Search Engine Optimization A Beginner s Guide to Climbing Search Engine s Rankings

Transcription

1 THE ESSENTIAL MANUAL TO Search Engine Optimization A Beginner s Guide to Climbing Search Engine s Rankings A publication of fpg

2 Table of Contents About the Author & Introduction / 1 Understanding Google s Job / 2 Where to Start / 3 Page Titles Page Description Page Content URL Structure Copyright Date The Next Step / 6 Utilizing Social Media Optimizing Images Connect With Google / 8 Webmaster Tools Analytics fpg

3 About the Author Introduction Robert C. Bowman III is the Senior Web Developer for FPG. Based in New York City, Robert leads the web development and SEO team. His adventure with websites began when AOL mailed a CD to his parent s house with 1,000 hours of free internet. Nearly two decades later he still cannot believe we re looking at websites on cellular telephones. When thinking about a website the best comparison is a fancy business card. It has a logo, contact information and a bit of information about the company. It also is an awesome design, but the problem is that no one will see your business card unless you go around handing it out. Fortunately for websites you don't have to physically walk getting noticed is to prepare and optimize your website for the search engines, like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the the art and skill of optimizing a website so the search engines can better understand what your company is all about. This SEO guide will help you understand where to start to optimize your web presence. 1

4 Understanding Google s Job Today our algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals, some of which you d expect, like how often the search terms occur on the webpage, if they appear in the title or whether synonyms of the search terms occur on the page. Google has invented many innovations in search to - works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. - Source, Google 2

5 Where to Start blue. The Basics: Page Title Best Practices: for. 3 Page titles are shown in Blue on Search Engines

6 PAGE DESCRIPTION While not technically part of Google s search engine metric, it is important to spend time on the page description. Writing a great page description is very similar to writing a great page title. It will only be shown on SERPs as black text for each link listed, and is important there as a sales tool.. The Basics: Not Writing a Page Description: one of their own. PAGE CONTENT. The More the Better: have to type the city they re in to look for services.the keen website owner will recognize these variations and write additional pages, blog posts and content on their site that targets these potential keywords. 4

7 PAGE CONTENT (cont.) Blog Postings: If you already have all of your service & speciality pages written, there isn t much need to add more pages - it s time to begin writing blog postings. A blog is like a diary for your business. Each blog posting should focus on a single topic, and it is a bonus if you can incorporate one or more of the search terms you re looking to target as well, while keeping the content naturally readable. Do s: Make your content original and compelling. Why would people want to read (and share) what you ve written? Are you showcasing a new technique or have special services or prices to offer? Dont s Writing for the search engine is a bad idea. Unnaturally repeating keywords 50 times will likely get your content banned from SERPs. We would also recommend checking your spelling & grammar. URL STRUCTURE If you have a website that allows you to easily log in and add, edit or delete content, chances are it s connected to a database. When a user clicks on a different page of your website, let s say your About Us page, it tells the browser to visit the database and grab all the text and images in the row marked About Us. This is particularly troublesome if your web developer doesn t use a better script to rewrite your URLs as SEO friendly. For example: BAD - GOOD - In reality, 47 is the database row that should be displayed, but it doesn t have to be listed like that in the URL. They are in fact the same page, but the second one looks a lot better for search engines and gives them another idea what is on that page. Imagine if you were a plastic surgeon in Denver. You have created a great website, but want to enhance it with better SEO. Let s look at the page devoted to nose jobs. BAD - GREAT - Without even looking at any of the content on that page Google already knows that ty (which is a similar search term). And even though they link to the same page, why not dress it up with a sharp looking, descriptive URL? 5

8 COPYRIGHT DATE - The Next Step - 6

9 CONNECT WITH GOOGLE One problem is that the spiders each search engine sends around don t have very good eyes. They can only read code, so if you have a photo on your website with the skyline of Atlanta overlayed by text that reads, Atlanta s Best Divorce Lawyers - the spiders cannot read that text, nor do they know it s the skyline of Atlanta. The spiders just know that it s an image. identify and categorize your images. <img src= alt= Atlanta Divorce Lawyer title= Divorce Attorney in Atlanta /> Alt Tag The best way to let search engines know what your photo is about is to use the alt tag. File Name If you have taken pictures with a digital camera and uploaded those images to your Before you upload these to your website, its important to change the default images to best-dentist-in-tampa.jpg. Title An image s title is what visitors to your website see if they hover their mouse over the image. It pops up in a yellow box. File Size When it comes to the world of web, the main unit of measurement are pixels. Pixels are tiny squares that hold display information. Put a billion pixels together with separate colors and you have your display screen! When you upload the amazing photos you took of your Hawaiian vacation from your digital camera, not only are they large visually, but also digitally. Photos taken by experience as it affects the load time of the page. 7

10 CONNECT WITH GOOGLE Connect with Google WEBMASTER TOOLS Using webmaster tools you will be able to submit a detailed map of all your website's pages, set a geographic target and preferred domain name, view if there are any errors when Google's robots crawl through your site, review search queries, what websites are linking to yours and which pages, suggested SEO improvements, keyword density reporting, and much more. We recommend keeping a relatively close eye on Google s Webmaster Tools to ensure that their robots aren t having any trouble combing through your website and monitor any other issues. ANALYTICS Google Analytics offers detailed reporting on your site s visitor statistics. This free tool offers a small bit of code to copy/paste into your website. Add it to every page that you want tracked (we recommend all of them) and wait for people to visit your site. With Analytics installed you ll be able to view where in the world visitors are coming from, what browsers and devices they are using, what pages they looked at and for how long. Analytics will be able to tell you if users typed in your website directly, used a search engine or clicked on a link from somewhere else. There are dozens of other stats you can track and custom reporting. No doubt we re huge fans of Google Analytics and use it for all of our clients, but how does it help with SEO? A website that does well in search engines is geared to well on where it should be placed in SERPs. visitor statistics. If your average on page time is 50 seconds, but you have one multiple pages. Or if the top search terms are variations on your company s name 8

11 A publication of fpg