lesson 4 - search engine optimization
TRANSCRIPT
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Effective Basic SEOSearch Engine Optimization Techniques
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
What is SEO?
• Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's search results.
• Usually this is registered as a ‘free’ activity in that paying money to the search engine does not effect the ranking of your page.
• Simply speaking, it answers the question: ‘How do I get higher on a search engine?’
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Monitor your search standings
Use tools such as
- Pagerank
- Alexa
- Many others.
To monitor your ranking.
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Choose your keywords wisely
• Think about the keywords that should be important to you and add them to your webpages.
• Think about what the user would search for to find information that your site contains.
• Think about similar terms to yours (use a thesaurus) and use those terms also.
• Use these keywords on headings, titles, URLs, plain text
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Take Care of your Word – Keyword Ratio
• TFxIDF formula.
• Too many terms will negate the others.
• Too many of the same term can also be dangerous but is less risky
• Focus on search phrases, not single keywords
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Links
• Link to yourself. Try to link different pages within your site to each other.
• THE MOST RELIABLE WAY TO BOOST VISIBILITY ON SEARCH:
GET OTHERS (reliable sites) TO LINK TO YOU. THE HIGHER THE RATINGS
OF THESE STES THE BETTER. (REMEMBER TO RETURN THE FAVOUR)
• Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site
• Check the link to your home page throughout your site
• Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally (not ‘click here’)
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Create a sitemap
• An effective sitemap (and generally just any sitemap) will help a crawler / spider to find the contents of your webpage.
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Create user and computer friendly URLs
• Use words for URLs, even for subcategories.
E.g :
www.hotels.com/spain/bungallows/
Not
www.htls.com/sp/bn/
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Avoid FLASH
Enough said…
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Up to date
• New content helps your site.
• Keep content up to date always!
• Add material using a blog really helps boost traffic
• Keep all your antispam and virus checks up to date
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Use social Media
• Osting links to your site and promoting it on social meda really helps and these act as links!
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Pay attention to your images
• Use Alt text to also describe your images. They will also be searched
• Use the surrounding text close to an image to describe the context
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Avoid
• Keyword Stuffing
• Hidden Text
• Cloaking (content presented to the search engine spider is different from that
presented to the user's browser)
• Paid Links
• Link Spam
• Link Farms
• Piracy / DMCA Takedowns
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Use meta data in your HTML
<head><meta charset="UTF-8"><meta name="description" content="Free Web tutorials"><meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript"><meta name="author" content="Hege Refsnes"></head>
Fernando Loizides 2015 - Information Architecture SEO
Also remember
• Design with SEO in mind
• Submit through Google’s regular submission form (this is online)
• Open up a PPC account (AdWords etc) and pay [using the right way] for traffic.