Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Important SEO terms and guide


What is a website?
It is set of hosted webpages which gets served in browser with a domain name.
Each website has its own unique name called domain name, and a hosting space on hosting server to store the webpages.

What is a keyword?
The search term/query we enter into the search engine for searching something is called a keyword.
Different keywords have different monthly search volume and competition.

What is keyword density?
Keyword density is how many times a keyword appears in a article/content .e.g. if a keyword appears 3 times in 100 word article then its density is 3%
Keyword research can be done using keyword research tools and most popular is google keyword planner. You need a gmail email id to access this tool.
https://adwords.google.co.in/KeywordPlanner
The other keyword research tools are www.wordtracker.com, http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/

Blackhat SEO is SEO practices and tactics done not as per search engine guidelines to inflate the search engine rankings. E.g. keyword stuffing, doorway pages, cloaking

The search engine result page (SERP) for any keyword/query displays list of websites, where each entry of the list consists of title, url and meta description (or a piece of content sometimes).

Onpage SEO is the changes we make on the website for the SEO purpose. Following are the changes we can make in the website for the SEO purpose.

Title tag is a html tag to be entered in the code of the webpage in the section. It can be of around 66 characters. You have to make a meaningful sentence containing keywords in the title and having brand name or business name at the end.
e.g. <title>Manufacture of plastic containers | Niranjan Plastics </title> Manufacture of plastic containers | Niranjan Plastics

Meta description is a html meta tag to be entered in the section of the webpage. It can be of around 166 characters. Make meaningful sentence containing keywords for the meta description.
e.g. <META name="DESCRIPTION" content="We are dealer of calcined alumina, aluminium oxide, organoclay gallant and graphite powder in India ">

Meta keywords are html meta tag where you can enter few of your targeted keywords for the page. Search engines do not use these as a ranking factor.
e.g. <META name="KEYWORDS" content="calcined alumina, aluminum oxide, organoclay gellant, graphite powder, calcium carbonate in India ">

You can view source code of a webpage by pressing CTRL and U simultaneously while viewing a webpage in the browser.

Image optimization
1. Image file name should be relevant to the image an in lieu of space you should use hyphen (-).
e.g. plastic-container.jpg
2. Image should be given a proper and relevant alt tag in html code describing the image.
e.g.<img src="images/sewage-pump.jpg" align="center" width="170" height="255"alt="Submersible sewage pump">

URL renaming and rewriting
URL of a webpage should be SEO friendly containing keywords where ever possible.
e.g. suppose there are 3 products on the website having the webpage name as
product1.html
product2.html
product3.html
These pages/urls can be given relevant product name as
narrow-mouth-jerry-cans.html
open-top-round-drums.html
narrow-mouth-round-drums.html
Instead of space you have to use hypen(-) in the file name as shown above.

URL rewriting is creating seo friendly urls same as above at server end without actually renaming the file name of the webpages.

Anchor text
Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.
e.g. Blogging tips
In the above the phrase “Blogging tips” is anchor text and when you click on it, it will go to the website www.blogtraffictips.net

Heading tag
The <h1> to <h6> tags are used to define HTML headings. <h1> defines the most important heading
e.g.
In html code heading tag looks like the following
<h1>Types of plastic containers </h1>
The text becomes bold and large in the visible content due to heading tag.

Bold and italic tag
Text in the content can be made bold and italic using html bold and italic tag
e.g.
<b> this text will appear in bold </b>
<i> this text will appear in italic </i>

What is pagerank?
Pagerank is a rank given by Google between 0 to 10 to a webpage based on quality and quantity of the inbound links to the webpage. Higher the pagerank better for its ranking in search engines.
You can check pagerank of a url by online tool or browser addon.
e.g. http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Robots.txt
robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct search engine robots, how to crawl and index pages on their website.
A example of a typical robots.txt file
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Here first line allows all search engines to crawl the website
Second line does not disallow any url from crawling.
Disallow: /products.html
The above line will block the page products.html from crawling.

Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users.
XML sitemaps are used to submit to search engines. You can submit xml sitemap using webmaster tools.
You can create and download XML sitemap at website https://www.xml-sitemaps.com

404 error
The HTTP 404 Not Found Error means that the webpage you were trying to reach could not be found on the server.
This means that the webpage is not present or you have typed url incorrectly.
When 404 errors occurs it can be redirected to some other webpage.

301/302 redirect
Status 301 means that the resource (webpage or website) is moved permanently to a new location.
Status 302 means that the resource is temporarily located somewhere else.

How to register a site/domain name and host.
You can book domain name through a domain registrar company/website.

You need to search for the domain name you want and can book it for one year or more
You can book hosting webspace as per your requirement through hosting provider companies

Alexa report
The free alexa report about a website gives you its popularity, its alexa rank based on traffic, audience geography, visitors engagement, top keywords from search engines, its inbound links, audience demographics and more. Paid version will give more details.