Steps involved in SEO
This is a widely asked question. What are the steps involved in SEO for a website. What a website owner has to do or should get done while doing SEO or Search Engine Optimization of his/her website? Here are a few answers.
On Page Optimization – It is directly related to the content of the website.
1) Content: Content is the king for a website, as they say. Content has to be fresh, original and interesting which can make users staying on a page to read more and more and explore the website. A stolen or duplicate(typical copy paste) or repeating words and phrases in content do not count for the quality content. It has to be :- original, interesting, user friendly, short and brief. A well-written site means a well-ranked site.
2) Structure and Design : The navigation, structure and design of website should be appealing, easy and user friendly. To avail full advantage of SEO while creating a website you must be taking advantage of structural elements such as page-titles, meta-tags, file-names, heading-tags and other tags. It provides huge benefits in terms of search engine rankings. The search engines read your site to see if you’ve used those elements (and how well you’ve used them). Your resulting index rank will depend on whether you’ve taken the best advantage of these built-in optimization opportunities.
Linking pages – While user going through a page or post, related which related closly to current page or post must be on the very page having good anchor based text links so user keeps on with reading on your website content. The way your site is built plays a large role in your online success.
3) Keyword Optimization : You should have some specific keywords which you use to target users to visit your website. Google Adword tool is an ideal way to monitor keyword searches and number of searches. By analysing these targetted searches you could develop content by targeting those keywords in the content and meta tags.
4) Meta Tags : The title of website and description are shown in search engine pages. You should write good title and description for each page to get quality traffic from search engines like Google. You must ensure to optimize header tags and page content accordingly.
5) Social Media : The social media is an important factor nowadays to get more traffic or users to your website. Ensure that users can recommend and like your site and site links on social media plateform like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. You should have social media icons closer to the content of each post and near header or footer for your main page.
Off Page Optimization – It’s about getting recognition from search engines like Google by supplying links to other websites from your website and vice-versa.
1) Link from related sites and domains : Look for simililar or related websites, directories and news releases which has similar content or theme to that of your website. Do some research and development and prepare a list of such websites. Link building is an off-page factor which deals in providing relevant content links to your website from popular, content-rich web sites, which are related to or are of the same theme as your website. This is an integral part of the SEO process and accounts for about approx. 70% weightage in achieving top search engine rankings if blended suitably with other “on-page” factors such as content optimization, Meta tag optimization etc.
2) Link from Forums and Blogs : Do participate by sharing your knowledge in relevant forums and blog post comments related to the content of your website.
3) Write Blog Posts : You can request other site owners having guest blog facility to write a blog for them so as to share the content and knowledge. In return, you can get a dofollow link.
4) Social Media : Create a social page for your website at Facebook, Twitter. Attract users by posting new and fresh content to social media pages or your website.
5) Submit your website to to Major Search Engines and Directories.
6) Linking with Most Relevant Page : Ensure that where ever you get an opportunity to link from external domain. You should get link to the most relevant page of your site which matches the content of external domain with the keyword friendly anchor text.
Valid Code and Correct Coding
1) Improved Coding
Make sure that (X)HTML of your website is validated by W3C. Also your CSS should have been validated by W3C. You must avoid the use of ‘meta-refresh’ tag to forward to another page. Also, at least 20% of the code on your page should be text which the user can read. The keyword being searched should be in the readable text of your page to a density of between 3 and 6%.
2) Helpful Coding
You must include the “alt” attribute in image tag (<img>) with a helpful phrase value which might help to explain the image. Each image used in your website should be below 50kb so the page loads quickly. The H1, H2, etc tags should be used correctly for page titles or headings. The images should have width and height attributes so the page contents won’t distort if they fail to load. Menus and navigation should not be controlled by javascript or flash which search engines find hard to follow.
There are a few very useful website providing information on SEO:
http://howtoseo.link2light.com/
http://howtoseo.link2light.com/how-to-seo-your-website.php
http://www.updater.in/seo/steps-involved-in-seo-tips-to-optimize-website-to-rank-high-in-search
http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
http://www.aheadoftheweb.com/articles/what-is-involved-in-search-engine-optimization.htm
