Beginners SEO Guide

 

Everybody searches something on Google or a different search engine almost every day. Let’s say you go to Google and search for a particular word or a phrase. Google gives you a list of results and you open the first or may be the second result in the list. We barely go to the second page on Google result lists because the results on the first page are always reliable and informative. A website that appears on the first search result page has a good ranking and visibility for a specific keyword. There are various tools and methods through which one can improve one’s website’s visibility and ranking. The process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website in a Search engine is called as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Depending on how frequently a website appears in the search results of a search engine, it receives more and more visitors from that particular search engine’s users.

SEO Tools For Beginners

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10 Lessons About Enterprise SEO

I have been fortunate in my 3 year SEO career to work with a huge number of companies and I have seen many different implementations of an "SEO campaign." I've seen what works and what doesn't, especially at the enterprise level.
What follows are 10 lessons that I have learned over the years so that you might know what to watch out for as you run or manage your own SEO campaign. Hopefully you find the information valuable!

Lesson #1 - Don't Ignore SEO Recommendations

Put another way, SEO recommendations need to be given their proper prioritization within the list of everything else your IT team is trying to accomplish for your website.
It's important to recognize that most IT teams don't have much visibility into analytics and don't see how much traffic (and ultimately revenue) is created through organic search. Be sure to share this information with them along with the potential opportunity that search could bring to the site if it was better optimized. After all, the name of the game in this economy is revenue and you can't make any if you don't have customers.

Deployment of an SEO checklist

The following is a basic list of SEO items to check in every deployment. Use it as a guide to what to look for in each deployment, and feel free to customize based on your specific needs.

 On Site

• Page titles exist and are correct
• H1s exist and are correct
• Meta descriptions exist and are correct
• Alt text is targeted
• Content exists and is correct
• Correct version of site is being shown to search engines (if you do that sort of thing)
• Accessibility
• Meta Robots are correct
• Robots.txt file is correct

Identify rel=”nofollow” Links without Viewing the HTML Source Code

One of the most important skills an advanced SEO must possess is the ability to analyze and understand the link structure of a given web page or website. This skill can be applied to many different SEO-related topics, such as information architecture, link building, and the mysterious practice of PageRank sculpting. Even “content is king” advocates rely on links to deliver traffic, increase rankings, and to make their content discoverable to search engine crawlers.
Anyone who’s serious about SEO needs to be able to easily identify links that (a) cannot be crawled, or (b) cannot flow PageRank. Two common examples of this are:

• links that include the rel="nofollow" attribute
• links that are embedded in a page via inline frames (i.e. <iframe> elements)

In this article, I will show you how I have customized my web browser (Firefox 3.5) to help me identify nofollowed links and iframes, without viewing a page’s HTML source code. If you don’t use Firefox, you can still benefit from the CSS examples in this post, but you will have to figure out how to add custom user-defined CSS styles to your browser. If you’re using Internet Explorer, just kill yourself.

Google Penguin Update 3 Released, Impacts 0.3% Of English-Language Queries

Google’s Matt Cutts used Twitter this afternoon to announce that Google is launching the latest “data refresh” of its Penguin spam-fighting algorithm today and that it will affect searches across multiple languages

Including the original Penguin algorithm launch in late April, this is the third update, so we’re calling it Penguin 3 and avoiding the previous 1.1, 1.2, etc. naming scheme, just as we’ve done with the Panda updates.

 

Penguin Releases So Far

Here’s the list so far, showing when each Penguin update came out, the percentage of English-languages queries it was said to impact (other languages are also impacted, but we’re using English as a consistent baseline):

• Penguin 1: April 24, 2012 (3.1%)
• Penguin 2: May 26, 2012 (less than 0.1%)
• Penguin 3: Oct. 5, 2012 (0.3%)

 

Some Details On Penguin 3

Cutts, chief of Google’s spam team, posted about the Penguin update in a series of tweets. The first said that a Penguin data refresh is on its way and that about 0.3 percent of English-language queries will be “noticeably affected.”

Weather report: Penguin data refresh coming today. 0.3% of English queries noticeably affected. Details: goo.gl/AF5kt — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 5, 2012