Monday, October 15, 2012

21 Important SEO Tips



You mightn't be agree with me, but I finally realized that SEO is not such complicated as bloggers have been explaining it. According to my continue research on SEO for last 2 years and my own testing, I can say that it is just a technique to know the Search Engines' bots algorithms and criteria properly. There aren't anything hidden in this. Search engines like Google itself has stated many times the best practices of SEO on their help pages. One can visit Google's own sites and within 10 minutes can clear his/her concept about SEO.

I researched a lot about SEO since 2010 and wherever I go for reading articles on this topic; I found them confusing people with extra ordinary tips. However, there has been many guys who are genuine Optimizers like Mustafa Ahmedzai and Harsh Agarwal. But all are not like them; even some webmasters are just don't know how to optimize their own blog/site, but giving people tips on SEO. Thereby, I became confused with SEO in entire 2010 year. Now here is a question that What Search Engine Optimization Basically is? well, a great question I've been asked many times. Find a simple answer to this question in my next paragraph.

From my prospective, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique/process that is used to convince the Search Engine's Spiders to index and rank your online content. As Search engines crawlers are just software not human, but to know about them you can read their coding/formulas. Now here I want to let you know about the 21 basic aspects of SEO. So make sure you remember them and use them in the future for explaining SEO to someone. 

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it was initially used in 1990s for finding better webpages by Search Engines, but after Google's invention, it opened the eyes of webmasters.

2. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO simply means, the work you do within your website for SEO is called On-page i.e website design, navigation, Pagelayout, interlinking, titles, meta tags, headings etc. 

3. Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO simply means, the work you do outside your website for SEO is called off-page i.e submitting site to search engines, sitemaps, backlinks, social bookmarking etc.

4. Title Tags

The title tag is the  most important SEO component which is used for giving a title to a webpage. It is simply an HTML tag.

5. Meta Tags

Meta tags are special/reserved HTML tags that are used to describe the content of a webpage. These tags are commonly used in SEO terms. Usually, meta tags are: Description, Keywords, Author, Robots, Generator. And they are used in the head section of a webpage. 

6. Headings

Headings are also important components of SEO, a webpage may be having many paragraphs, so for each paragraph we can use different headings. Always sorting for Headings is follow: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. 

7. Keywords 

The special/reserved words that describe the whole page is called keyword or keywords. They are mostly included in the title tag and used again and again in the entire page. 

8. Keyword Density

The limit of a keyword in a complete article is called Keyword density. The maximum keyword density is 5% percent for the whole page. So if you write an article of 500 words the keyword may be included 25 times but not more than that. 

9. Keyword Stuffing & Cloaking

This is a black hat SEO technique which is no longer accepted by Search Engines. This technique is used to cheat search engine crawler; by using this technique some webmasters include a huge number of keywords in meta tags or in the page. Also they use different techniques to deceive visitors as well as search engines i.e hiding the original text from the user or positioning it somewhere, where it can't be seen by human eyes.

10. Robots, Spiders & Crawlers

These are search engines software/system/algorithms which discover new webpages on the web and index them in their servers. These three names give same meaning. 

11. Interlinking 

Interlinking is a technique which is used to create links within a website with particular pages.

12. External Linking 

This is a technique that is used to insert external links in a webpage, these links are indicating to other websites. If the links are not kept Nofollow then they are crawled by search engine robots.

13. Inbound links

Inbound links are those links that are outside your website on the web, but linking back to you. It is an indication for search engines that your site has been also somewhere else.

14. Outbound Links

Outbound links are those links that are going outside from your website. If they are not kept Nofollow they can be crawled by Search Engines crawlers.

15. Backlinks
Backlinks are those links which are outside your website but indicating back to your website. Those links with Dofollow attribution are called Backlinks. The other are just outbound links.

16. Nofollow
It is an attribute that tells the search engine crawler not to follow a particular page or link. So if a website dosn't want to index a webpage or link, simply a nofollow attribute is added. 

17. Dofollow
Dofollow is an attribute that tells the search engine crawler to follow the webpage or link entirely. By default all links are dofollow if they are not changed.

18. No Index
No Index is another attribute that instructs the crawler to not index the webpage. The link can be followed but the content won't be indexed.

19. Sitemaps
Sitemaps are the best way to tell the search engines about your site's complete A to Z content. It is essential for driving massive traffic from search engines.

20. Robot.TXT
This is simply a text file that is kept in the root directory of a website, it instructs the search engine crawler about the restricted webpages or directories which shouldn't be accessed by them.

21. Your Turn:
These were some basic SEO components and you must learn them in order to optimize your own blog or website by yourself. Comments and questions are welcomed and sharing this post is also appreciated.

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