The A - Z guide to SEO - All you need to know about search engines and how to get your website to the top of them ... in an alphabet!
(hint: If you need to know the meaning of any word in this web page just double click it!)
A is for ALT tags, make sure you give all the images on your website a text description so that search engines and visually impaired people know what they are. The W3C has some good guidelines which tell you all about marking up your HTML.
B is for BE CAREFUL, trying to cheat or 'spam' the search engines will not pay off in the long run (probably!)
C is for CONTENT, good content is the foundation of SEO, write for your visitors, not the search engines and you'll see better long term results
D is for DRIVE TRAFFIC, once you have great content that people will link to, go tell the world about it on bookmarking sites, PR sites etc. Stumble upon is a great way to drive loads of traffic to your website relatively cheaply
E is for EVENTS, attending events such as the search engine strategies conferences in person or
visiting their websites and downloading what you can can give you a lot of good advice and is definitely worth the trip over the pond at least once a year
F is for FORUM, encourage visitors to have their say and in the process gain loads of user generated content that can be spidered by the search engines. PHPBB is an open source forum which can be simply customised to integrate with your website.
G is for GOOGLE, over 70% of UK searchers use it so this is the search engine you should really be focusing on if you want to increase your web traffic, it has some great webmaster guidelines too
H is for HEADING TAGS, use etc to break up your sites content and tell the search engines which are the important words in your text. Click here to find out more about how to use these tags
I is for Index, this is where the search engines put your pages when they have crawled them, any pages not in the index used to be included in the supplemental results or 'Google hell' as it was known until a week ago. Matt Cutts tells you all about it in his video
J is for JUMP LINKS, although a little bit outdated, they can still be used to good effect for usability and telling the search engines about the important parts
K is for KEYWORDS, finding the words that people type into the search engines to find your product or service is THE most important thing in SEO, after all, what's the point of spending 3 months optimising for 'sneakers' when everyone in the UK types in 'trainers'. Research can be done using a number of tools, an excellent one is wordtracker
L is for LINKS, the more links you have from other websites, the more successful you will be, it's probably THE most important aspect of SEO. Refer to B however when trying to obtain them!
M is for META DATA, This is the data that goes into the head area of your web page, your visitors don't see it but the search engines do and you can tell them a lot about your site by using it properly.
N is for NEW CONTENT, fresh content makes your site more relevant to users and also provides more pages for search engines to show to users
O is for OLD CONTENT, old content should be changed or deleted very cautiously as Google tends to favour older sites and send more traffic to them
P is for PAGERANK, Googles (blunt) measurement of how much it 'trusts' a particular webpage. Download it here
Q is for QUALITY LINKS, a few very good quality links from other websites can give you far more traffic and trust than lots of links from low quality / irrelevant sites
R is for ROBOTS.TXT, this is a small text file that sits on your server, search engines read this to see which pages you want them to index and which ones you don't, make sure you haven't mistakenly barred any of your pages using Google's webmaster tools or find out more about robots.txt here
S is for SPIDERS, these are the little programmes that 'crawl' around the Internet all day looking for new and updated web pages, make sure they can read your website content properly by using the poodle predictor
T is for TITLE, The title's of your web pages should all be different and explain the actual content of that page to help both visitors and search engines
U is for URL, your URL's say a lot about your websites content so make sure they're not useless strings of database fields like 'www.example.com/2333?34jherj3i3e=333endd.aspx' Give the fields a name that is related to the content on the page and your visitors and search engines will appreciated. There's a useful URL re-writing tool here
V is for VERTICAL SEARCH, which is focused on a specific niche interest or topic on the Internet. You can optimise your site to these niches to attract more targeted visitors
W is for WIDGETS, investing a little bit of time in building a successful widget can pay dividends if people start to use it and link back to your site. Learn all about them here
X is for XML, content in an XML format can be distributed and published throughout the web to give you a larger presence
Y is for YAHOO SITE EXPLORER, a great way to keep track of the number of people linking to your website.
Z is for zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, if you've read this far, you're probably dropping off to sleep by now (okay, I cheated a little on that one - just couldn't think of anything to do with SEO beginning with Z)
A is for ALT tags, make sure you give all the images on your website a text description so that search engines and visually impaired people know what they are. The W3C has some good guidelines which tell you all about marking up your HTML.
B is for BE CAREFUL, trying to cheat or 'spam' the search engines will not pay off in the long run (probably!)
C is for CONTENT, good content is the foundation of SEO, write for your visitors, not the search engines and you'll see better long term results
D is for DRIVE TRAFFIC, once you have great content that people will link to, go tell the world about it on bookmarking sites, PR sites etc. Stumble upon is a great way to drive loads of traffic to your website relatively cheaply
E is for EVENTS, attending events such as the search engine strategies conferences in person or
visiting their websites and downloading what you can can give you a lot of good advice and is definitely worth the trip over the pond at least once a year
F is for FORUM, encourage visitors to have their say and in the process gain loads of user generated content that can be spidered by the search engines. PHPBB is an open source forum which can be simply customised to integrate with your website.
G is for GOOGLE, over 70% of UK searchers use it so this is the search engine you should really be focusing on if you want to increase your web traffic, it has some great webmaster guidelines too
H is for HEADING TAGS, use
I is for Index, this is where the search engines put your pages when they have crawled them, any pages not in the index used to be included in the supplemental results or 'Google hell' as it was known until a week ago. Matt Cutts tells you all about it in his video
J is for JUMP LINKS, although a little bit outdated, they can still be used to good effect for usability and telling the search engines about the important parts
K is for KEYWORDS, finding the words that people type into the search engines to find your product or service is THE most important thing in SEO, after all, what's the point of spending 3 months optimising for 'sneakers' when everyone in the UK types in 'trainers'. Research can be done using a number of tools, an excellent one is wordtracker
L is for LINKS, the more links you have from other websites, the more successful you will be, it's probably THE most important aspect of SEO. Refer to B however when trying to obtain them!
M is for META DATA, This is the data that goes into the head area of your web page, your visitors don't see it but the search engines do and you can tell them a lot about your site by using it properly.
N is for NEW CONTENT, fresh content makes your site more relevant to users and also provides more pages for search engines to show to users
O is for OLD CONTENT, old content should be changed or deleted very cautiously as Google tends to favour older sites and send more traffic to them
P is for PAGERANK, Googles (blunt) measurement of how much it 'trusts' a particular webpage. Download it here
Q is for QUALITY LINKS, a few very good quality links from other websites can give you far more traffic and trust than lots of links from low quality / irrelevant sites
R is for ROBOTS.TXT, this is a small text file that sits on your server, search engines read this to see which pages you want them to index and which ones you don't, make sure you haven't mistakenly barred any of your pages using Google's webmaster tools or find out more about robots.txt here
S is for SPIDERS, these are the little programmes that 'crawl' around the Internet all day looking for new and updated web pages, make sure they can read your website content properly by using the poodle predictor
T is for TITLE, The title's of your web pages should all be different and explain the actual content of that page to help both visitors and search engines
U is for URL, your URL's say a lot about your websites content so make sure they're not useless strings of database fields like 'www.example.com/2333?34jherj3i3e=333endd.aspx' Give the fields a name that is related to the content on the page and your visitors and search engines will appreciated. There's a useful URL re-writing tool here
V is for VERTICAL SEARCH, which is focused on a specific niche interest or topic on the Internet. You can optimise your site to these niches to attract more targeted visitors
W is for WIDGETS, investing a little bit of time in building a successful widget can pay dividends if people start to use it and link back to your site. Learn all about them here
X is for XML, content in an XML format can be distributed and published throughout the web to give you a larger presence
Y is for YAHOO SITE EXPLORER, a great way to keep track of the number of people linking to your website.
Z is for zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, if you've read this far, you're probably dropping off to sleep by now (okay, I cheated a little on that one - just couldn't think of anything to do with SEO beginning with Z)
posted by Duncan Bloor at
2:32 PM
1 Comments
