Chirag Chamoli

I am writing this post for multiple reasons.

1. Refresh my Search engine optimization( SEO) basics
2. A lot of startups ask me
3. Basic SEO is not something you must be paying for.
4. SEO is important

So without wasting your time, let’s dive in.

What is SEO

You’ll see a lot of people talking about SEO as if it is some thing magical. Do a google search of  ”Basic SEO” and bam you have 23,900,000 results (one more just got added :) ). Just remember SEO is dead simple and you can do most of it yourself.

Note: I’ll be refering to Google search alot but same is valid for all search engines bing, yahoo, ….

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

SEO Best Practice

• Pick a domain name that matches your primary keyword.
• Make sure every page has a unique title and H1 tag that matches your primary keyword objectives for that page.
• Make sure the homepage links to most, if not all, other pages ( to start with).
• Make sure every page links back to the homepage and many other secondary pages using appropriate anchor text.
• Register on every social media site that makes sense for you. Include a link to the site in your profile. It helps if the username you choose is a primary keyword. for instance on this blog the primary author and the author name is same.
• Link the social media profiles to each other where applicable. Fill them out as fully as possible.
• Actually use the social networks. More activity will create more pages of content with more links to the profiles, in turn passing more  links to your website.
• Claim your site using Google Webmaster Tools. Submit your sitemap (preferably one that is automatically updated).
• Do a Google Search for every one of your top keywords. Figure out how to get a link from any site showing in the top 20 results.
• Do not under any circumstance pay someone for a link. Do not offer or accept offers to trade links.
• Avoid linking out to shady/spammy websites of any kind.
• Study the keywords your competitors target (if they use meta-keywords like idiots, you can just lift those from the source).
• Write a blog, or find some other way to continually add new content. This adds to the content you have indexed, but is also another opportunity for links. Long term strategy right here.
• Build a Twitter client, wordpress theme, or something else that people will link to and use with persistent links to whatever you decide is in the by line.
• Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you.
• Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most)
• Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul’s, dl’s)
• Get links from other websites (best case scenario: link’s anchor text is your keyword). Higher the PageRank of the linking site the better. NoFollow’s don’t count.
• Don’t use subdomains (i.e., put your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com) That will give you a good start. From there, start a blog with interesting content, and submit it around. The idea with the blog is that the posts are more interesting than your site’s copy, so people will actually link to it.
• Linking to your own pages will always increase the value of the link.
• SEO is not just a ranking exercise, it’s a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~60 characters of you
• Speed matters. Google is on record about this.
• Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. They’ll regularly pull it down from your server so as you add pages to your site, Google will know to index them. They’ll tell you how many pages you have submitted, and how many are indexed. Check if your site has crawl errors. Check out the HTML suggestions. Google will point out the pages which are missing title tags, which have duplicate tags, short descriptions. Lots of other information in there, including page load times.
• Pageank is logarithmic, a link from a higher pagerank site will have more of an effect than one from a lower pagerank site.
• Google often say that they use more than 200 ranking factors. External link text matters way more than anything else.
• Widget bait – Allow simple embedding of your content/app, widgets are great strategies .
• Don’t pay any for any general SEO service.
• Beware of nofollow links.  Nofollow links are links with a special attribute that tell search engines to ignore them.  To check a link, view the source of that page in your Web browser and look for rel=nofollow in it.  You don’t want to waste time getting links on sites that use this attribute.  The canonical examples are popular blogs, twitter, facebook and Wikipedia.  Don’t waste your time submitting comments and editing Wikipedia articles with your links because it won’t help you.
• Don’t ignore the long-tail content. People often concentrate on getting rankings for specific keywords. You can be just as successful building lots of pages with unique content that end up ranking high on the most random things.  Often such pages will be the only things that come up.
• Less is more.  Ranking is distributed across your site, so less pages, less links on them, and less text on them will concentrate your ranking potential on what is left.
• FYI: The typical search query is composed of 2 to 5 words
• Navigation: a) don’t use frames of any kind, b) don’t make javascript menus, use CSS instead, c) stick to very UL, LI simple nav.
• Don’t use Flash: if you’re going to use it, make sure it is under a correctly formed web page. Use very very  very sparely.
• Robots.txt: this file, which should be findable under the root of your website, provides a search map to the bots about what you would like them to index. Find out more at Robotstxt.org
• Make a Facebook/G+ page for your business. Better still, make a Facebook application.
• Make interesting, non-gimmicky videos about your product, how to use it, and research about your areas of expertise. Youtube is best at SEO
• Read this if you have some time, we have covered most of it anyways.

Write good content and we can discuss this more here.