The most common question I see on SEO forums, primarily from SEO newbies, is something along the lines of "How do I get my site to rank well?" My first thought is, "Wow, ok, that's a really broad question. Maybe I should direct this noob to a few SEO 101 tutorials." That was one reason I created the Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging post earlier this year.* Still, even with the wealth of information that's available for people to learn the basics of SEO, it seems like they should have an even more basic starting point.
When I put together my SEO For WordPress presentation last month, I laid out a description of the purpose of an optimized page. Looking back on it, I now think that slide makes for a great basic starting point that helps answer the broad question, "How do I get my site to rank well?". So here is what I would say to an SEO newbie. Start with understanding these 5 goals of a search optimized page, and then expand your knowledge with the resources compiled in the Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging post.
You have 5 goals when optimizing any of your site's web pages.*** Your goals are to:
HELP SEARCH ENGINES FIND THE PAGE
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Summary: Place a link to your new page on a page that is crawled by Google frequently (checking cache to determine frequency of crawl). This allows Google to find the link quickly, follow it, and discover your new page.
HELP SEARCH ENGINES INDEX THE PAGE
If you want to allow all robots to spider your entire site, put the following code in your robots.txt file:
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User-agent: *
Disallow:
-----------------------The following robots meta tag (or none at all) placed in a page's header will also allow all robots to spider the page.
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
HELP SEARCH ENGINES UNDERSTAND THE PAGE
- Structure the page's content in the same way you would structure an important document. Use an outline format. Place the most important page topics in heirarchical headings (H1, H2, H3), with descriptive or explanatory text under each heading.
- Use lists and bold text where appropriate to help special content stand out and be more easily readable.
- Most importantly, make sure that the actual words and phrases that define the page's content are actually used. The example I used in my WordPress presentation was that if your page was a recipe for cherry-filled chocolate cake, then it would be a really great idea to actually use the phrase "cherry-filled chocolate cake recipe" in the content. If you only use the phrase "Yummy Yum Yum" as the name of the recipe, you may find it difficult to rank well for the phrase "cherry-filled chocolate cake recipe".
Summary: Use words and phrases that are descriptive of the content. Structure the content in a clear, hierarchical format whenever possible, using headings, lists, and emphasis to highlight the most important concepts.
HELP SEARCH ENGINES EVALUATE THE PAGE
Summary: Your job in helping search engines evaluate the importance of your page is to create quality content and then to spread the word far and wide that your content exists. The combination of good content and creating awareness of the content is the surest way of acquiring links to the page. With luck (and descriptive page copy), the links acquired may also include descriptive, relevant link text that will help search engines understand that your page is not only important - but relevant as well.
HELP SEARCH ENGINES RANK THE PAGE
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* I do try to keep the Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging resource list up to date, btw, but if you think it's missing something that should be on it, let me know.
** The Google Cache bookmarklet was "borrowed" from Pole Position Marketing's SEO Bookmarklets page. They have a number of other useful bookmarklets there as well.
*** Note that these goals are only concerned with ranking a page in search engines for relevant search queries. You should have other goals for your pages as well, including but not limited to, usability and conversion. Those goals, while extremely important, are beyond the scope of this post.