Understanding and analyzing basics of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process to make different changes and improvements in website to get higher rank or more exposure in search engines results which will lead more and targeted audience traffic to your website and get you a large market reach. Search engines what exactly do is find the content on internet and shows the result which is relevant to the query which user was looking for. They perform this process in fraction of seconds based on many different factors. In this post we will discuss some basic factors one should keep in mind if you own or going to build a website.

Analyzing Keywords

Keywords are most important factor in SEO. These are the words which user type in search engine to search content. This can be a single word or multiple. To find right keywords for your website you must do a thorough analysis to see what people are searching that will lead them to your website. You have to do some research to find out the important keyword list which are relevant to your website content. You can start this by listing some important keywords that you think are important ask others what they think of if they search for the content like yours, check websites which you think you are competing and they have more exposure in search engines.

Title of the website

The title tag is short which describes the content of page so if it contains the keyword which search engine is looking for then it will be considered important and will be listed in search results. Title tag is written at top of the HTML code and appears in the browser's title bar. Search engine use title to know about the content of page and use it as link to your page. So to encourage people visit your page from the list of search results, title should contain a good keyword which they were looking for. Title should be different for every page and must contains the keyword related to the content of page. It should contain 60 to 70 characters more then that will not be shown in search results. Try to add important keywords to the start of title because they are weighted more then the end.

Description

The description tag is used to describe the webpage and written in the head tag of HTML code. This description will appear in search results after the URL of your page. This text encourages user that this page contains the content which they are looking for so you should write description with some important keywords making them title case that will catch the eye of user. Description should contain 70 to 160 characters more then this will be truncated in search results.

Keyword tags

Meta keywords are not very important for SEO because most of the search engines do not consider this tag for page rank so you can include it or exclude it from your web page it will not make any big difference. If you are opting to add this tag then it should be with in 155 relevant words and try not to spend much time on it.

Heading tags

Heading tags also known as SEO header tags and are very important factors for SEO. When search engine look at web page they will look for heading tags because it represent different sections of content. H1 tag have more importance then H6. Search engines pay attention to the content inside H1 tag because it contain basic information about the page content. Best practice is to use only one H1 tag and the use H2 or H3 tags for further headings to create well structured page which will make easy for spider robots to read the page.

Adding alt and title attributes to image tag

If you want your images to be listed in search engine results be sure to add a little description of image containing important keywords in alt attribute. Title attribute works as tool tip for image.

Google Analytics

Google analytics generates comprehensive site statistics for your website which monitors and analyze the traffic. Adding google analytics in your site does not effect your SEO directly but it can help you to monitor your SEO progress. The important data which google anlytics will give you is from where your visitors are coming from, how they found you, which browsers are they using and most importantly which keywords are they using.

SEO friendly URLs

SEO Friendly URLs refers to the URLs which contain different keywords which helps search engines to understand about the content of page and will consider that link in search results. Nowadays most websites are managed with CMS which lets you create URL with your own keywords the second option is using .htaccess which helps you create URLs with some basic knowledge.

Recommended: Creating SEO friendly URLs with PHP and SQL

Adding Sitemap

Adding sitmap to website is very important because this way you can tell search engines how many pages do you have and they can index all these pages easily. Sitemap can be created based on Sitemap protocol

Recommended: Creating XML sitemap with PHP and SQL and submitting to search engines

Adding website to web Directories

To increase your site rank the one step you can take is to add website to web directories. These directories maintain website by categorizing and sub categorizing them and create links to the websites. Well known directories are Yahoo Directory and DMOZ(Open Directory Project).

Recommended: Suggest website to DMOZ open directory project