SEO: The Basics

Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization

The first part of SEO is done right at the start during the design phase of building a website. You need to plan the navigation of the website with both a visitor and a spider in mind. While a visitor may be able to use fancy buttons to navigate a spider can crawl those too but it will not find the anchor text to tell it what your term your page should show up for in the search engines. I am not saying you shouldn't use fancy buttons or flash style navigation. I am saying that there must be text links on your site for the search engine spiders to crawl. A site map is always an excellent feature to include in the site design as it provides text links to all pages and allows for all pages to get indexed.

The other thing to do during the design phase is to make sure there is plenty of keyword rich content on each page. While making the content rich you should be careful to not put your keywords in the content more than is needed. Search Engines will penalize you for this as they consider it spamming. The best thing to do is write your content for a human visitor to read not a spider. Plan to include keywords in several locations. They are listed below.

• Title tag.
• Meta description tag.
• Meta keywords tag.
• H1, 2 and 3 tags.
• Alt attributes of image tags.
• Anchor text of your links.
• Having the keywords in the URL has also shown to help in Yahoo and MSN.

Phase 2 includes the ongoing process of getting relative inbound links. This involves seeking out other quality sites to get links from. These sites include directory sites, both free and paid inclusion. You also will be seeking out other sites that relate to yours and asking if they might trade links with your site. Another way to get links is to do a search to find who links to your competitors and then see if they will link to you. Linking is the way that spiders can find your site and the most important way to get indexed and show up well in the search engines. It is an ongoing process, as one can never have too many inbound links. When seeking out links always be watchful for link farms and other related forms of spamming. The best thing to do is keep the links relevant to your website if your exchanging links.


Dustin Williams
A2Z SEO L.L.C.