SEO Basics for Newbies

TITLE

Not a lot of people pay a enough attention on TITLE, but there are 2 things you need to keep in mind when it comes to maybe most important on-site SEO factor you’ll have on your site – your title!

Quality title will get you much higher CRT% then KEYWORD stuffed one!

Yes I really believe that visitor oriented title will get you further then KEYWORD’s stuffed one. Example:

KEYWORD PHRASE 1 | KEYWORD PHRASE 2 | KEYWORD PHRASE 3

Won’t get your as many clicks/visitors as:

Best KEYWORD PHRASE 1 and KEYWORD PHRASE 2 source online at www.site.com

I know this may get disputed a lot but just what I noticed from all the sites I’ve tested so far and that were in top 3 (so actually getting enough visitors to test on).
So make sure to include a call to action or a personalized message to your visitors in the title as this is what average SE user will notice first and decide to visit the site or not.

Next don’t be afraid to split test your titles – yes, keep the core the same so you’d avoid rising any flags but you can play with the wording a lot and actually see up to 1% difference in your CTR’s.

Keep within the KEYWORD count limits if you want your title to be fully displayed in SEARCH ENGINE

This is really simple but 60% of sites I worked with got it wrong. So here are some tips on writing a good SEO optimized title (not my words but love it!)

“Place the most important keywords or keyword phrases at the beginning of the tag and keep your title short, roughly 10 to 64 characters including spaces. Try to minimize the use of stop words, such as a, an, of, on, etc., as they consume character count and offer no value.”

Also make sure EACH page of your site has a different title than other.

If you’re using WordPress I’d advise you to go with WordPress SEO by Yoast or All in One Seo Pack to help you achieve this.

Avoid using any special characters in your title (& for example) as you’ll most likely mess up the code of the site and Google won’t “read” correctly. You can always quickly check this by right clicking the “View page source” option. So if you see any funny characters in your title – re-do it!

META KEYWORD TAG AND META DESCRIPTION TAG

META KEYWORD TAG

All right this is where I’ve see a lot of people go wrong as well.

They stuff their Meta KeyWord tag in hopes of squeezing in as many KeyWord’s as possible in order to rank for them. Well this is only counter – productive. The best way to use Meta KeyWord tag is to simply just put in 2 most important KeyWord’s and separate them with comma and that’s it! Nothing more needs to be done here! Some even leave it out completely but I’m still putting it 2 most important keyword’s.

META DESCRIPTION TAG

“This can provide potential visitors very relevant information that probably will not be displayed in the snippet otherwise, and can increase the CTR from the search engine results.

Keep all descriptions larger than 50 characters, and no more than 149 characters, including spaces, Google displays 154 characters, but other search engines display even less.
Be aware that if you are adding irrelevant words into the description it can possibly trigger search engine spam filters. “

One of the SEO plugins mentioned above will actually help you out a lot when creating this as it will inform you when you go over your character limits!

So again keep an eye on your characters count as there is nothing uglier than running into three dot’s at the end of the tile or Meta description in the SERP’s.

Example:

So you get what I mean those ugly three … in your title or Meta – avoid it!! That should cover the basic title + Meta set up for the new sties!

CONTENT!

All right – now I’m not saying you CAN’T rank pages with little or no content on top but I am saying it’s harder to do so.

IMO each site that is just getting first off-site SEO done should have at least 5 quality articles as well as basic on-site set up already covered before starting off site. If it’s still not done then wait till you finish your on-site to move on to the next step.

So make sure to use your URL’s (permalink structure /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/ worked best for me so far) to put in the KEYWORD’s there when making new articles/posts.

Next and this goes for ALL pages of your site – use 1 x H1 tag, 1 x H2 tag, 1 x H3 tag –again put your KEYWORD’s in your H tags. Also don’t use multiple h1 or h2 tags as it’s not going to help your on-site SEO.

If you’re adding images to your site (and you should – just make sure they are royalty free as a law suit is just not worth it) you can add your keyword or keyword phrase to ‘alt tag’ as well.

Lastly make sure you have unique content (best 1000 words or so) with KEYWORD density 1.5-2% as well as KEYWORD in first and last sentence of the article posted on your new site. You can if you wish also mark your KEYWORD’s with bold, italic etc.

My advice would be as you’re starting the off- page SEO to gradually keep adding KEYWORD targeted 1000+ word articles every 2-3 days to your site till you reach first page. Then you can take it down a notch and go for one let’s say every 5 days. Once you’re on the top you can add one very 7-14 days as you've already built some authority and trust to your site.

Just try to cover as many different but related to your topic KEYWORD’s as you can!

Also if you’re creating your content or writing your articles in Word – make sure to paste them to notepad before placing them on your site. Word uses some special characters that will create a mess when copied to your site directly.

ON-SITE LINKS

I’m sure that if you’re building an affiliate page or using CPA/AdSense that you’re dying to add the links to your new site BUT I’d suggest you to stay patient till you reach the rankings you want and then slowly add the affiliate/cpa/AdSense links in!

I know this is hard but it’s much harder to rank a brand new site with no content and 5 affiliate links on the home page :)-

So just wait it out till you get to page 1 to add your links and make sure to cloak them!

I wouldn't advise to going over 3 ads per page but it’s up to you.

If you do feel like adding any external links to your page you can always use to good old Wikipedia trick to gain some trust. Find the closest article in Wikipedia about your site’s topic and link to it using you anchor text. Don’t post this link anywhere that’s a really call to action but just mention it contextually.

DESIGN

If you’re using AdSense and making some money with it chance are you’ll get a manual review within the first 2-3 months. And there is one thing manual reviews love and it’s good design.

No worries you don’t have to be a talented web designer to pass it just make sure to make the site look pretty user friendly, have nice easy to use navigation as well as some appealing and topic related pics.

And make sure you get a logo made! This doesn't have to be a huge item, you can get one for $5 on Fiverr that will do the job.

Also add a Favicon to add a more personalize touch to your site.

SITE ARCHITECTURE

This plays a huge role as well and it can mess up many factors. Some themes are buggier the others, harder to rank, some load faster and some hove a ton of unused CSS on them.

So make sure to choose a light theme that is updated by the developer and that yourself know how to modify.

Also make sure to have as little unrelated links coming off your site (like link to wordpress.com and to your theme creator etc, try to keep it as clean as possible).

Oh yeah and don’t add “tag cloud” to your page – it kills on-site SEO

Forgot to mention canonical tag, it’s must, but if you get one of the two plugins mentioned above (Yoast or all in one seo) you’ll be covered.

SITE SPEED

One more pretty big on site factor that often remains neglected. You can speed up your site using many different tricks for zipping up the files, to losing some of the features to cleaning up the css but I love the simple to implement advice you can get on this page (and test your site as well) http://www.gtmetrix.com/

PLUGINS

I’m not really a huge fan of having tons of plugins but here are some I consider to be mandatory

Akismet – blocks your site from tons of unwanted comments

All in One Webmaster – simple way to add all the codes you need to your site

Exploit Scanner – comes in handy to keep the security tight

Google XML Sitemaps – a must have

Google XML Sitemap for Images –not many people use this but I ranked my images high with and get some visitors over Google images as well easy to set up and you can submit sitemap to webmaster after it

SEOPressor– the most easy way to KEYWORD optimize your post

Shockingly Simple Favicon – this plug doesn’t lie, it really is shockingly simple

WP Super Cache I just prefer it over W3 Total Cache as I get better results but of course you can go for any one of those two

WordTwit – this one is pretty cool if you have a Twitter account as it automatically tweets (and you can re-tweet as well) about your posts

WP Smush.it – one more for site speed as it reduces your image

ROBOTS

Make sure to block the folders of your site you don’t want to be seen as some serious damage can come from it! So set up your robots.txt