SEO Tutorial

Search Engine Optimization Tutorial Introduction

Welcome to our SEO Tutorial, here you will find answers to common and not so common search engine optimization (SEO) questions. Unlike a lot of SEO companies we do the SEO research ourselves, avoiding the guesswork and speculation so many SEO consultants rely upon!

You will not find contradictory SEO information within our tutorial like you tend to find in so many SEO forums and SEO newsgroups filled with clueless amateur SEOs.

SEO Can Equal High Traffic From Search Engines

To obtain maximum search engine rankings, it is essential to understand how your target audience is searching for information via search engines like Google. When your potential visitors and customers use search engines like Google and Yahoo to find products and online services (or just information, spit ), they type a set of words or phrases, commonly called keywords or keyword phrases into the search box.

For the target audience to find your website on the search engines, your pages should contain keyword phrases that match what your target audience is actually typing into search queries (we like to state the obvious at SEO Gold).

For example if a page on your site is about an “SEO Tutorial” the phrase (SEO Tutorial) and its derivatives (i.e. Ethical SEO Tutorial, Search Engine Optimization Tutorial etc…) should be used throughout the text, anchor text of links and other important areas of the web pages code. Also individual keywords of a multiple word phrase should be used, so in the above example the words SEO and Tutorial should be used as much as possible throughout the text.

Is Your Website SEO Optimized?

The above SEO advice to use your keywords might seem like common sense, but take 30 minutes to read through your web sites important pages before continuing this SEO tutorial and ask yourself “do they shout about your product or service, are they optimized for the search engines?”

If not you’ll find this Search Engine Optimization Tutorial an essential aid to the future SEO success of your web site.

Quick SEO Tip – note above how rather than writing “If not you’ll find this Tutorial useful” we added the important phrase “Search Engine Optimization Tutorial” another derivative of SEO Tutorial. Being long winded is a prerequisite to good SEO copyrighting!

What’s Covered in our SEO Tutorial

When a search engine spider like Googlebot analyzes a web page, it determines relevancy based on the search engines algorithm, a formula that calculates how web pages are ranked in that search engines results pages (SERPs). The most important search engine (generates most traffic), Google bases it’s algorithm on at least 100 factors with both on page SEO factors; body text, page title, headers etc… and off page SEO factors; text links to the page, especially the anchor text and PageRank (PR) of text links ranking highly.

As a firm of SEO consultants we’ve analyzed and reanalyzed almost every aspect of the search engine algorithms and this SEO Tutorial will reveal the secrets of the major search engines.

Ethical and Unethical SEO Techniques

There has been a lot of discussion in the SEO community/forums about ethical and unethical SEO techniques (or whitehat and blackhat SEO). We do not consider ourselves ethical nor unethical SEO consultants and so this SEO tutorial is neither ethical or blackhat. We research ALL aspects of search engine optimization using our own domains (it would be unethical to use our clients sites for SEO tests) and have in the pursuit of SEO knowledge had more than our fair share of domains penalized/banned (most by Google). Through this free tutorial we will deal with both the recommended SEO techniques (no to low risk) and the not so recommended SEO techniques (possibly unethical to some SEO firms and high risk) detailing potential risks and rewards. It will be up to you which search engine optimization techniques you employ to your website ( would suggest whitehat SEO techniques since a banned site makes little revenue!).

On with the SEO Tutorial

Let’s start at the very beginning. You have a great idea for a business; you’ve researched the market and ideally have a business plan in place so you have a good idea what you need to do to make your business a success. Since you are reading this SEO tutorial it’s reasonable to assume your business needs a web site that you want to rank highly in the search engines (especially Google).

One of the first things you have to do is choose a domain and a business name for your web site. Even if you have your business name and domain name etc… already we advise you don’t skip the first section since there are some very important concepts and SEO techniques that we’ll be introducing.

SEO Tutorial Subjects Covered

1. Business and Domain Name Choice : You might think what’s the name of my business got to do with search engine optimization (SEO)? If you choose the correct business and domain name in the first place it makes the whole optimization process so much easier….

2. WebSite Optimization : In this section of our SEO Tutorial we’ll broadly introduce on site optimization, how to optimize your web site for better search engine rankings with good Google rankings our primary goal….

3. Title Optimization : The TITLE element of your web page (found within the HEAD) is very important, probably the most important part of a page (especially for placement in Google and Yahoo) and should ideally be optimized for a small number of keywords or phrases….

4. Meta Tags Optimization : There used to be a time when the contents of a pages Meta Tags was very important, it was around about the same time the Berlin Wall was still standing!! Today meta tags hold little value to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)….

5. Anchor Text Optimization : Google (and to a lesser degree other search engines) heavily weight it’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) towards the anchor text of links to a page. This can be demonstrated by looking at extreme examples where a pages high ranking can only be attributed to anchor text and no other SEO factors….

6. SERPs Competition : Your websites Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are determined by various SEO factors, on page content (your body text, the title element etc…), anchor text of links to your web sites pages, the search engines algorithms tweak of the day and of course the number of websites/pages competing for that search phrase. In this section of the SEO Tutorial we’ll deal with estimating the number of competitors for a SERP….

7. PageRank PR : PageRank or PR for short seems to be misunderstood by so many that this part of our SEO Tutorial we will try to explain the ins and outs of PageRank without getting too technical….

8. Google Sandbox Effect : A lot has been written about the so called Google Sandbox Effect in SEO forums over the last year or so, but not much of it is backed up by reality or facts. Find out what the sandbox really is….