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SEO Facts and Tutoring examples
A premier SEO guide

Firstly, unlike usual SEO FAQS that were reliable a few years ago and with techniques that haven’t been developed or even tested by the people who wrote it since then, this guide actually contains up to date tips and tricks. We provide a complete walkthrough with easily understood info that may seem too simple to work but in fact have a high success rate.

This guide won’t offer any ways around Google’s policies or illegitimate methods. All the tips we offer are approved and recommended information.

Intro
In the last ten years of internet marketing, SEO has been one of the most important terms used, and this trend doesn’t seem to weaken. SEO is a popular topic of conversation, everyone uses it and most people succeed at it. Our objective is to make you part of that category. If you already have some experience in SEO you can go directly to chapter 3, if you are new to it just read through the basics.

1.A. SEO explained
SEO is the abbreviation of “Search Engine Optimization”. However, unlike what its name may insinuate, SEO is more about optimizing the targeted websites for the search engines and increasing traffic than optimizing the search engines themselves. Lets start with a basic description of search engines.

Search engines were first used in the early 90’s to find information on the web. Web search engines work by storing information about web pages, which they obtain from the html itself. When a person enters a query, mostly keywords, the engine goes through its index to find the best matching sites.

So, a website with a lot of keywords has a higher chance of being shown in the search engine’s results.

Thus, SEO is basically a way to increase the ranking of your website in the search engines. There different methods of SEO, some are legitimate, and others, called “blackhat” methods, are heavily penalized by search engines.

1.B. Will I need SEO?
Most people would say yes. But on second thought what do you need SOE for? If its to advertise for new products and services available at your store or for a shop you just opened there are better ways to do so. On the other hand, if you own an Internet business then SEO is for you.

1.C. Hire SEO expert or try it myself?
One of the biggest decision when opting for SEO is whether to do it yourself or to hire an SEO expert. Both options can be attractive, here are some advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

Disadvantages

Hired SEO

You won't have to waste your time with the technical details.

You won't need to learn SEO yourself.

SEO experts are often quite reliable and offer satisfactory results.

You will have to regularly check on the hired SEO’s progress.

You to be careful when you hire a SEO expert as there’s no guarantee that they will complete the work.

The hired SEO expert may have no experience in the theme of your site.

SEO experts may require a regular payment.

Do it yourself

You do it yourself and the way you want.

The knowledge you gain learning SEO may be very useful later on.

You don’t have to pay for it.

You apply changes and updates when and how you want.

Reading guides and maintaining the SEO is time consuming.

The results may not be as great as you wanted.

2. Basic attributes of SEO
2.B. Search engines
Firstly we need to understand how search engines work. Every search engine consists of 3 parts:

1. The Web Crawler, also called spider bot or web scutter. The web crawler usually starts with a list of downloaded websites’ pages, looks for the hyperlinks within them and adds them to the crawl frontier. The crawler will visit the websites in the crawl frontier regularly to check for changes and the rate at which contents are updated. How fast the crawler visit’s a website again depends mostly on how much traffic you get.

The crawler itself doesn’t rank the websites, it simply leaves the information retrieved to the indexer but crawlers can also be used for automatic maintenance tasks on a website, like checking links or validating HTML code.

2. The Indexer is a module that collects, parses, and stores data about all the pages crawled by the spider bot in its database, the index. The indexer can determine whether a word exists within a particular document and where it is. The index updates itself every time the spider bot crawls a website, however this process may take time to apply the changes to the database as the index’s volume is quite large, thus people may say that a website has been crawled, but not yet indexed.

After the contents of the websites are added to the index, the ranker starts to work.

3. The ranker is the search engine software the user works with. The ranker applies the search query and goes through the indexed to find relevant contents. The results are then sorted according to their contents and their ranking before being showed to the user.

Read “Ranking factors” for more information.

2.B.2 SEO business lingo
Here are the basic terms you need to know. All others will be explained along the way.

Anchor text
This is simply a text of a link. If you have a link like this:

<a href="………">…………<a>
The link to click on will be as follows:

The text "The essentials of SEO - a complete guide" - is the anchor text in this case. The anchor text is the most important part of a link building strategy. The anchor text must always be relevant to the theme of the webpage. For example if your page is about movies you cant link it with a “lose weight“ anchor text. While you cannot manage every links on the web, you can at least make sure that your website has the appropriate anchor links.

Inbound link
Its also called backlink, a link that directs people to your site. Its best to have as much of those as you can. But more importantly there are many conditions to this rule, so read the Off-Page optimization section to get more details.

Keyword
It’s a set number of words that describe the topic of a website or page. In fact, there is a difference between keyWORDS and keyPHRASES, however when using SEO they are all called keywords. Basically, the keywords for this page are: SEO FAQ, SEO tutorial, etc.

Short-tail and long-tail keywords
Short-tail keywords are some commonly used keywords and usually obtain more results than long-tail results, examples are music, movies, poems, games and so on. Long-tail on the other hand describes a particular theme to obtain les results but much more specific to what you were looking for. Examples are "paramore free music", "online rpg games", "rent a red Ferrari car" etc. Specific queries tend to be less popular and less visitors will type this exact query. However these queries are quite well demanded as such visitors may become regulars at your site, if not customers. Remember this! Long-tail queries are not very popular, but the conversion rate for such queries is much much greater than for short-tail ones.

SERPs
You have probably heard this term before, but didn’t understand what it meant. The acronym SERP refers to "Search Engine Result Page". When visitors asks for a query they are directed to a SERP. They are afterwards shown a number of sites they can click on. Of course the first results shown receive more visitors, that’s what you are aiming for and what we are trying to help you accomplish. In short this SEO guide aims to make you move higher in SERPs.

Snippet
The snippet is the basic information the search engine will show in the SERP‘s database. It is mostly retrieved from a Meta Description tag, but it can also be made based on the page’s content by the search engine.

Landing page
Landing page is a page that appears when a person clicks on a SERP to visit the website. Here is an example query:

Link juice
The term link juice refers to the value a website may obtain from backlinks posted on other websites. In short, your website will get link juice from the sites where the backlinks were posted. Your page‘s rank will rise as it accumulates link juice. If a page is worth $20 - that‘s the page‘s value. If the page has 4 links, each of them will receive $5 then - that is the amount of link juice passed to the linked page. If the origin page has 5 links, each of them will receive $4 .

Simply put, the more links a Page X has, the less value will be distributed to pages Y. Obviously, the real link juice value is not measured in dollars.

Nofollow links
Nofollow link is a link that search engines aren’t allowed to follow. Below is the code to make a nofollow link:

<a href="somepage.html" rel="nofollow">Some anchor text</a>

Google does not follow nofollow links and link juice isn‘t passed down these links. .

Link popularity
Link popularity refers to the number of links directing to a site. The more popular sites are, the more links the have. However, the number of inbound links is only a half of it all. The ‘off-page optimization” section offers you more information on this topic.

Keyword stuffing
Putting a lot of keywords in a tag is called keyword stuffing. For example, the title tag of this page would be: <TITLE>SEO guide, SEO FAQ, SEO tutorial, best seo faq, seo techniques, seo strategy guide</TITLE> and so on. This is what keyword stuffing is like. Keyword stuffing isn’t recommended as a) it does not work; b) it may affect your ranking negatively.

Robots.txt
robots.txt is a file that allows you to control the level of access spider bots have on your website. It is a simple txt file placed in the root folder of your website. Here are examples of robot.txt:

This txt will prevent GoogleBot from accessing your entire site:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This txt will block all files within a single folder except myfile.html for all crawlers:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder1/
Allow: /folder1/myfile.html