blacK-9 Notes

Fundamental Techniques in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The first and most powerful step to developing effective SEO techniques is being informed. This guide draws upon Google Webmaster guidelines and related resources to highlight important SEO techniques and best practises.

Warming Up
How Authority is Measured
Developing SEO - Checklists
Things to Avoid
A Handful of Free Tools
Sources

Warming Up

Search engines attempt to rank pages based on authority. For example, Bob Dylan’s official homepage should be the most authoritative source on Bob Dylan. We can expect Bob Dylan’s homepage to contain the most accurate, complete and relevant information on Mr. Dylan.

An authoritative site is authoritative because it contains the most accurate information, and it has the legal authority to present copyrighted material. We can expect that a high authority site provides high quality content that is unique and helpful.

How Authority is Measured

Authority is the measure of a web site's importance in regard to a particular topic. A major search engine like Google can easily use over 200 factors to determine authority. Officially (at Google), almost all of the factors and their relative importance are kept confidential. However, one of the most important known factors is Pagerank. Google defines Pagerank as a “... measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.”

Developing SEO - Checklists

Files:

• The file "robots.txt" is accessible from your site at http://my-domain.com/robots.txt
• The file "robots.txt" contains useful information for web robots such as:
• The location of the file "Sitemap.xml"
• Folders and files that should not be crawled, such as auto-generated content and search results
• The file "Sitemap.xml" is accessible from your site at http://my-domain.com/Sitemap.xml
• "Sitemap.xml" should contain an xml based hierarchy of your web page, with valid links
• You have formally submitted your "Sitemap.xml" to major search engines
• You have static html files that contain mostly html
• CSS and Javascript should largely be contained in their own proper files (instead of being furiously mixed in with the html)
• You have done your best to keep file sizes as small as possible

Links:

• Every link on the site is in good working order
• Your site should be easy to navigate with a clear and well-organized hierarchy
• Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link
• Text links should be descriptive

Tags:

• Every page should contain an accurate <title> </title> tag
• Every page should contain an accurate <meta name="description" content="..."/> tag
• If you have pages with duplicate content, the preferred version is identified as the canonical version
• Header tags should be used organize the content of your site based on importance
• Every image should be labelled with a descriptive alt (alternate) tag

Things to Avoid

We recommend reading Google’s Search Engine Optimization Page to get an idea of what not to do. There are a lot of dirty tricks out there, and you don’t want to get caught because your authority will probably suffer.

• Google's SEO

A Handful of Free Tools

The internet is swamped with “Free SEO tools”. The following is a short collection of Google tools that let you perform powerful research on keywords, search trends and a whole lot more. Don’t forget to have fun and try to be creative with your research!

• Google Insight
• Google Trends
• Google Zeitgeist

Sources:

• Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
• Google-friendly sites
• Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
• Google’s Search Engine Optimization
• Google Basics