SEO Training, Tools And Tips: Everything What You Need To Know For Get Search Engine Success
Everyone loves a good tip, right? In this post of search engine optimization training I'm sharing the sticky facts and everything about SEO that would help you always and be your pillar in SEO, here are 46 SEO tips and introduction about search engine optimization basics that can be useful for you on every stage of your job, Further I will write and post articles about all below topics with long discussions in the next chapters of this SEO guide.
Note: You can find all topics sort wise A to Z:
Aged Domains – An aged domain is a domain that has been in indexed by Google at least two or more years ago and it’s a critical component of any successful SEO campaign. Google penalizes new domain names, making it very difficult to rank any keywords at the #1 position or even on the first page of search results for that matter in the beginning. Purchasing or having an aged domain will be one of the critical factors in your success for ranking a site high for any given keyword.
ALT tags – Also known as alternative tags, these are the tags that appear within the HTML <img> tags that present the alternate data to the search engines to provide a description of what the image is. For optimal search engine rankings you should have at least one image ALT tag that correlates with your site or page’s primary keyword.
Backlinking – Likely to be your biggest undertaking when it comes to SEO, backlinking is the effort involved with creating hyperlinks that link back to your Website. There are several rules involved in backlinking that are covered within the content of this book in part of Off-Site SEO.
Black-Hat SEO – Black-Hat SEO is a term used to describe a SEO tactics that are not compliant with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Black-Hat SEO techniques are frowned upon by the search engine industry. Examples of Black-Hat SEO techniques are trying to hide keywords within HTML comment tags or trying to cloak pages.
Breadcrumb – A navigational aid used on Websites, breadcrumbs not only allow users to quickly jump through informational sections on the site, they also provide high SEO value by allowing the search engine spiders access to quickly navigate and spider through a site, indexing data faster and more efficiently.
Cloaking – This is a technique that delivers different content to the search engine spiders then it does to real human visitors. The cloaking technique is oftentimes used to mask the real content or change the real content of a page and make it appear differently to a search engine spider. This is considered a Black-Hat SEO technique and while it is sometimes used for legitimate purposes, it is oftentimes used to display pornographic material to real human visitors while only displaying non- pornographic material to a search engine spider.
CPC – Cost-per-click, or CPC, is a term used in online paid advertising to indicate click through percentages. The cost per click is calculated by diving the number of clicks with the total amount spent on the advertisement. For example, if you spent $100 on an ad and 200 clicks was received; the CPC would be $0.50 cents.
CSS – Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS, is a style sheet presentation markup language that is used to position elements, layouts, colors, fonts, images, and construct a Web page on the whole. While CSS is used primarily in styling HTML Web pages, it is also used to style XML and other documents.
Dofollow Links – Dofollow links are an attribute associated with an HTML hyperlink that tell a search engine to continue to link through to the site, disseminating some of the site’s important link juice. These are very powerful types of links that work well when pointed to your site or to a link pyramid that leads to your site. When a search engine sees a Dofollow link they continue linking through to the site, passing part of the SEO link juice that would have been offered to that page had the link been a Nofollow link.
Duplicate Content – In the search engine world, content is king, but duplicate content is the court jester. Copying large chunks of content to your site is one of the biggest no-no’s in the industry. The search engines will figure it out sooner or later and you will be demoted in the rankings. If you’re going to do SEO right, make sure all the content is high-quality and unique content that’s well researched.
Headings – HTML headings are blocks of code that are placed around certain words, styling and providing a certain level of prominence in the overall page structure. Heading tags range from <h1> through <h6>, however, in the modern SEO world the first three hold the most importance. Tags <h1> through <h3> should all contain the primary keyword spaced throughout the page with the <h1> and <h2> tags being above the Website fold.
Internal Link – Internal links are links from your page’s content to another page or section on the same domain. Internal links are important when it comes to On- Site SEO.
Keyword – A keyword is a word or phrase that is used to optimize a Website or Webpage. Selecting keywords is one of the most important tasks in SEO work and selecting the right keywords in the outset can either make or break you. It’s important to note that the keyword “Miami vacation” and “vacation Miami” will produce different search results, so the order and positioning of the words within the phrase is just as important.
Keyword Density – The keyword density is the number of times a keyword appears on a page in relation to the total number of words. Optimal keyword density ranges from 2% to 5% with anything considerably over 5% being construed as SPAM and anything considerably lower then 2% being construed as not keyword rich enough and thus less relevant. It’s important when writing your content that your primary keyword is evenly distributed throughout the page, making sure that it appears in the first and last sentence of the content as well as evenly spaced throughout the balance of the words.
Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing is the over usage of a keyword in content or meta keyword tags, something that used to be popular many years ago, but is now frowned upon as a Black-Hat SEO technique. Keyword stuffing is achieved in various different ways which include placing the phrase multiple times within the Meta tags while combined with other words in different combinations, applying the same color to the keywords as the background making them invisible, using the <noscript> tag, and using CSS z- positioning. All of these practices will get you demoted and sometimes de- indexed by search engines like Google.
Long Tail Keyword – A long tail keyword is a keyword that has a minimum of at least 3 words and any maximum number of words. Long tail keywords are used by marketers trying to target a specific niche, question or topic, which produce near similar results to a broader search term of lessor keywords but may have higher competition. Long tail keywords are a great way to rank at the top of search engine results for terms that may otherwise be more difficult to rank for.
Link Bait – Link Bait refers to content that is created in order to garner as many links to it as possible. Since backlinks are one of the primary drivers of SERP positioning, many SEO efforts include the creation of content with the primary goal to get as many links back to that content as possible.
Link Farm – A link farm is a group of sites that all hyperlink to one another, back and forth in an oscillating fashion. While link farms used to be advantageous, they don’t have large relevancy today since the two-way links make it confusing for search engines to determine which site is the vendor and which is the promoting site.
Link Juice – This is the SEO linking power of a page and usually refers to the combined sum of the link power of all the pages linking into it. You’ll hear the term link juice referenced when quantifying the power of a certain link or a page that those links lead to.
Link Pyramid – A Link Pyramid is a very powerful form of Off-Site SEO backlinking that involves the creation of a linking structure that is extremely powerful. Think of the strength in physical form that a real pyramid has and how the transference of force is physically supported by the structure itself and how that has stood the test of time. Link Pyramids generally have three tiers: a bottom tier with low level links,
a middle with medium level links, and a top level with high level EDU, GOV or other authority links. The bottom links link to the middle, the middle links link to the top, and the top links link to your site.
Link Sculpting – When you implement attributes to links to affect their behavior in how search engines interpret them, you’re engaging in link sculpting. The most common form of link sculpting is using the Nofollow or Dofollow link sculpting forms. The Nofollow links tell a search engine not to follow a link, thus leaving the link juice on the page, while a Dofollow link tells a search engine to continue on to follow that link thus disseminating the link juice to the next page.
Link Wheel – A Link Wheel is a form of linking that links one site to another while also linking back to your site as well. The links flow in a sort of wheel format with the spokes being links back to your site in the center. When done correctly, a link wheel can be a powerful form of SEO boost for your Website and the most effective forms of link wheels are organically fashioned ones that utilize social media platforms as their linking mediums.
Meta Keywords – Meta keywords are part of a set of Meta Tags that appear in the header of Websites. Meta keywords used to be prominently used in search engine rankings but have no interpreted value of importance today. Instead of using meta keywords, search algorithms now use other tags such as heading tags, site content, keyword density and backlinking keywords to determine search engine rankings.
Meta Description – The meta description tag is one of the meta tags that are still used by search engines to display search results. This along with the title tag is used to display the name and description of the link on SERPs to the user searching for information.
Nofollow Links – Search engines spider the Web looking for information and in turn ranking the relevance of sites in its indexes. Nofollow links are an HTML attribute associated with hyper links that tell a search engine to not follow the link, stopping the search engine’s traffic at that page, almost like a dead end. Nofollow links are optimal when it comes to making sure that your own page is optimized to the highest level possible by not allowing the link juice to pass through it.
Off-Site SEO – Off-Site SEO are the methods and practices of performing SEO work that happen away from the site itself. Off-Site SEO mainly involves the use of heavy backlinking, social media shares, authority site content creation (i.e. squidoo.com, youtube.com, etc.), article spinning, and so on. Off- Site SEO is a very labor-intensive part of the SEO trade and I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to it to help you efficiently tackle it without wasting your efforts and making mistakes.
On-site SEO – Any work that is done on the Website to increase the effectiveness of its SEO is considered On-Site SEO. This includes any HTML work, content creation, internal linking, setup, keyword distribution, and other related efforts.
Page Title – The HTML page title is the descriptive site title detail that resides within the page’s <title> tags. This information is displayed by the search engines and is used in ranking the site on the SERPs. A good page title tag should be descriptive but not superfluous and should accomplish its goal in around 70 characters (the cut off point for most SERPs) with the use of the primary keyword.
Pinging – Pinging is a technique that notifies the search engines to go out and seek data from a URL. This is required because a lot of the link building that is done happens on low, or no page rank sites that do not get visited often or at all by the search engines. When a search engine is pinged to go out and index a URL you can be certain that the hyperlink to your site or to another link in a link pyramid that’s pointing to your site, will be found and indexed.
Panda Update – The Google Panda is a change in the algorithm for Google’s search results that was released in February of 2011. The effects of Panda were to demote low quality sites and promote sites with high quality well researched information. The effects of this release were widespread, making huge shifts in positioning on SERPs forcing some businesses to lose large volumes of search traffic while others were able to gain it.
Page Rank – One of the most important descriptors of a Web page, the page rank is a Web page’s rank in relevancy on the Internet, ranging from 0 to 10. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s home page achieve Page ranks of 9 and 10, while lower trafficked sites have lesser page ranks.
Penguin Update – The Google Penguin was one of the latest major updates released to Google’s algorithm on April 24th, 2012, that began to demote visibility of listings on SERPs that violated Google’s Webmaster guidelines and employed Black-Hat SEO tactics such as cloaking, keyword stuffing, and the creation of duplicate content.
PPC - Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is a form of paid search engine advertising that marketers use to get their message out to the masses on a large scale very quickly. PPC ads show up on the right side of SERPs and are now also being implemented on Facebook, YouTube videos, and more recently on sites like Twitter.
PPV – Pay per view ads, or PPV, is a type of advertising that is utilized by marketers to distribute ads to a user base that has expressly agreed to receive those ads. An example of this is free software downloads or online services such as Pandora that use PPV ads to display advertisements on a periodic basis while providing a free service.
Referrer String – Referrer strings are used in affiliate and Web marketing to pinpoint campaigns and where a lead or referral came from. This is important to some marketers running paid advertisements to be able to gauge the successes of their various efforts throughout the Web. Web programming dictates that after the Web page name, a question mark can indicate the start of any variables that may be appended to a URL, thus resulting in a Referrer String.
Robots.txt – This is a file that resides in the root directory of your Website, that provides instructions to search engines on any folders, or files that it shouldn’t index. Most people don’t want search engines seeing all files on their sites such as administration files, or other files that contain sensitive information.
RSS Feed – A Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed is a standardized format that allows for the automatic update and syndication of content on sites that have frequent changes and entries such as blogs and other news sites. The RSS feed format provides a standard in formatting that allows ease of redistribution of either full or summarized data, metadata and publishing information.
Sandbox – Google Sandbox Effect is an effect that happens when a newly formed domain name’s link juice is not fully weighted due to filtering from Google in order to prevent SPAMMERS from reaching the first page in SERPs by registering multiple domain names quickly and actively promoting them.
Search Algorithm – A formula devised by brilliant minds that weighs and takes multiple factors into account when reaching a determination for search result page ranking. The Google search algorithm combines many factors including the aged domain factor, Website link popularity, On-Site SEO elements, and Off-Site SEO elements. No one outside of Google knows the exact current algorithm and the total weight of each of the factors that are taken into account or precisely how they impact search results but there are very good guidelines available.
SEM – SEM is the business of search engine marketing, the industry that search engine optimization specialists fall under. SEM is used to refer to not only SEO efforts but also paid search engine marketing efforts as well.
SERP – Search Engine Ranking Pages, also known as SERPs, are the end listing results pages of queries to search engines. SERPs will generally include a title and brief description of each listing related to the keywords searched along with a link to that content. In SEO the goal is to dominate the first page of SERPs.
Sitemap – A sitemap is a page that’s created to aid browsers in crawling a site. A sitemap provides a hierarchical link structure of pages on a Website that are accessible and permissible to be crawled.
Social Media – Social media is a term that refers to the types of sites that have increased in popularity in the past several years that base themselves on end user interactions in a social and collaborative format. Examples of such popular sites are Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter.
Spider – A Spider is a Web-robot that’s instructed to go out and crawl the Internet for data used for the purposes of Website indexing and rankings. Google has multiple spiders that it sends out, some that are dedicated to deep-indexing the Web, others for more periodic updates to Web content, and even others for algorithm adjustments such as the Google Panda and Google Penguin.
Website Fold – The Website fold is the section of the Website that is viewable to the natural eye prior to getting cut off by the browser and forcing a user to scroll. The Website fold will vary from screen resolution to screen resolution, however it’s typically 600 to 850 pixels down from the top of the browser.
White-Hat SEO – White-Hat SEO techniques are those that follow the rules and standards of the SEO world and also adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. White-Hat SEO techniques, while more time intensive, offer the largest long-term gains for your Website’s ranking on SERPs. These techniques include quality content creation, proper On-Site SEO configuration, and organically looking Off-Site SEO linking.
Kamran Khursheed, Founder and Author of GoogleWebTech, He specializes in on-page, off-page SEO, inbound marketing and link-based content marketing with a five-year track record of driving qualified leads and traffic to websites. Now he is a full-time blogger who loves to explore blogging. He has a passion for helping newcomer bloggers make their blog noticeable and money making.
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