Smartideabox

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It covers all the means to climb on top of the search results.

I aim to make this post a general thread, we should regularly update it and work on that. It is so important because no matter how good your website is, if you don’t have visitors it’s nothing.

Let’s say it first, the only goal you have in SEO is being on the first page of google. Why? Because google handles 90% of the searches on internet, and because if a user doesn’t find what he wants on the first page of google, he will try different keywords rather than going on second page.

Domain

Your domain should feature your most important keyword.

Page titles

2nd most important part. They must feature the keywords and they will be the big blue link in google results.

Keywords

Appearing on first page of google isn’t necessarily hard. If you in invent a word like supacioulacitious and then buy supacioulacitious.com, you will most definitely end up first in google results for that keyword. Now try to appear on the first page for the keyword “SEO” and you will see that you face a whole new challenge.  It all depends on the keywords.

IMPORTANT: having your best keyword in your domain name is also crucial.

An easy way of going up is aiming for niches, where there is less competition. This can be a paying strategy. Keep in mind that the perfect keyword is a keyword that people often search for but doesn’t return many results. You can see your competitors by simply searching for keywords in google, but you cannot know how many people search for given keywords, unless you work for google. We need a spy there, an undercover smartideabox agent.

Title and description

Now, what to do when you have chosen your market and it’s keyword and you’re building the pages?

Make your pages look sexy in google search results.

In google results, the title of a result (the big blue link) is the html <title> tag, and the description that goes under it is the description <meta> tag. If you don’t have any description in your meta tags, then google will automatically extract the content of the first <p> it finds.

So make good titles and good descriptions for every page, keeping in mind that people will click on what you wrote.

Inbound links

That’s for people to click on your result, but making them appear on first page is a bit harder.

The MAIN parameter will be the number of pages that link to your site. This is interpreted by google as your online reputation. If your pages are often mentioned and linked to, you get a better page rank. If you have good content, people will automatically link to you, like they do for wikipedia. But you can also obtain those links, by different ways:

- Leave comments on blogs and reviews on sites like amazon, because there is a field where you can fill your web site’s address.

- Buy links. That’s simple. But don’t buy links to websites selling links, because if google recognize it, it will kill you. It’s better to ask websites that don’t do it usually to see if you can buy them anyway.

- Create many websites and link them to each other. But do it cleverly, because google also dislike link exchanges. You can for example have three sites, site n°1 link to site n°2, site n°2 link to site n°3 and site n°3 link to site n°1. Or you can have 10 websites, 9 of which link to the 10th, which would be the most important.

Be imaginative, just keep in mind that all you need are links. And google is really intelligent, so a link coming from a site that has a good page ranking will do more good to your own page ranking, and a link coming from a website that is about the same topic as your is also more valuable. It’s not really valuable having a link coming from a video game website if yours is about scuba diving.

Also, having good content can provide you with natural links. In this sense, a really strong identity through the logo, design, community can bring links.

Outbound links

Those are important too. Each time you link to a page, you share pagerank with it. UNLESS you add the rel=nofollow attribute to your link html tags. Also you should link to relevant pages.

Link Exchange

Intern links

Google Local

If your website is about a local business, think about registering it in google local business center . It will display on really top of google search results, next to a little map when people include a geographic name in their search.

Else

I will update this post, but in the meantime I encourage you to google for SEO and see for yourself what you can learn.