Scoop Bucket

If you are new to search engine optimization then you will need a reliable source of information to get you on your path to top 10 natural Google rankings. I personally have 15 years of experience in the seo/sem industry and am writing this basic tutorial to fill the void.

First things first ….Meta Tags

You will come across a good number of seo professionals who will tell you that meta tags are no longer relevant. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live no longer rely on meta tags to determine your ranking. The fact is that meta tags DO matter. Here’s how.

Meta tags used to be something that you could abuse. You could own a website with adult content on it but place meta tags that told search engines the website was about fashion. Your website would then show up in search results displaying the information about fashion that you placed in the meta tags, and when you visited the website you would get an eyeful of naked women that were not wearing anything, nevermind something fashionable.

Search engines caught on and closed that loophole. But they did not rid meta tags from their algorithms completely. If a website lacks meta tags (keywords, and descriptions) then it get hits with negative points. How many negative points only the search engine knows. If you DO have meta tags, then the search engine will scan them and determine whether or not they match the page content. If they do not match the page content then you lose more points than you would have had you not used meta tags at all. If they do match then you get plus points in the algorithm.

I cannot tell you how I know this, but I can tell you that you can experiment with this if you want and find out that I am right. My recommendation is to use meta tags and make sure they match the content on the pages as best they can. If you have a dynamic site like a blog then you can find excellent plugins that will add/edit the meta tags automatically to match page content.

Anchor Text

Anchor text has nothing to do with boats. Anchor text is the keywords that you see that are hotlinked to another page. Lets say you have a navigation. Your navigation has “Home, About Us, Contact Us, seo Services, link Building” and each of them are linked to a page. The words About Us are anchor text. When you have a website with products for clothing you will want anchor text that says “women’s clothing, plus sized clothing, mens clothing, biker shorts, summer wear”.

Anchor text linking tells the search engine what it is about to find by following that link. If the page content on that following page matches that anchor text then you are in the clear. If it doesn’t match then it doesn’t look good for your seo efforts.

Page Naming

Using the above anchor text information, the next item is page naming. When you link an anchor text such as “seo services” you want it to go to a page named “seo-services.html” or a similar variation. This basically nails the coffin shut in regards to anchoring. The keyword you are targeting is not only in the link, but the actual url that the end-user ends up on. All that’s left is for the content on that page to display text about seo services.

link Building

link building is important because you want to tell Google that your website is popular enough that other webmasters wanted to link to it. An outbound link can end up being bad for the website that linked to you if your website content was not related to the anchor text that linked to you. It is like recommending an employee to your boss who hires him, and he turns around and craps on the bosses desk while he was sitting there eating lunch.

One of the methods used for link building is to submit your site to directories in the proper categories related to your website. You want to find directories that do not require a reciprocal link. It is generally not a good idea to link to a directory, unless your website is about directories. You can also find many directories that do not require a submission fee. Allot of the time, directories that charge a fee never survive so your link will end up being lost in the future anyways. Directories like DMOZ do not charge a fee, and in fact if they find editors trying to make money for adding a link, that editor will be banned from editing at DMOZ.

You can write articles related to the website you are working with. Let’s say you have a website for an event planner. You can write articles about planning the perfect wedding, or managing costs at large corporate events. You can then submit your article to free article publishing sites on the net. Your article will be published and often republished by other webmasters along with the required link back to your website. This will help you generate traffic and inbound links at the same time. It also builds your PageRank.

You can take part in blogs and forums while placing your URL in your signature. This will make it so that when you post a comment or thread, your url will automatically be posted. If anyone wants to learn more about you they can click the link and visit your website. Allot of the time these types of sites use the “nofollow” attribute so it does not benefit your inbound links or PageRank. But it is still worth the brand recognition and potential traffic from direct clicks.

Outbound Links and rel=”nofollow”

When linking to a site that you do not want to associate with on a technical level with Google you can use the rel=”nofollow” attribute at the end of your link code before the ending brackets. This will tell Google that you do not approve of the website and do not want it to bleed your PageRank to this website.

It is best to use this feature when linking to general websites. If you are doing reciprocal linking then you DO NOT want to use the “nofollow” attribute because it is plain rude and will only make the other webmaster to take your link off of his website. The biggest purpose of link trading is to get a link back that counts, so nofollow basically removes that purpose.

Dynamic URL’s and Sessions

Dynamic urls are those ugly urls you see on your browser where you type the http://www. and it often looks like a ? and a random string of numbers, letters, and other charactors. This is bad for seo, and you basically want to read above under the subtitle “Page Naming”. The dynamic urls do not provide keyword page naming. Depending on what script you are using for your website there may be a mod, plugin, or some other feature to allow for “search engine friendly url’s”. If not, then you will need to hire a web developer to handle that for you. It can often be done in Apache using the mod_rewrite feature.

Blogs and Fresh Content

Blogs are an important feature in your seo/sem campaign. A blog will allow you to post content regularly without touching a single link of html code. I often come across clients who want a website using the WordPress platform as a CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is very good for search engine optimization and it is the platform I use for this very blog you are reading now!

Your blog does not have to have the standard ugly design. You can create a custom theme that matches the design of your website, or you can download many free themes available under the extend section of the WordPress website as well as other websites offering free WordPress themes.

Social Media / Social Networks

Social networks are an obvious outlet for publicity. Go where the people are. You can utilize Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Tagged, Hi5, and many other social networks out there to generate traffic to your website. My WordPress blog uses a plugin that automatically posts to Twitter the blog post title and a link to read the article when I post a new article here. It will happen immediately after I hit the publish button when I am done writing this article. If you noticed, I also have a graphic in the lefthand side of this blog that when you mouseover displays multiple social networks and rss syndication sites you can repost this article to, or a link to it. I also have a little Digg icon at the end of this article. Check below. I invite you to utilize that Digg button .

This article is not meant to replace an seo professional, but it will get you started whether you are the DIY type or you just want to know what your seo is or isn’t doing. Good luck and thanks for reading this article.