Learn SEO basics
To Learn SEO Basics really isn’t that hard!
If you want to learn SEO basics all you need to do is to right click on most web pages a drop down menu will appear with all the information your competitors are using.
Select ‘Source code’ or ‘Source’ and a screen will pop up that will look like a whole pile of gibberish. It isn’t gibberish to a search engine in fact quite the opposite. To a search engine a picture is gibberish whereas a picture to a human might require thousands of word to explain. So that becomes SEO 101:
SEO 101: Pictures speak to humans not search engines.
The next thing you need to learn about regarding your Source code is the important SEO basics:
- Near the top of the screen you will see a thing that looks like this: <head>. This really just tells the search engine where the important SEO bits start.
- Down a bit you will see some more code that looks like this: <title>
- Down further still something that looks like: <meta name=keywords
- A bit further down something that looks like: <meta name=description
So let’s put all that together and learn the SEO basics with a simple example. Imagine you go into business selling Pink Lady Apples (my personal favorite).
In a perfect world your web site would be called: www.pinkladyapples.com
When you open a web page at the top left of your computer screen there is a box. The box contains the web page’s URL which is the location of the page a bit like a Post Office box or street address for web pages. When done properly it should look like this:
http://www.pinkladyapples.com/pink-lady-apples
When a search engine like Google does a search it provides the user with a list of web sites the person might like to click on. Well the ’bold’ heading for each web site on the list is, you guessed that is your title (<title>. In our example a good title might read something like this:
<title> Pink Ladies Apples fresh daily. Enjoy a Pink lady apple.
Notice where I have ‘ladies’ …. read on and you will find out why I did that.
Our <meta name=keywords are the words you tell the search engine to look out for because when someone uses those words you want Google and friends (Yahoo / Bing etc) to let that person know about your web site. Good keywords are well researched and are vital. Get them wrong and you may never get found properly. So for our example I looked up the keywords and found the following top searched specific terms:
<meta name=keywords “pink lady apples / pink lady apple / apple pink lady / pink ladies apples”
Of the 4 phrases listed most people searched using: “Pink Ladies Apples”. That is why researching your keywords is vital. I doubt anyone has thought to add ‘pink ladies apples’ to their keywords. Yet the first one to do so will have all those searches to themselves. Apples is different to apple to a search engine so you may need both (something else to look out for).
Notice I did not use words like: apple or apples. I also didn’t try to be tricky and use phrases like: green apples or red apples. I didn’t have hundreds of keywords either. That stuff doesn’t work! Even if you do get a lot of traffic by using ‘green apples’ it is unlikely these poeple will want to buy Pink Lady Apples so be specific.
Next we have our <meta name=description which is the bit that people first read when Google does it search i.e. the non-bolded type under our ‘title’. So it has to get the person doing the search interested enough to click on your site. Use short, punchy sentences. The sentences have to attract the search engine and the human so don’t be overly concerned if the english used is not always perfectly expressed.
<meta name=description “Pink Ladies Apples are great eating. Fresh daily our Pink lady apples are delicious. A Pink Lady apple is best chilled. Of all apples Pink Lady are amoungst the finest eating apples in the world.”
Notice we have included as many keyword phrases in our description as possible more to assist the search engine than the human.
The final part of the jigsaw is the content on the page. The bit you and your visitors read. You need to include all of your keywords in the text on the page multiple times. A good rule of thumb is 3 – 4 times a page of 300 – 500 words. Remember I said having a huge list of vague terms was next to useless? If a search engine can’t find your keywords in the text on the page it assumes you have tried to trick it and there goes your rank. That’s why it is important to learn SEO basics as simple mistakes can really cost you in the rankings.
Which brings me right back to the top of the page: Pictures are gibberish to a search engine! Do your keywords match your text? Does your domain name, title, keywords, description and page text all match? Sadly for most people the answer is no so the ROI (return on investment) most site owners get is $0.00.
The good news is if you learn SEO basics you can easily look at leaving the sheep behind!
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