Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies
Overview
Get search engines to rank your site as the No. 1 result with help from this comprehensive resource
What's the best hiding place in the world? The second page of Google's search results!
If you want your website to be found, you need to make sure it appears prominently on search engines. In Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, you'll find practical and easy-to-follow advice to increase your site's chances of landing that coveted No. 1 spot on Google, Bing, and other popular search engines.
You'll discover how search engines decide which websites to rank highly, how to optimize your site for your best chance at the first page of organic results, what keywords to target, and even how to make your site internationally visible. You'll also find out how to:
- Optimize your webpage with responsive design that makes it irresistible to Google
- Create a keyword strategy that keeps interested and engaged visitors flowing to your website
- Generate the backlinks that will teach Google you're a trusted resource and help you climb the search engine results page
Perfect for webmasters, bloggers, e-commerce professionals, and anyone else looking for more online visibility, Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies is a must-have guide to improving the quantity and quality of your web traffic.
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About The Author
Bruce Clay is considered by many to be the father of search engine optimization, or SEO. He has over 25 years’ experience coaching companies to improve their online presence and search results and increase their audience.
Kristopher B. Jones is the founder and former CEO of digital marketing agency and affiliate network Pepperjam, which he sold to eBay in 2009. He most recently founded three-time SEO agency of the year finalist LSEO.com and DIY Software company DoItYourselfSEO.com.
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search engine optimization all-in-one for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Effective SEO (search engine optimization) is critical for any business that has a website. You want your business’s website to show up on that first page when people search for what you’re selling, and that’s where SEO comes into play. Here you’ll find the key components of a website that should be crafted with care to help a web page rank, the server status codes that help or hinder SEO, and advanced search operators that will have you searching the web like a pro.
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Search engine optimization (SEO) requires some technical knowledge about how search engines work and how to research what makes sites rank and find out how your competitor sites are successful. The advanced search operators in this table show you how to filter search engine results to find just the information you’re looking for, including limiting your results to just a single site or getting back results where your keyword is used in a page title or URL.
You may want to employ some seasonal keywords as part of your SEO strategy. Some keywords retain their popularity and relevance throughout the year, like [Ford Mustang] or [California]. Others see rises and spikes throughout the year due to seasonal trends. Holidays are a good example. More people buy Christmas tree ornaments in December than in July, and the majority of costume sales happen before Halloween.
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You will need to take mobile usage into account when developing your site for SEO. Because a desktop computer monitor and a smartphone are drastically different in size, designing for mobile means that you have to do one of three things:
Build a responsive web design that dynamically adjusts content from desktop format to mobile format
Use dynamic serving to make the mobile experience device specific and control how mobile content is delivered page by page
Create a separate mobile site designed specifically for mobile users
Currently, responsive design is the mobile-friendly configuration recommended by both Google and Bing.
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How you code is an important part of SEO. In a web page’s HTML code, you have two ways to include a link: relative links and absolute links. An absolute link is a link that contains the whole URL of the file you’re linking to. When it appears in code, it looks the same as when it appears in the browser’s address bar:
<a href=“http://www.
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The vast majority of Americans surf the web from their phones. Here’s a quick-reference checklist of mobile web design and optimization tasks. When making your site mobile, make sure you check off the items on this mobile SEO checklist!
Choose a mobile platform
Decide which method of mobile design you’ll implement for your mobile site.
Marketing
Domain names are an important part of your SEO strategy. If you don’t yet have a website domain name registered, you may be surprised to learn that you have a lot of options open to you besides ending your website name with .com. First, a little lesson in domain name anatomy.
A URL is made up of several parts:
You’re probably most familiar with the following top-level domains (TLDs): .
You need to keep SEO in mind when handling secure server problems. You may have pages on your site where users provide sensitive data, such as a credit card number or other type of account information. The Internet solution for protecting sensitive information is to put those web pages on a secure server.
Technically, this means that the web page is on a secure port on the server, where all data is encrypted (converted into a form that cannot be understood except by knowing one or more secret decryption keys).
Marketing
Quality backlinks are valuable to your business website. Links pointing to your site help improve your site’s search engine rankings and bring you new website visitors. But before you can foster healthy link relationships, you need to find out who might want to link to your site in the first place. One way to do this is to research your competitor’s backlinks.
Marketing
In order to rank well in search results for a particular keyword phrase, your website must provide related information that is organized in clear language that search engines understand. When your textual information has been stripped away from its design and layout, does it measure up to be the most relevant aggregate information compared to that of other sites?
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Stable, successful businesses can grow in many directions, including internationally. A solid SEO strategy is essential if you plan this kind of growth. A country or region in Asia, Latin America or Europe might be a good fit for your brand and offerings because of customer needs, culture, language compatibility, and countless other reasons.
Marketing
Some elements that are important for search engine optimization (SEO) are fairly well hidden in the HTML (programming code) of a page. Sure, you can see a web page’s source code by choosing View Source on each page individually, but that’s time consuming. A tool that can pick out just the important SEO elements and display them together, even for multiple pages simultaneously, is much more efficient!
Marketing
Redirecting pages or sites on an Apache web server is very easy and a good way to ensure SEO. You do it by modifying a file on your website called the .htaccess file (note that the actual file name begins with a period). The .htaccess file is a control file that allows server configuration changes on a per-directory basis.
Much like its main search index, Google My Business is the most popular local vertical out there. Submitting your site to Google My Business enables you to show up for local queries, appear on Google Maps for searches there, and, of course, appear for relevant general queries via blended search when Google detects that a local result is appropriate.
Forms are used on websites to collect information from users. Sites use this information to complete transactions and registrations, or to complete other tasks such as submitting an insurance claim online.
When approaching form design for mobile devices, keeping the physical mobile experience in mind is important.
When you include pictures, video, or other non-text elements in your website, you need to describe them in the surrounding text for SEO purposes. This is the key to optimizing your multimedia elements so that search engines know what they’re about. Search engine spiders can’t watch a video or see a picture accurately yet, though they are working on it.
To include a video on your website, the SEO best practice is to embed it within the applicable page. Don’t show it in a pop-up window where it’s isolated from the text describing it, because you want the spiders to see the video as part of the current page.
Placing videos where they count most
Many sites move videos into separate windows with no title or text, but this is a lost opportunity from an SEO perspective.
If you use a hosted e-commerce site, you want to make sure you employ SEO techniques to get noticed. Many service providers make it easy for people use to set up an e-commerce storefront quickly. Online options for proprietors range from joining an online marketplace (like Etsy for retailers and Fiverr for those offering creative services) to building your own website.
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Making your site mobile optimized means thinking about the factors that can help your site rank higher in search engine results pages — such as making sure that you’re using keywords, optimizing for local search, and granting search engine spiders access to your content. Keep reading to discover several mobile-specific tactics that might improve your site’s mobile search engine results rank.
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Videos are good for SEO because they can attract users who wouldn’t otherwise find your website or hear about your brand. One strategy for attracting a bigger video audience is to upload your videos to a video-sharing site such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Metacafe. YouTube is owned by Google and also happens to be the second largest search engine, though every one of these hosting sites provides free hosting that’s easy to use.
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As part of your SEO strategy, think of all the things your users see when they visit your website. From words, pictures, and video to your site’s navigation, they see the content of your website.
Now, get in your mobile mindset and think about how your visitors will experience your website content when they are on mobile devices walking the streets of New York.
One way to check the status of your server for SEO is to run a quick diagnostic utility called a Check Server tool. This utility attempts to crawl your site the same way that a search engine spider does. If the Check Server tool runs into any obstacles that could prevent the spider from indexing your site, it tells you about them on a report that the utility creates.
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Google Analytics is free software that helps website owners understand what’s going on with their online business. Besides collecting and analyzing data, you can set SEO goals — specific actions that you want website visitors to take. As you see how well those goals are being met, you can evaluate how effective your site is and make improvements as needed.
Marketing
After you’ve selected a development approach, created mobile-friendly content, and optimized your website for user experience and SEO, you’re done, right? The truth is that an online marketer’s job is never done. After you’ve built your mobile website to be just how you want it, it’s time to start testing to make sure that everything is working how it should.
Search engines have come up with additional tools called advanced search operators to give power users even more control when searching. Advanced search operators are special terms that you can insert in your search query to find specific types of information that a general search can’t provide.
Several of these operators provide useful tools for SEO experts as well as others who want very specific information or who want to restrict their search to very specific sources.
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Content Experiments is a free tool that’s included within Google Analytics that runs A/B and multivariate tests. Here, you find easy instructions for using this tool because it’s quick, accurate, and free.
Set up your experiment
To start the testing process with Google Analytics Content Experiments, you need to first make sure that the Google Analytics tracking code is installed on all pages you’re using in the test.
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When it comes to constructing your site’s pages and SEO, there’s a hot topic you need to know about: engagement objects. Engagement objects are non-text elements such as images, videos, audio, or interactive elements on a web page that help engage users. Not only do they make your page more interesting to a user, but they are also now becoming increasingly important as a search engine ranking factor.
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Themes are the foundation and keywords are the building blocks of your website SEO campaign. To optimize your website to attract search engine traffic, you need to know the topics and keywords to focus your web pages on. Some great tools for keyword research are available online.
The most popular free keyword research tool might just be Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner.
In order for your XML Sitemap to be useful for SEO, the XML Sitemap should be constructed according to the current Sitemap Protocol format (which is regulated by Sitemaps.org). Sitemap Protocol allows you to tell search engines about the URLs on your website that should be crawled. An XML Sitemap is a document that uses the Sitemap Protocol and contains a list of the URLs for a site.
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The Single Page Analyzer tool can help you improve your site for SEO. It tells you what a web page’s keywords are and computes their density. Keyword density is a percentage indicating the number of times the keyword occurs compared to the total number of words in the page.
When you run a competitor’s page through the Single Page Analyzer, it lets you analyze the on-page factors that help the web page rank well in search engines.
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At the start of 2014, it finally happened: Internet use via mobile devices actually exceeded desktop Internet usage in the U.S. for the first time. Face it, everyone has a smartphone these days, and people are increasingly using those handy devices, tablets like the iPad and the new midsize range of phablets (oversized phone-tablet devices) to go online.
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When you expand into the international market, you have three options when it comes to your site architecture and SEO: one site, multiple sites, or a combination of the two. With one site, you can take advantage of subdomains and subdirectories that point to pages in different languages or are geared toward specific countries.
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Here, you discover how the rest of the world searches the web by discussing several internationally popular search engines. First up is Google. This image shows the French, Japanese, and Brazilian versions of the site.
.com" width="535"/>Google has sites for many international markets besides the flagship .com address.
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When designing with SEO in mind, you may want to focus on making your site user-focused. The process of building your website so that it functions in a way that caters to the specific needs of your customers is called building a user-focused website, or designing for usability. A user-focused website is just as it sounds — a website that is created with a focus on users and their needs.
Your hard work on search engine optimization (SEO) won’t matter if your server isn’t set up to properly deliver pages and codes to search engines and your customers. You have to keep your server happy and healthy. Use this table to diagnose server problems, sort out redirects, and ensure that everything is working as it should, and you’ll minimize SEO problems.
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If the very best location on the web is on page one of the search engines, you need to know the SEO elements that can get you there. A good place to start is with keywords.
Search engines use advanced processes to categorize and analyze keyword usage and other factors in order to figure out what each website is about and bring searchers the web pages they’re looking for.
You will need to consider link equity as part of your SEO strategy. Part of the search engine algorithm (how search engines rank your site) is measuring your link equity to see whether you’re an expert on your subject. In broad terms, more links equals greater expertise, especially when the links are from expert sites that are relevant to your site.
Search engines don’t rank individual pages but they do look for overall site-wide themes in determining how relevant your web page is to a search query. As a general rule, the home page should use more broad-range terms, and the supporting pages should use more specific and targeted terms that help support the home page.
Search engine optimization starts on your own website. Focus on ensuring that your content, server setup, and internal links communicate expertise and professionalism to search engines and visitors. Strive to make your website equal to your competitors first, and then focus on surpassing them. As you work to improve your website, stay organized by using this checklist to coordinate your SEO campaign:
Do keyword research.
The discussion of any SEO code of ethics is like a discussion on politics or religion: There are more than two sides, all sides are strongly opinionated, and seldom do they choose the same path to the same end. Most search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners understand this code of ethics, but not all practitioners practice safe SEO.
Developing an ethical SEO strategy is the best way to ensure that you rank high in search results. Sure, spam might bump your page rank for a little while, but you will be caught, and your site will be penalized or pulled from the index entirely. So why use it?
For too long, many SEO practitioners were involved in an arms race of sorts, inventing technology and techniques in order to achieve the best rankings and get the most clients.
You want to optimize any videos you have on your site for SEO. Video enriches your website by offering media content that search engines and users are increasingly looking for. For quick reference, here’s a summary of the best practices for mixing in video:
Placement: Embed the video on the page it relates to, rather than in a separate window.
Marketing
You’ve probably learned through your SEO research that search engines use keywords to match results to queries. However, that’s not entirely true. Search engines were first developed to use a ranking system that rewards pages by how closely the words in the query match the words on a page. The more exactly the query phrase matches a phrase repeatedly used on your web page the more likely your web page is to be delivered to a searcher as a relevant result.
Marketing
Effective SEO (search engine optimization) is critical for any business that has a website. You want your business’s website to show up on that first page when people search for what you’re selling, and that’s where SEO comes into play. Here you’ll find the key components of a website that should be crafted with care to help a web page rank, the server status codes that help or hinder SEO, and advanced search operators that will have you searching the web like a pro.
Social media optimization aims to improve how a piece of content performs on a social media network. For content posted to YouTube, taking care in crafting the video, the description, and your user profile are all things you might do to optimize a piece of media for discoverability and engagement on YouTube.
Another way social media contributes to online marketing is through its influence on search engine results.
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Letting users contribute content directly to your website is important for SEO and meets at least two goals simultaneously: It adds more content to your site and stimulates higher user engagement. Although you might feel nervous about letting other people write text that appears on your website, the advantages make it definitely worth considering.
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On the surface, creating content doesn’t sound so hard until you sit down and try to write. Your SEO strategy depends on that content. It’s even worse if you’re writing content for what many people might consider a boring industry. The good news is that it is possible to turn potentially boring subjects into good content.
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Your mobile-friendly navigation can take many shapes as part of your SEO strategy. The option that is best for you depends on how complex your navigation needs to be, your conversion goals, and your users’ preferences.
Remember that your site’s navigation needs to help visitors — and search spiders — navigate through your website.
Besides watching your conversions, you still need to keep an eye on the big picture: Is the time, effort, and money you are putting into your SEO project actually bringing you a return? You need to know whether the keywords you are using are actually working out for you. Are they affecting your rankings in the search engines?
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Have you ever noticed that your search results usually differ from another person’s search results — even when you both type the same query into the same search engine? Before you think this means that search engine optimization is completely futile and throw your hands up in exasperation, read on. Here’s what’s really going on.
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You want your SEO strategy to attract a lot of people to your website. But you don’t want just quantity — you want quality traffic. You want to attract visitors who come and stay a while and find what they’re looking for on your site. What you really need are customers. In the world of search engine marketing, site visitors who become customers are called conversions.
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In order to be successful with your SEO strategy, you need to know what search engines really see as keywords. When someone enters a search query, the search engine looks for those words in its index. Here are some general things the search engine looks for:
Web pages that contain the exact phrase.
Web pages that have all the words of the phrase in close proximity to each other.
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