Questions On SEO

1) What is SEO?

Ans) SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is defined as (in my own words):

"The process of finding out the best keywords for a web site and by the use of optimizing the web site along with other off-page work making that web site attain a higher position in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for those selected words."

Although the exact calculations used by the search engines are kept secret, there is lot of knowledge and observations in this field from thousands of webmasters worldwide.

It could be said to be a branch of online marketing. In general terms you can say that it means to make a web site more visible and make it look important in the eyes of search engines.

Not being familiar with SEO and not applying it compared to actually doing the right things can make a huge difference in terms of visitors to your web site.


2) How do I find out the best keywords to target?

Ans) The "best" keyword depends on the following main factors:

1.) The amount of traffic it will generate.
2.) The difficulty of attaining a top ranking.
3.) The profitability of that keyword.

In this answer I will address each point and give recommendations on tools to use to help you in your assessment.

The Amount of Traffic it Will Generate Often people choose keywords based on how popular they think they may be. Mostly it is based on "real world" factors rather then fact which is readily available. For instance, I recently saw someone who proposed they were going to go after the term "nursing homes" due to the aging population.

Although this area may be growing quickly, those interested in finding out more information often do not use a computer or if they did, would not be researching it online. Although they would still get visitors, they would find there are much better keywords to target with profit in mind. When it comes to traffic, the best measurement is actual searches. This will tell you how many people search in a day or month for that term and it can be a great indicator. By far, the most popular tool for finding this out is the Keyword Suggestion Tool. This tool combines the two most popular ways of judging popularity, Wordtracker and Overture. In addition, it suggest related keywords and lists their traffic. Always remember however, that this is total searches. These search numbers will always be divided among the SERPs.

The Difficulty of Attaining a Top Ranking

If you simply chose the keywords with highest amount of traffic, you could still lose money. This is because these keywords typically warrant a lot more work to rank for. A perfect keyword is one that has a lot of searches but little SEO competition and moderate to easy to rank for. The best tool I have found for this is the Keyword Difficulty Tool created by Rand Fishkin. It will give you an indication of the amount of SEO work required which you can balance against the number of searches.

The Profitability of that Keyword

There are also keywords where you may get 1000s of visitors with only one conversion while others where you can achieve 1 for every 100. This should be factored in as unless you make your money per impression, you want the highest number of conversions per visitor. The best way I know to evaluate this is to run an AdWords account. The amount of data you receive by starting a campaign can be very useful in establishing the conversion rate. I believe it is always better to spend $10 to find out a keyword isn't profitable then to spend 6 months getting it to number one, THEN find out its a dog.

The moral of the story is although there is no such thing as a "perfect" keyword, you can find the best ones for you by using a combination of the factors above.

3) What is KEI and how do I use it?

Ans) KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. KEI is a ranking system based on how popular a key word is and how much competition it has on the Internet. The higher the KEI number, the more popular your keywords are and the less competition they have. It also means that you'll have a much better chance getting ranked high on a search engine. A low KEI score means not many people are searching for that keyword and it has too much competition. Hence, eliminate all KEI scores with a low number and choose those with a high KEI score. The higher the score, the more profitable your keywords will be to your web site.

4) What are the most important things for on-page optimization?

Ans) On-page optimization is the part of SEO where you deal with the pages itself, opposite to off-page optimization and keyword analysis.

Here is my opinion on the most important elements in on-page optimization and some brief information about them.

* Content

It has been said over and over since years that a successful way of establishing a web site is by adding more good unique content to it on a regular basis. It cannot be stressed enough although still people are not doing it and want some "magic" to happen.

Make sure that you have your targetted keywords included in the content on your web pages in a natural way. My rule of thumb is that you write without thinking about it and when you finish you can look over the text and add the keyword maybe on one or two places extra where it fits in. If it looks spammy or too much in any way then reduce it. You are writing for the visitor and not for the search engines - never forget that.

Also make sure that the text is unique as if it is the same as on other web pages it can raise a red flag at major search engines and duplicate web pages and even whole domains gets erased from the index.

* Weight factors

By placing your targetted keyword in places such as the title, H1 and H2, Strong tags and Emphasis tags you put more weight on those words and for the search engines it becomes more relevant for those words.

But don't overdue it because if you place the same word or phrase on all the weight tags on the same page you can get hit by the over-optimization penalty which means that basically the search engines figured you tried to cheat them and push you down the rankings.

* Navigation structure

Make sure that the search engine spiders can follow the internal links on your site. If you have a site based on a database it is recommended that you use mod_rewrite to get the best benefit.

If you have lot of pages on your site and they are buried down in the navigation tree of 3 or more clicks away than I recommend the use of a sitemap and a link to it from each page of your site. A sitemap makes is easy for search engines to find all your pages and it can also be a great resource for your visitors to find a specific page quickly.

If one or more web pages of your site is more important than the other ones, like the home page, then get more links to it from the other web pages of the site. A good example is to have a link, "home", on each web page back to your home page. That is also useful for your visitors and it gives more power to the home page in the search engine rankings.


5) Is the use of meta tags dead?

Ans) Yes, in fact they have not been relied upon since many years. An article from Danny Sullivan stating exactly this was released in October 2002.

There are still some minor “stone age” search engines around that uses them.

The main reasons why they have been ceased to work are mostly from these factors:

* Most webmasters tried to fool the search engines with meta tags unrelated to their content and services.
* With improved FTS (full text search) tool kits from verity and many other companies, search engines can index your web pages and know the theme of your web page. With such advanced APIs, search engines like google can easily decide, what your website is about and what your website offers.

Some of the basic features of FTS API are that they can filter out text of your webpage and get important statistics such as:

1. How many times a word gets repeated
2. How far each repeated words are from each other
3. How many times a particular word gets repeated in a particular sentence
4. How far a word 'Online' appears from words like 'Party', 'invitations' to
see if that sentence makes any sense.
5. They can easily figure out, if you are doing keyword dumping.

So with such API's the webmaster should concentrate on the content/layout and not put the meta tags as a main concern.

However it has been tested that the meta keyword tag still has a minor influence on the rankings and the meta description tag should be used as it is some times shown in the SERPs (search engine result pages).


6) Where in my code should I put the keywords?

Ans) We all know it is not enough to have your keyword in the meta keyword tag.

Here is a list of places to put it in the source code, ordered by estimated weight:

* Title tag.
* H1 and H2.
* In paragraphs and general text on the site.
* In STRONG tags: Keyword
* ALT description attributes on image tags:
* TITLE attributes on anchor tags:
* SUMMARY attributes on tables:
* In the file names of images:
* Meta description tag.
* Meta keyword tag.


7) How is the best way to write the title?

Ans) The title is most probably the single most important place to put your keyword.

Have the word in the beginning of the title and also in the end. Try to vary it in different forms as well.

If you want to brand your company name you should keep that name in the end.

Try to follow this and at the same time make it look natural and appealing for the visitors. Remember that this is what is most visible in the SERPs for the visitor.


8) What is the best way to write the URL's?

Ans) In regards to Google it has been stated by two of their staffs involved in the SEO community (GoogleGuy and Matt Cutts) that the dashes (-) are better than underscores (_) when writing the URLs. This has also been confirmed by my own tests on the matter.

In regards to Yahoo, MSN and other search engines I actually don't know but I think it varies.

9) Which factors are considered unethical or black hat SEO?

Ans) Page cloaking is a BIG one, which basically consists of using server side scripts to determine whether the visitor is a search engine or a human and serving up different pages depending. The script would serve up a keyword rich, totally souped up page to search robots, while giving humans an entirely different page.

Linkfarms are considered black hat. Linkfarms are basically sites which consist of masses of links, for the purpose of getting rankings in search engines and turning a profit (usually off of affiliate program advertisements on the website).

Duplicate content can keep a page from getting indexed, and some people have even reported trouble with entire websites being duplicated by unethical webmasters, causing problems with their rankings.

Spamming keywords, in meta tags, title tags, or in your page's content is a black hat SEO trick that used to work well back in the 90's. It's long since been basically exterminated as a useful trick.

Linking to "bad neighborhoods", or sites that have been banned from search engines for using the above tricks, while not particularly black hat is definitely unhealthy for your own sites rankings.

10) How should good navigation look like?

Ans) Good Navigation can be broken down to one word - "Breadcrumbs"

If you remember the fairy tail "Hanzel and Gretel" you will recall that when the children were kidnapped, they dropped breadcrumbs so that their rescuers would be able to find them. In our situation, imagine its your site that has been kidnapped and the Search Engines are your "rescuer".

An example of Breadcrumbs would be the following

*Home-->Sublevel1-->Sublevel2

This type of navigation allows the Search Engines to find all of your pages in the most efficient and thorough way. It also aids "Deep Crawls" which are crucial to dynamic sites which may have 100,000 or more pages. Not only should you use this style of navigation behind the scenes but displaying the Breadcrumbs somewhere on the site will help both the Search Engines and visitors alike. A perfect example of this is www.dmoz.org

The second part of navigation is the "site map". This is a page which contains a link to every one of your pages. To be fully optimized, the links should have a descriptive anchor text to further help the page you are lining to. In addition your site map should always be within one click of the index page as this will help the Search Engines find it quickly.

Using these two methods of navigation will ensure your site gets fully indexed and will add to your users experience

Types of Links

The major type of navigation to avoid or to at least compensate for is Javascript pulldown menus. Because Search Engine bots will not follow these, it is important to compensate by having text links somewhere else on the page. These can be in the footer or worked in elsewhere in the content. In fact, Javascript as a navigation in general has been shown to hinder indexing. There are a few alternative ways to code your javascript however if you always code a backup plan, you will enjoy easy indexing without the worry.