A brief summary of the topics covered:

• Keyword research, hierarchy and selection
• Copy writing for search engines and content development
• Landing pages – optimisation and management
• Tools for tracking and reporting your search activity + success
• How to improve your page rank
• Linking strategies

You can read the SEO Bootcamp Ageneda and see how many useful topics were covered.

1. Always use the standard HTML tags for headings, bold text and lists.

The HTML has tags for headings, bold text and and ordered/unordered lists and you should always use them. By using CSS, you can practically style them anyway you like. By using a H1 heading tag for your headings, strong tags for important text and ul, ol and li tags to create lists will help search engines understand what text on that page is a heading or what are the more important terms on that page.

Using our lawn mowing example from the previous post, here is an example of NOT making a heading in a good way for SEO:

<p style='font-size:16pt; font-weight:bold'>Garden Maintainence Services</p>

By applying a CSS style to a paragraph tag that makes text larger and bold doesn’t tell search engines it is a heading, but rather, it will treat it as though it is a paragraph of normal text because it is a paragraph tag. A much better way would be to define a style for your heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6) in your CSS file. The better way to make a heading is this:

<h1>Garden Maintainence Services</h1>

2. Always use ALT text when adding an image.

As search engines can’t read text inside an image, by adding ALT text to your image tag helps the engines understand more about that image. You can use it to place more keywords and phrases into your page but don’t keyword stuff the ALT tags as this is frowned upon and can get you blacklisted.

Here is an example of using ALT text inside an image:

<img src='/images/gardens.gif' width=400 height=300 alt='Garden Maintainence Services'>

3. Avoid Canonical URL issues and never place session IDs on the URL.

Search engines see http://thelawnman.com.au, http://www.thelawnman.com.au, and http://www.thelawnman.com.au/index.html as three different pages. To correct this, you should always link to the preferred domain and at the root level ie. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/. You may also wish to use a redirect to point all of your pages to this preferred option. If you have signed up at Google and are using Google Sitemaps and the Webmaster Tools, you can also select your preferred domain that Google uses. We love Google! How good is that.

If you are using sessions, make sure your Session ID (especially if you have a PHP site) is not added as a parameter PHPSESSID to the end a URL on your PHP page eg. PHPSESSID=34467908. This can be extremely problematic for your site’s search engine ranking. Search engines will see a unique PHPSESSID in the URL every time they visit a page on your site, and in turn think it is a different page each time and even worse, it could be viewed as lots of duplicate content and your site may become banned. Turn off this setting in your PHP.ini file or ask your server administrator to do this for you.

4. Have a unique, meaningful TITLE tag on each and every page.

Unfortunately, this is an area HUGELY NEGLECTED by many web developers. By not having a meaningful title tag, you are reducing the amount of traffic to your site greatly. Each and every page has different text, content and images so why would it not also have a different title? Why use a title of “untitled-1″ when you can put meaningful words about your page in the title. It is also a bad idea to use one generic title across all of the pages on your site.

So, using our dummy site map from the first SEO article, here are three titles for those three pages on our site:

http://www.thelawnman.com.au/

<title>Lawn Mowing, Tree Lopping and Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title>

http://www.thelawnman.com.au/work-request.html

<title>Work Request for Lawn Mowing and Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title>

http://www.thelawnman.com.au/current-work.html

<title>Current Work Schedule of The Lawn Man's Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title>

5. Do not use “click here” or “read more” text links unless absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, this is also an area HUGELY NEGLECTED by many web developers. By not using meaningful text inside links, search engines cannot establish whether the link actually links correctly to the same subject as mentioned the link text.

An example of this is to search for “click here” inside Google. You will find the top result is actually for Adobe Acrobat Reader. This is because millions of pages use something similar to this:

To install the latest version of Acrobat Reader <a href="www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html ">click here</a>.

So, it is important to have meaningful text inside your links as well. Let’s say we wanted to link from the homepage of our lawnman site to the work request page. The best way in which to do this would be:

If you would like The Lawn Man to work for you, please fill out the <a href="http://www.thelawnman.com.au/work-request.html">Work Request for Lawn Mowing and Garden Maintainence Services</a>.

The link text contains many of the same keywords in the TITLE tag and META data used of the work request page, so the search engines can determine that the link pointing to that page is one they can trust.

6. Where possible, use the W3 Validators on your site.

Your site does not need to be technically perfectly to rank high in the search engines but having a validated HTML page will help ensure that search engines (and browsers) will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator. Validating generally identifies areas of your HTML code that is redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

So, let’s continue with Part 2 of basic SEO. The top of your HTML is some of the most important ‘code’ you are likely to write if you are interested in obtaining a good search engine position. I’m going to break down the four most important factors and hopefully describe it in a way that helps.

1. Title Meta Tag

The title tag is displayed as the headline in Search Engine Result Pages. This title tag should be easy to read and contain your main keyword phrase toward the beginning of the tag. Don’t put your company name first, unless you are huge company already like Amazon or Ebay. People are more likely to search for products or services on offer, not your name. I think it is a good idea to capitalise every word in your tag as well. Titles should be five to ten words long, no more than 70 to 80 characters.

2. Description Meta Tag

The description tag is the paragraph will be displayed in the Search Engine Result Pages. Your description tag should be designed designed to attract customers and it should compel the reader to act right now and follow your link. If you do not include this description tag, search engines will sometimes display the first text on your page (which may not be the best option). When writing your description, you should approach it as though it is a proper sentence and follow proper grammar and the use of punctuation. It is also a good idea to try to include your subject and geographical references to where you are, like your city name. The description should not exceed 150-200 characters in length.

3. Keywords Meta Tag

The importance of Meta keyword tags fluctuates among different search engines. Some people deeply involved with the SEO community debate as to whether or not they help at all. I advise using relevant targeted keywords as they do seem to help with rankings, especially in Yahoo. Avoid stuffing with too many keywords. Just use relevant tags that apply directly to the content of that particular page, and don’t overdo it. Remember this simple ‘rule’: if your total keywords on a page has a value of 100, each keyword you use takes a percentage of that score. So, if you use 5 keywords, they each have a score of 20/100. The higher the score, the more powerful your keywords can be.

4. Revisit Tag

While not a search engine optimization item, the “revisit” tag may help a search engine spider to return in so many days to re-index the site. This may be of great importance to when your site updates its data and you are trying to get your latest content inside the index.

5. Robots Tag

The Robots Tag was created to provide developers a method of keeping pages out of search engine indexes who cannot upload or control the robots.txt file at their websites. The Robots Tag that may contain one or more of the following keywords without regard to case: none, noindex, nofollow, all, index and follow. Here is a break down of these keywords:

• none – ignore this page (equiv to: noindex, nofollow)
• noindex – page may not be indexed
• nofollow – do not follow links from this page
• all – no restrictions (equiv. to: index, follow)
• index – include this page
• follow – follow links from this page to find other pages

You can also specify actions for specific robots, like GoogleBot for example. This can be helpful if you find you are being crawled frequently by robots not offering any value to your site, and you wish to limit it to just GoogleBot and MSNBot for example.

One new keyword that has appeared is NOODP. This refers to the description displayed on search engine result pages and DMOZ. Some search engines will take the description of your site from DMOZ over your own description tags. Use this tag if you do not wish for this to happen.

6. Put .CSS and JavaScript into External Files

For search engines, excessive or poorly formatted code at the top of your page will have a negative impact on your rankings. By including your CSS and JavaScript in external files, you will increase the amount of text a search engine can read in your page. If you have too much HTML/JavaScript/CSS code, the text content usually won’t be seen entirely.

So what is an example of a good header?

So now, using out example website – www.thelawnman.com.au – which offers lawn mowing services in Sydney, here is an example of a good header targeting three keywords: lawn mowing services, tree lopping, garden maintenance

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en-us">
<head>
<title>Lawn Mowing, Tree Lopping and Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="Keywords" content="Lawn Mowing, Tree Lopping, Garden Maintenance Services, The Lawn Man, Sydney">
<meta name="Description" content="The Lawn Man - Sydney based lawn mowing service with over 10+ yrs experience in garden maintenance. Whether you need lawns mowed or trees lopped, The Lawn Man is for you.">
<meta name="robots" content="noodp">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="index, follow">
<style media="screen" type="text/css">@import url("includes/style.css");</style>
</head>

OK. So there you have it. Of course, this article did not discuss selecting appropriate keywords or displaying appropriate content, but it should be a guide to help you create an effect page header.

Google XML Sitemaps have been around for a while now and it is probebly a good time to starting to become familiar with them. They can help you to achieve up to date indexing in Google, which in turn should help you with search placement.

A Google XML Sitemap allows web developers to provide Google directly with a master list of all their site’s critical pages for indexing/crawling. The sitemap data is recorded inside an XML file and it includes a list of URL’s belonging to the site, the date the page was last modified date, how often the site is updated and the sites priority.

These Google XML sitemaps generally helps Google index your site but if your site is small (say under 10 pages) or is not updated very often, the Google XML Sitemap may not help much at all, especially if your site is already inside the index. It helps most with trying to keep the latest postings/versions of your page in Google. Larger sites with lots of pages should benefit as sometimes not all of your pages are appearing in the Google index.

Google XML sitemaps will in many cases not improve your page rankings, but by having the most current version of your site in Google’s index, this can help improve your results in Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). This is due to you being able to make an update to a page and Google’s index will have this page updated more quickly than without the XML sitemap. This effectively means that with more frequent spidering you can help get your latest site version in the index, and this should help with your sites rankings.

If your site is small or your prefer to you can create your XML sitemap manually. The structure is not difficult to follow and even an XML novice will be able to follow the structure of the XML sitemap. If you prefer automated tools that require little changes to the output, then I can recommend VIGOS GSitemap which is a free, easy to use tool that will help you create your XML sitemaps with ease.

Here is an example sitemap:

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/ sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.thelawnman.com.au/</loc>
<lastmod>2006-08-29T16:58:33+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>Fortnightly</changefreq>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.thelawnman.com.au/work-request.html</loc>
<lastmod>2006-08-29T16:58:33+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>Monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.thelawnman.com.au/current-work.html</loc>
<lastmod>2006-08-29T16:58:33+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>Daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Submitting your completed XML Sitemap to Google is relatively straightforward. After the file has been created the first thing you want to do is upload the file to your server, preferably at the root level eg. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/sitemap.xml. Now you will need to log into the Sitemap console using your Google account login. From here you can add a site to your account. To do this, simply enter your top level domain where it says “Add Site” eg. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/. This will add the domain to your account and allow you to then submit the XML sitemap you have created. You will now be taken to the site summary page for this site. You will see a text link that says “Submit a Sitemap”. Click on this link to enter the online location of your XML sitemap. Once you have entered in the location, click “Add Web Sitemap” and it is recorded.

So, that’s it. It is quite a simple process to get a sitemap added into Google. There is one final thing that you can do and I recommend you perform this optional step – you should verify your Sitemap. This can be easily done by placing a specific meta tag on your home page provided by Google. Verification allows you to access crawl stats and other valuable information regarding your Google listing.

Google XML sitemaps are great. We love Google!