SEO Made Easy
If you want people searching for related keywords to your business find your website, you have to optimize your site for search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
Search engine optimization really comes down to 3+1 major steps:
1, Keywords research: you wanna know what keywords to target before you do anything
2, Onpage SEO: you wanna make sure that your website is structured correctly and you have a bunch of quality conent on your site
3, Offpage SEO: getting links to your website and making more and more content
+ Optimizing and improving
That’s it! Let’s get started.
Now, before you do any SEO work, you need to do 3 things. Please, follow the instructions below
1, Sign up with Google Webmaster Tools
1/1, Sign up a free Google Webmaster Tools account, and log in!
1/2, Add your site! You have to add it twice: once with „www” as www.yourwebsite.com, and once without „www” as yourwebsite.com
1/3, Prove to Google that you own the site! Choose any method you like to verify, I prefer the meta tag. You have to verify the „www” and no „www” version as well.
1/4, Go to back to Webmaster Tools home (Click the Webmaster Tools sign)
1/5, Click on your site (the „www” or the non „www” version, it doesn’t matter)
1/6, Go to „Site Configuration / Settings”
1/7, Choose a geographic target! Choose a country you want to target the most with your site. If your site is English I recommend you target users in the United States, unless your business is a non-U.S. local business.
1/8, Choose a Preferred domain! Now, this is VERY important! You have to make a decision whether you wanna use the „www” or the non „www” version of your site in the search engines. I recommend you use the „www” version, so choose the www.yourwebsite.com, and from now on, you only use, link, mention your website with „www” because those are actually 2 different domains, even if you own them both, and you don’t wanna confuse the search engines with duplicate content, because they can penalize you for it.
That’s it for the webmaster tools. Sometimes you can come back and see how your website does, or if there is any diagnose problems, because Google is happy to tell you that in your webmaster tools account.
2, Create your .htaccess file
(The .htaccess (hypertext access) file is a directory-level configuration file supported by most web servers, that allows for decentralized management of web server configuration.)
2/1, Open Dreamweaver, and create a new page (html, or whatever)
2/2, Delete all the content in the file, and name it as .htaccess (without any extension)
2/3, Put it in your local site folder
2/3, Open it, hopefully it’s empty, if not, delete everything, and in the first line paste in:
Options –Indexes
Why? If somebody types in yourwebsite.com/existingfolder/ and the folder doesn’t have an index.html page in it, the browser may list out the folder directory, unless the server is configured not to. However, you wanna make sure nobody can do that, because it’s not secure if people can see the root directory of your site.
2/4, Now that you made a decision to only use the „www” version of your site (or the non „www” version) you wanna make sure that your server redirects visitors to the „www” version if they type in your website without „www” (or vice versa)
2/4,a If you chose the „www” version, in line 2-4 paste in, and edit „yourwebsite” and „com” to your domain:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourwebsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.yourwebsite.com/ [L,R=301]
2/4,b If you chose the non „www” version, in the 2-4 lines paste in, and edit „yourwebsite” and „com” to your domain:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourwebsite\.hu$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://yourwebsite.hu/ [L,R=301]
2/5, If somebody types in a page on your site that does not exist, you wanna redirect them to a page, where you tell them that the page they are looking for does not exist.
In line 5 paste in, and edit „yourwebsite.com” to your 404 error page (where you tell them that the page they are looking for does not exist, or if you are lazy to create that page (like me) then type in your home page:
ErrorDocument 404 "http://www.yourwebsite.com/404errorpage.html"
2/6, Just as a side note, if you have a page that you wanna move to a different url, paste in, and edit „pagemoved” to your moved page, and then put the absolute url of the new page you would like to redirect them:
Redirect permanent /pagemoved http://www.yourwebsite.com/newpage
2/7, Upload your .htaccess file to your site folder on your web server, and make sure if it’s working. If it doesn’t, ask your hosting company how to use your own .htaccess file on your site.
You can use .htaccess to many different things, you can password protect a folder on your site, and if you google „.htaccess generator” you will find lot of free tools to generate the code you need.
3, Sign up with Google Analytics
1/1, Sign up a free Google Analytics account!
1/2, Follow the instructions, add your website, copy and paste the tracking code on your site (onto every page!) and then you can start measuring your results.
Keyword research
Before you do any search engine optimization, you need to know what keyword phrases you’re gonna target. What are the keywords that somebody who is looking for your product or service would type in Googe?
You can target about 3-5 keyword phrases/page. Every page is competing in the search engines, and you can target different keywords with your different web pages.
1, Use the free AdWords Keyword Tool to find relatively high search volume keywords!
Do NOT start off by optimizing for a keyword like „weight loss” or in my case „dreamweaver”!
Why? If a keyword is too broad, or just searched too many times, then the competition you will have to outrank will be extremely tough. This is not something you should try to take on right away.
You wanna target long tail, relatively high search volume, low competition keywords, because you have a much better chance to rank for those keywords pretty fast.
2, Look for long tail relatively high search volume keywords, and write them down!
3, Check out the competition for those keywords!
How? Type in your keyword phrases in Google in quotation marks like this:
"your long tail keyword"
See how many results you get for those keywords. You will see the number of results right above your listings. Obviously, the less results you have for a keyword phrase the better, because it means there are less competing web pages to outrank.
Also check out how many web pages are out there using those keywords in the title. The title is a very important onpage SEO factor, so type in your keyword phrases in Google like this:
allintitle:[your long tail keyword]
See how many web pages are out there having those keywords in the title.
4, Then find 3-5 optimal keyword phrases for each of your web pages, and write them down.
Onpage SEO: optimizing your site
Now that you know your keywords for your web pages, it’s time to prepare them to rank high for those keywords. Let’s start with your web pages:
1, Use your keywords in the title, keywords, and description meta tags
2, Use your keywords in your image alt tags, and file names
3, Use your keywords in your h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 tags
4, Use your keywords in any text
5, Use Google friendly url like: yourwebsite.com/keyword.html
6, Link each of your web pages from your home page directly, or at least indirectly, and use the actual page’s keyword in the anchor text (link text)!
So if you have a web page that is not your home page, and you wanna rank that page for a specific keyword, then put a link on your home page linking to that page using that keyword in the anchor text (link text)
Your home page is the strongest page in the eye of the search engines, so if you link all of your individual web pages from your home page, you are gonna make all of your web pages stronger in the eyes of the search engines.
7, Create as many web pages as you can! The more pages you have, the more traffic you get. That’s why blogging is so important.
Offpage SEO: getting links to your site
This is the most important step! If you wanna rank high in the search engines, you need strong websites linking to your website.
What do I mean by „strong” websites? Websites that have high Page Rank (PR)
Here's a quick definition of Page Rank:
Page Rank is Google’s way of giving a specific value (0-10) to how popular your website is. It is based on the number of „votes” other websites cast for your website. A „vote” is simply when another website places a link on their website that is pointing to your website. Generally, the more links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank will be, and the higher you will be able to rank for your keywords.
In order to see your own website’s Google Page Rank, as well as others, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer. You can get it for free here: http://toolbar.google.com
Or, you can use any free online Page Rank checker on the web. There are many Page Rank checkers out there, one of them is: http://www.prchecker.info/
It’s time for getting links!
First of all, remember that you have already made a decision to use either the „www” or the non „www” version of your site. So make sure you only link that.
Second, when you place a link on a website pointing to your website, you wanna use your keywords in the anchor text (link text).
Now you don’t wanna use the same exact link text over and over again. No! You wanna vary it, and you will get much better results because it looks natural for the search engines. If you use the same link text everywhere, Google will think that you use some kind of software to get links, and it will penalize your site for it. So make sure you rotate your link text.
Third, getting links is a lotta work, boring, and to me it’s headaches. However, you have to do it consistently if you wanna rank high in the search engines.
So you have to do it, and you can also outsource it. If you do both, that’s probably the best!
To outsource it:
Simply visit one of the many link purchasing websites. Here are a few of the better ones that I personally use on a regular basis. I've listed them in order of which I view as the best:
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/ http://www.linkadage.com/ http://www.text-link-ads.com/
Here is how you do it:
1, Use your older websites
Something that I typically do with new websites, is I will always link my older, higher Page Rank websites to my new websites. If you already own a PR3 or stronger website, then place a link on the index page of that website and point it to your new website.
2, Blog comments
Find high Page Rank blogs in your niche, Google your most important keywords, choose „Blogs” and find the high Page Rank blogs especially those blog posts that use your keyword in their page title, put your website url in the „your website” field, and comment on those blog posts using your keywords!
Then create a list of the best high Page Rank blogs, and when they publish a new blog post, comment on them and become part of the conversation. Obviously, you don’t wanna spam those blogs. Always add value, just make sure you use your keywords in the comment somehow or another.
3, Paid links
Many times you can purchase a PR7 link for a month time period for, say, $150, and the link boosts your rankings immediately, and after the month is up, even if you don’t renew the link you keep your better rankings! So, basically by paying a one time fee of $150 you can boost your rankings in Google.
And you can purchase a link on ANY website!
4, Directories
Web directories are directories on the web, that are specialized in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. Usually you have to pay for a listing, but don’t pay a dime for a link in a PR0 directory! PR3 is the minimum I would ever pay for.
When you visit a directory site, look for a link that says „suggest URL” or „suggest a site” and follow the instructions!
Here is 4 of the highest PR directory sites: (Get a link in there because it’s gonna boost your rankings!)
http://www.dmoz.org/ http://dir.yahoo.com/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/site-directory http://www.ipl.org