complex map that tells the search engine:

1. Where everything on the web is (by its address) and
2. What every web page is about (by an algorithm that is a secret (so people don't try to fake it out) and
3. How important a given Web page is in terms of the subject matter on the page.

SEO refers to optimizing a website so that the search engines can easily determine the informational value of its pages and correctly rank them in the search engine results page.

Google SEO 101 need to know definition -

“Crawling” From the Google Webmaster site here is a detailed definition of how Google actually crawls the web:

• Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these Websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.
• Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently

The Search engines want to find the best results for each search and return them to the searcher in an order that has the best matches first so that the person doing the search is happy and will use that search engine again. If the person gets the wrong information back to many times they will most likely switch to a different search engine and over time that would damage the Search engines value.

Being ahead of the Fold

This means that your web page is one of the first 10 pages listed in the Google SERPS. It is on the first page (The first page shows 10 results) ahead of the fold as if the page was folded in two and you have to flip the page to see the next 10 which you really do in a sense, you have to click on next to see the next Ten.

Most people will just pick from the best of the first page and never click to see the next 10.

It has been proven that the higher up in the search engine results a web pages link appears, the more traffic that site gets with the vast majority of Traffic going to the links to Websites on the first page of the search engines.  While I have seen varying statistics, essentially if your web page appears in the first spot of the Google SERPS you will get Approx. 43% of the clicks. Subsequent spots each get significantly less then the ones before it.

If you are

Getting this high page ranking is so important that many people will do whatever they can if they think it can trick the search engine to get their site ranked higher in the search engine results. So that is why Google wants to keep their ever changing algorithms a secret .

New Google SEO 101 – What makes a web page relevant to a persons search request?

Again from Googles Webmaster site we get the following definitions:

• Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors
• One of which is the PageRank for a given page. Another is how many back links point to that page.
• PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank.
• Back Links are links from another web page to that page. This measures how authorative or important a page is on the web. How many other sites link to it!
• Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results.
• You can click on this link to read our review of  great wordpress plugins for blog traffic
• The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

New Google SEO 101 – How to SEO your site given the basic information presented so far:

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly.

• Your Website should be organized with a hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. If you use WordPress this is taken care of for you. If you are creating your own site from HTML you have to make sure that it is linked to (Meaning a person can click on a tab or highlighted link to get to that page (and for good site design they should be able to click on a tab, button or link to get back to where they were or the home page).

• You need a site map. For wordpress the xml sitemap  plugin does this for you automatically. But make sure to have a tab or page with the site map for users to navigate around your site. You can click on this link to read our article on the Top 10 WordPress Plugins

• Don't try to pump a page full of links or keywords.

• Do try to get relevant links to each page from other Websites.

• Create a site with unique usefully content, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

• Do keyword research (click here to go to a site dedicated to keyword research to learn more)

• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

• Make sure that the main keyword or phrase that any given page is about is in the title and in the description.

• Do not try to get 50 keywords jammed into one page thinking that Google will rank your page highly for everyone of those keywords. it won't work. focus each page on 1 – 3 keywords!

• Make sure that you have the Title and Description Meta Tags in each web page. The Keyword Statistics plugin, and some other SEO plugins, will do this for you in WordPress.

• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

• You can use a tool like Coffee Cup to Check for broken links and correct HTML.

• Dynamic pages (where the URL contains a "?" character) do not index well so don't use them much.

• You can have the URL to each page be whatever you want. A URL that contains your main keyword or phrase for the page is better.

OK, We hope that this New Google SEO 101 Basic article has helped you. You can click on this link to read our article on Website SEO !