Eferi - Free SEO Guide

Free SEO Guide

Get Some Analytical Software

Well, first things first, you can't do any type of SEO without performance metrics so go here Google Analytics and apply for an invite. It could take a month or two to get, but I highly recommend it, it's a great way to see where traffic is coming from and what type of stickiness you are attaining. Stickiness is how long they are staying on your site. If they bounce into your site and are gone in a minute, you know your site sucks (to be frank).

Title Tag

The other things, the title tag is key what's between <title></title> can make or break a site. If you have Home Page you've just wasted a bunch of time that the search engines could have been picking you up.

Heading Tags

Next, <h1>, <h2>, <h3> are the best ways to organize your page. <h1> means it's the leading heading on your page. You should only have one set of <h1> tags per page. Example: <h1>My Target Keywords Used in a Sentence</h1>. Do not put other tags in between the h1 tags. NO! to <h1><strong>My Keywords</strong></h1>, you will lose search engine ranking. BACKLINKS ARE YOUR FRIEND. You can never have too many backlinks.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other external sites that link to you. The more backlinks, the more search engines trust your content. Trust is key to ranking well in search engines.

Going Table-less

Tables were originally written into the html specification to allow for the ease of display of tabular data. Ex:

	Col 1	Col 2
Row 1	Row 1/Col 1	Row1/Col2

However, when some lazy html programmer/designer decided that it would be far easier to use tables to layout content then it would be to properly designed a site, the table-layout revolution was born. You can tell a site that uses tables for it's layout by looking at the source code of the web page. Usually you will see <table>&lttd colspan="2"><table>... You get the picture. Anyways, what happens is that you get nested tables. Well that doesn't sound to bad in theory, the problem lays with Search Engine parsing engines. To determine relevent content, a search engine has to parse all these elements <table>, etc. and find the actual content. Trust me, it is a lot more difficult than in sounds, especially trying to keep track of some people's messes (if they can even be considered that). So for the sack of simplicity, minimize nested tables. The search engines will like you a lot better!

Site Structure

Create a site map that bears some semblance to a NORMAL persons brain of categorical sorting, ie. Don't throw all pages under the main directory (www.yoursite.com/index.htm, www.yoursite.com/page1.htm, www.yoursite.com/page2.htm). First off, these file names tell nothing of what's in your web page, and second, you have no idea what category they fall under. Before you start your web site, sit down with a good 'old piece of paper and sketch out what you want your site structure to look like. If it's too many zig zags and cross connects, crumple it up, and start over.

The End

I hope this mini-tutorial has helped you on your way to getting your site ranking well in the search engines. Michael Rice is available for SEO consulting by emailing: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

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