Nowadays more and more people are getting interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As always, if there is a demand, there is a supplier. To run a quick search on Amazon.com or other online book stores, you will find tons of books cover this topic. Some of them are for beginners, others are for advanced users. Before learning advanced SEO techniques, you must have some basic knowledge first. For example, you have at least to know how major search engines work. I found the basic knowledge is important for better understanding those advanced tips and tricks. If you are interested in this topic, you may want to read the beginner’s guide of search engine optimization offered at seomoz.org. It is a free web-based content. You don’t need to buy anything or register any account to access it. As long as you get an internet access, you can read the guide online. Here is the link to the free guide: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
It contains 10 Chapters. Each chapter is focusing on one topic.
1. How do search engines work?
2. How do internet users interact with major search engines?
3. Why is search engine marketing important?
4. How to design a search engine friendly website or blog?
5. How to do keyword research?
6. What factors can influence websites’ SERP rankings?
7. How to get links and popularity for your website?
8. What are the search engine tools or services that you can use?
9. Other important aspects of search engine.
10. How to know whether the SEO of your site works?
The information provided in it may not be comprehensive, but it is useful at least for beginners. If you have time, you can read it. It is free any way.
Showing posts with label search engine optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search engine optimization. Show all posts
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
A Free SEO Tool to Check Whether Your Blog Content is Indexable by Search Engine
When you create a blog or website, if you want to get organic search traffic to it, you have to make sure that the content on your site or blog is indexable. The web content that I am talking about here is not only the text content, but also others such as images, audio and video content. Usually search engines can read plain text with no problem. But they can’t read images, audio or video. Content created with Flash or Java can’t be seen by search engines either. So what you need to do is to use “alt tag” or transcript to label these non-indexable content properly and convert them to SEO friendly content.
One free online SEO tool which can help you to find out how search engines see your blog or site is found on http://www.seo-browser.com/. At seo-browser.com, you just need to type in your blog’s URL and run the check, and it will show you what elements on your blog are visible to search engines in the result. If you found some important content on your blog can’t be seen on the result page, you will know these content may have the search engine index problem. Then you have to figure out how to make them more search engine friendly, if you really care about organic traffic to your blog.
Of course, alternately, you can also check the same thing by using Google Cache.
One free online SEO tool which can help you to find out how search engines see your blog or site is found on http://www.seo-browser.com/. At seo-browser.com, you just need to type in your blog’s URL and run the check, and it will show you what elements on your blog are visible to search engines in the result. If you found some important content on your blog can’t be seen on the result page, you will know these content may have the search engine index problem. Then you have to figure out how to make them more search engine friendly, if you really care about organic traffic to your blog.
Of course, alternately, you can also check the same thing by using Google Cache.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Basic Understanding of Search Engine Optimization
Two words are most important in SEO: relevance and importance. Relevance means that whether the content is what the search engine users are looking for. Importance means that whether the content provides valuable information.
Most important factors influencing search engine ranking results:
Different search engines have different criteria or algorithm. For instance, Yahoo said “Inbound links and content are important.” Bing said”Keywords should be contained in the content and the size of the page should be at right size.” Google said “WebPages should be for users not for me. So give your page a correct title and don’t put too many links on one page.” Of course, these are only some principles and their searching algorithms are always changing, at least from time to time.
How to fully understand how a search engine works? You can ask a search engine engineer who develop it or you can design an experiment to test it and figure it out by yourself. All the trouble shooting strategies are same. Every time you change one factor and then see what is the result. If you get the result you want, obviously the last factor that you have changed is the reason for the problem. So when designing experiment to study search engine, you can build several similar websites and each website has only one factor different from the rest of others. This may sounds easy, but when you really do it, it will have a lot of work involved. But fortunately someone else has already done this type of experiments and what you need to do is just to follow their guidance or observe carefully what they did on their own site.
Then you may ask: how can I who knows the secret of seo? It is easy. Run a simple search with some hot keywords in major search engines and those sites on the 1st page of the search results are your candidates. Do a thorough study on those sites, and you will learn a lot from them.
Most important factors influencing search engine ranking results:
Different search engines have different criteria or algorithm. For instance, Yahoo said “Inbound links and content are important.” Bing said”Keywords should be contained in the content and the size of the page should be at right size.” Google said “WebPages should be for users not for me. So give your page a correct title and don’t put too many links on one page.” Of course, these are only some principles and their searching algorithms are always changing, at least from time to time.
How to fully understand how a search engine works? You can ask a search engine engineer who develop it or you can design an experiment to test it and figure it out by yourself. All the trouble shooting strategies are same. Every time you change one factor and then see what is the result. If you get the result you want, obviously the last factor that you have changed is the reason for the problem. So when designing experiment to study search engine, you can build several similar websites and each website has only one factor different from the rest of others. This may sounds easy, but when you really do it, it will have a lot of work involved. But fortunately someone else has already done this type of experiments and what you need to do is just to follow their guidance or observe carefully what they did on their own site.
Then you may ask: how can I who knows the secret of seo? It is easy. Run a simple search with some hot keywords in major search engines and those sites on the 1st page of the search results are your candidates. Do a thorough study on those sites, and you will learn a lot from them.
Where to Find a Free Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Online
I read a new book: search engine optimization (seo) secrets written by Danny Dover. The author claims that this book is not for beginners. He didn’t bother to explain some basic SEO terms in the book, but fortunately he mentioned a website where beginners can learn some basic SEO knowledge. Here is the link to the site:
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo.
On this site, the SEO knowledge is divided into 10 chapters. And they explained what search engine is and how it works. It also gives an introduction on how to do keyword research and where to find seo tools and resources. This website is very suitable for people like me who has no any seo knowledge at all. If you are already a SEO expert, you can pass this site and continue to read Danny Dover’s new book which gives in-depth explanation of search engine optimization. It even shows you how to live as a SEO consultant. It is a very interesting book and I will definitely read it once I finished the beginner’s guide online.
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo.
On this site, the SEO knowledge is divided into 10 chapters. And they explained what search engine is and how it works. It also gives an introduction on how to do keyword research and where to find seo tools and resources. This website is very suitable for people like me who has no any seo knowledge at all. If you are already a SEO expert, you can pass this site and continue to read Danny Dover’s new book which gives in-depth explanation of search engine optimization. It even shows you how to live as a SEO consultant. It is a very interesting book and I will definitely read it once I finished the beginner’s guide online.
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