Lesson1 SEO basics

Gradberry Academy
Lesson 1:
Getting
Started
with SEO

Image Source:http://www.fireflimedia.com/images/section_search_engine_marketing.png

SEO terminology
• SEO =Search Engine Optimization – is a methodology of strategies,
techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website
by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the SERP (search engine results
page) -- including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
• Comprise of organic search listings
• SEM = Search Engine Marketing – A form of Internet marketing where you
pay for clicks, placements, and advertising for your website’s visibility.
• Google Analytics = Service offering traffic measurement and interactive
reporting for small and large sites, which includes visitor tracking, navigation
analysis and traffic segmentation.
• Comprise of paid listings

The Gradberry Academy: Copyright Gradberry.com 2013: All Rights reserved.

SEO terminology


SEO Vs SEM

A Few factors to consider:Immediacy (how quickly you want your
website to be on the SERP and Budget (is there a budget for a full-
fledged SEM campaign?)

Best practices: To use a combination of SEO and SEM strategies to
maximize number of visitors being directed to the site.


SEO terminology
Search engines have two major functions - crawling & building an index,
and providing answers by calculating relevancy & serving results.

• Crawling: Through links, search engines’ automated robots, called
“crawlers,” or “spiders” can reach the many billions of interconnected
documents.
• Indexing: Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to
facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. An alternate name for
the process in the context of search engines designed to find web
pages on the Internet is web indexing.


Image source: http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/how-search-engines-work-nutshell-version_51031c668bfe0.png


SEO terminology
Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway
system.

The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the
stops along the way,
so they use the best path available – links.


SEO terminology
Search engines are answer machines.
It is both “relevance” and “importance” that the process of SEO is meant
to influence.
• To a search engine, relevance means more than simply finding a page
with the right words.
• Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as
popularity – the more popular a site, page or document, the more
valuable the information contained in the site
Popularity and relevance are determined by algorithms.


SEO terminology
• Linkbuilding: The process of establishing relevant, inbound links to your website which help your
website achieve higher ranking with the major search engines and drive targeted traffic to your
site.
• Anchor text: Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it is often
blue and underlined, such as this link to the gradberry homepage.


SEO terminology
• White Hat SEO: refers to the usage of SEO strategies,
techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience
opposed to search engines and completely follows
search engine rules and policies. For example, a Web
site that is SEO optimized, yet focuses on relevancy and
organic ranking is considered to be optimized using
White Hat SEO practices. Some examples of White Hat
SEO techniques include using keywords and keyword
analysis, backlinking, link building to improve link
popularity, and writing content for human readers


SEO terminology

• Black Hat SEO: refers to the use of aggressive SEO
strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on
search engines and not a human audience, and usually
does not obey search engines rules. Some examples of
Black Hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing,
invisible text and doorway pages.


Common Misconceptions About SEO
• “We will improve your site visibility on search engines in 1 weeks time”, if you own google and Bing
its quite possible to do this and if not, in some cases you wont be even able to index your home
page in 1 week.
• “The more money you give us the higher your page rank in the search engine”, this is a tricky one,
while its possible to increase the visibility in the short term using Adwords and SEM, in the long
term this is impossible even if you had wads of cash in hand.
• “We guarantee your website will be #1 on google”, SEO company’s are usually boasting about how
they have priority over everyone when it comes to pushing your website for submission on a search
engine, well unfortunately they don’t, everyone uses Google Webmaster and the same submit URL
system.
• “We provide error free and genuine back linking”, anyone who’s trying so hard to sell you
something is probably just faking it, they will probably post backlinks to your website on parked
domains which will in the end just ruin your search rank
• Look out for people making promises in SEO, you can’t promise anything in SEO it’s a time
consuming process and the results vary from website to website, this solely depends on your
websites content quality, structure and relativity.


SEO Tools – Google Webmaster
Google Webmaster tools is a free online service provided by google that helps you
see what google thinks about your website in terms of search terms and structure. It
can be accessed from https://www.google.com/webmasters/ ,all you need to sign
up is a gmail account.

Some of the features that Google Webmaster offers:
• Configuring geographical targets
• Viewing incoming search queries
• Setting the crawl rates for the googlebot
• Checking both internal and external links to your site
• Detecting Malware (e.g if your site has been compromised with unwanted
advertising)


SEO Tools – Google Webmaster
Below is a screen shot of the google webmaster dashboard


SEO Tools – Google Trends
Google Trends is a great tool that can help in preplanning your site
content. Google Trends lets you see how often a particular search-term
is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of
the world. Some key metrics to look at in Google Trends:

• Related Terms
• Regional Interest
• Forecasts
• Hot Searches


SEO Tools – Google Trends
Below is an example of the google trend results dashboard:


SEO Tools – Bing Link Submission
Bing is ranked is the second most used search engine on the internet.
While Bing also offers a webmaster tool just like google, you can easily
submit links on http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url .


SEO Tools – Creating an XML Sitemap
Google and Bing Webmaster tools both require a sitemap submission to
increase search indexes. One of the fastest ways of creating a site map is
using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ sitemap builder. It has 4 easy
steps and generates your sitemap so that you can submit it onto your
webmaster dashboard easily.


Lesson1 SEO basics

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