8 Things Every Beginner SEO Should Know

Posted on by Jordan in SEO

I’ve recently been learning SEO as part of a new job role I’m undertaking, I was surprised at how broad the subject was and indeed how much their is to learn.

At the time of writing, I’ve managed to get a site from page 12 in Google to the top of page 3 in a little over 3 weeks for a relatively competitive keyword, which I’m quite happy with!

Here is a little list of eight things (not in any order or anything) I think any aspiring SEO’er should know:

1. Titles!

You may think the titles of each of your web pages are for aesthetic purposes only, but that couldn’t be further from the truth!

The keywords you use on your page titles play a major role in how / where you appear in search engine rankings, for example:

Your company ‘Lovely Websites Inc.’ have designed a great new website, it’s even got ajax on it, yeah, ajax. Now you may feel naming your pages ‘Lovely Website Inc. | Homepage’, ‘Lovely Website Inc. | Portfolio’ etc will look great, and that may be the case. Unfortunately however, this won’t have any affect in helping your site get found for your desired keywords.

If ‘Lovely Websites Inc’ was based in London, UK, it would be far more beneficial to use your services and location as your title, i.e. ‘Website Design London | Lovely Websites Inc’ as this will associate your site with those keywords.

Try and put yourself in the shoes of a customer searching for your services on the internet, and what they’d put into Google when searching for your products.

Using carefully chosen keywords throughout the titles, content and headers will help your rankings for those keywords in search engines.

2. HTML document names

It’s tempting to give your html documents straightforward names, such as your portfolio page ‘portfolio.htm’ but that doesn’t help search engines all that much. Try and use your keywords in the name of the document, so for example if it’s your portfolio page, why not name your document ‘your-name-portfolio.htm’ and this should help you rank a little higher for your name if it is also used elsewhere in your site.

The same applies to blog posts, some blogs are set up to display their dynamic URL’s as ‘journal.php?post=28′, this again doesnt help Google. If you’re using WordPress make sure your permalinks are configured correctly to aid the search engines in crawling your website.

3. In-Links

the links into your website have began to play a major part in search engine rankings, the more popular and trusted the site that is linking to your site then the more important it is.

Gone are the days when simply placing your website on link farms and directory sites would get your site higher in the rankings, they will probably now have the opposite effect and rank your site lower in search results.

Try and get high quality, contextual links into your site and don’t forget the anchor text. If the anchor text of the link to your website is one of your keyword phrases then Google etc will associate your website with that phrase if enough high quality websites do the same i.e. Instead of a link to your site being ‘lovely website Inc’ use ‘web design London’ or other desired keywords.

As well as links to your site from other websites, take a look at links pointing to your site from the rest of your own web pages. For example, if you haven’t got additional navigation in your footer pointing back to the homepage, about us page etc, insert these on every page and that is instanly a lot more in-pointing links for your site.

4. Your content

Getting links from other websites, which I mentioned above, is one of the hardest and most important aspects of SEO, as you have to have some content that people will find interesting enough to want to link to or pass on.

This is why the content on your site must be fresh, original and above all, linkable! Make sure if you write content and it links in to other peoples content, then let them know and they may just return the favour!

Look at what people are writing about, what’s on the front page of digg, delicious etc and write about these popular topics. Writing link-bait is one of the hardest, but most profitable things an author can do.

5. Sitemaps

As I mentioned previously, in-pointing links can also aid SEO. Having a sitemap on your site can provide an index of all of your webpages, this will not just aid in search engine terms, but it will also help a user navigate your site when looking for low-level pages in your website.

As well as a ‘physical’ sitemap that a user can use on your site, it’s important that you submit a sitemap.XML to Google so they can thoroughly crawl and index it. Take a look at Webmaster tools for more information on this.

6. Out-links

There is a lot of debate in the SEO world that having a lot of links out of your website can have a detremental effect on your own. I tend to think that without links pointing out, you dont have much chance of getting links from other sites unless you’re constantly writing new content.

Don’t go overboard but by all means, provide your readers with plenty of outgoing links, preferably to great, interesting websites!

7. H1, H2, H3….

If you have the ability to edit the headings on your page then it’s certainly beneficial to do so, these hold more rank the ‘bigger’ the heading, H1 ranks first, then H2, then H3 etc.

Try and use your keywords as many times as possible in your headings, but don’t spam or the search engines will punish you!

8. Having a standards-friendly website

Although this doesn’t directly affect rankings (i.e. If you alter your website to be standards efficient you won’t suddenly be top of page 1 for your chosen keyword), you can still benefit from having a website that meets standards. If your site isn’t, you risk Google not being able to crawl certain parts, or even all of your website!

This is a very quick and dirty list meant for people wanting to find out the absolute bare bones of SEO. Got any feedback or further suggestions for SEO beginners? Feel free to add some hints and tips in the comments below!

Look out for more SEO related posts soon on a web design blog!

Tags: google, search engine optimisation, SEO

55 Responses to “8 Things Every Beginner SEO Should Know”

Allen - Montreal Web Design

13. Mar, 2009

Being a Montreal SEO company, yes the 8 items are good. Content is golden, content is the most important rule.

Allen
Adeo Internet Marketing
Gelay Jamtsho

13. Mar, 2009

You got that one right!!! SEO is a very broad subject, and there seems that there is never enough one can do. Nice post.
listorbit

13. Mar, 2009

I would like add one more to this informative blog – Keyword Analysis
Jordan

13. Mar, 2009

Allen

I agree with the content sentiments, with good content comes good links hopefully. If you write content that someone wants to read, chances are that person will pass it on.

Gelay

I’ve only been learning a relatively short time and the sheer amount of information to intake is staggering! As ever though, there are so many resources on the internet for learning.

Listorbit

Very right, Keyword Analysis is vital to any SEO project. I’m using some very useful software at the moment to aid me in my Keyword research, could you recommend any that you perhaps have used in the past?
Traffic Geyser

17. Mar, 2009

I still believe that good and quality content are one of the most important factors of SEO, also getting quality backlinks are far more better than quantity of backlinks…
Lily

17. Mar, 2009

I usually don’t post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful!
Jordan

17. Mar, 2009

Traffic Geyser

Great tips there, do you have any set techniques for getting quality backlinks?

Lily

Thanks for reading!
Evelyn Vincent

18. Mar, 2009

Regarding Tip #8 Having a Standards-friendly website… readers would probably like to know if they go to W3C Validator http://validator.w3.org and type in their site URL they can “see” where their standards are in error or are not up to standards par.
Jordan

19. Mar, 2009

Thanks for that Evelyn, a very useful link
T-Law

22. Mar, 2009

Thanks
Abdurrahman Gemei

24. Mar, 2009

This is epic! Bookmarked!
Jordan

25. Mar, 2009

Thanks Abdurrahman, much appreciated!
Shaun

26. Mar, 2009

Very informative thanks. I never knew the actual html document titles would have a bearing on it. Do the internal folder names have any effect?
Rick Cooper, The Attraction Marketing Expert

26. Mar, 2009

Thanks for the primer on SEO strategies. This is a great summary!
Keli Whidden

26. Mar, 2009

Great information! It is a broad subject, I am slowly immersing in it and learned a couple of new things from your post…particularly the html titles info.
Jordan

26. Mar, 2009

Shaun

I’m not sure if Google count the holding folder name as importantly as the HTML document name but it’s certainly ‘noticed’ by Google when searching, you can test this out by searching yourself and noticing what is bolded in the URL name in search results.

Rick

Thanks for that

Keli

It’s a massive subject certainly, Google are always changing the algorithms they use which keeps the SEO’s busy!
Moksha Solutions

26. Mar, 2009

thanks will give a try my page rank is 2/10 for some months now and its really upset me. i hope i can improve it. thanks again
seo

27. Mar, 2009

nice article and nice web page
ny seo company

28. Mar, 2009

well these are all fairly nice gestures if you want to rank high but you should add more.
Jordan

28. Mar, 2009

NY

I could certainly add more, however this is intended to be a very rough list for a beginner. I could sit and write thousands and thousands of words but there are many books available to learn the advanced techniques.
RaiulBaztepo

28. Mar, 2009

Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
Cole

03. Apr, 2009

Great write-up for us new to SEO. I have been looking for ways to get the word out for my new website…need to get viewership up from 5 per day!

Look forward to reading your articles in the future as well as your back posts!

Cole
Webbo

04. Apr, 2009

Thanks for the great overview of the SEO basics.

Any chance that you could do a follow up on Keyword Analysis, and the best tools/software and techniques to use in Keyword research?

I am just about to undertake this task for my websites redesign and would like to know what software to use so that I can see how often certain keyword phrases are been searched + any other tips you might think are helpful to a novice like myself.
Jordan

05. Apr, 2009

Webbo, thanks for the comment.

I was thinking about writing some kind of Keyword Analysis post, like SEO though it is a massive area and a blog post can only cover the bare bones.

Off the top of my head though, I can recommend Market Samurai and the Google Keyword tool which you can through their Adwords service.

Keep an eye out for a more detailed blog post about this though!
Web Design Gloucestershire

16. Apr, 2009

We take a very ground up approach to designing websites for our clients. We ensure that they are search engine friendly from the start using tableless WC3 Standards Compliant coding practises, with well structured titles and tags. We then concentrate on the more long term SEO; content generation, link building etc. But keyword research is probably the key ingredient, best off getting this right from the start of the project and letting your client know how competitive their keywords will be.
rebeccazadeng

21. May, 2009

8 things mentioned for every beginner of SEO is very informative
Jordan

18. Jul, 2009

Thanks for the feedback guys!
web designers

27. Jul, 2009

Great information provided, solid tips that should be followed by every aspiring SEO.
Husien Adel [Egydes]

02. Aug, 2009

Nice & SImple SEO Tutorial Thanks Alot for Sharing ..
BTW what the tools to analyze keywords u rec for me ?
.-= Husien Adel [Egydes]´s last blog ..التدوين العربي بين التهميش والتحفيز =-.
Jordan

03. Aug, 2009

I’ll be publishing a post about keyword analysis in the coming week Husien, keep an eye out on the blog
Mike @ Toronto SEO

03. Aug, 2009

Well…really useful article for beginners – no doubt!
A couple of notices if you don’t mind:
1. use only ONE H1 tag per page. It’s funny to see how people use this valuable knowledge inserting H1 here and there countless times. SE should clearly understand what is teh main keyword of the page and it’s obviously H1 so use it once per page. also put it at the very beginning (top) of the page

2. don’t forget STRONG and B tags which are also very important. ans also – do not abuse them =)

Good luck!!!
Michael

05. Aug, 2009

Thanks for the writeup! It’s good to have these, especially since I’m fairly new to the SEO world.
Gareth Botha

05. Aug, 2009

Great article, thanks so much! This is very helpful
matrix

01. Oct, 2009

I agree with listorbit. keyword analysis is one of most important things seo work.
Boston

05. Oct, 2009

You for get to talk about keyword analysis.
Basic Websites

02. Dec, 2009

I think another important factor in SEO is the name of your website. For example yours – awebdesignblog is well chosen as you will rank more highly for having your keywords in your website name.
mp-design

07. Dec, 2009

content,content,content,….good content
Jordan

22. Dec, 2009

Some great points in the comments here.

@Mike: I’ve had some success using two H1′s although it’s best to use one where possible I agree.
FuggyFoo

06. Jan, 2010

> 5. Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are brilliant and I’ve sometimes noticed near instant results from them.

But I’m very skeptical of HTML sitemaps, sure they help the user but to a search engine they are very low value. Unlike natural links throughout your site from navigation and internal page links they offer little substance, they’re as trustworthy as Keyword Meta tags (to a SE) and the SE’s should already be indexing your well coded easy to navigate pages.

Other than to aid human users the only time I can think an HTML sitemap will help search engines is if your code is a bag of crap and they have a hard time getting around the site any other way.

Have Google ever confirmed normal HTML sitemaps are of significant use to a site owner for SEO? In my years of web design I can’t say I’ve ever noticed them do anything helpful in this respect. XML sitemaps on the other hand are brilliant.
Jordan

06. Jan, 2010

I find the only use for an HTML sitemap is an extra couple of links back to the various pages, as well as the obvious usability advantages.

I agree with the XML sitemaps though, the WordPress plugin is the first thing I install on any WordPress project.
Caddis Tech SEO

29. Mar, 2010

Very nice beginners guide. I think you touched on all the most important aspects here! Linking is huge!
TechyMinds

30. Mar, 2010

nice post… very useful for a beginner
Emma@chicago web design company

13. Apr, 2010

Great post. I think it should be read by every SEO savy person on net. Very informative and useful. Thanks
rickzwebz

22. Sep, 2010

Thanks. Always need as much SEO information as I can get.
Some of my pages rank high, others don’t show. Have to work on it more.
Lee

11. Oct, 2010

Good tips here
Sphamandla

21. Apr, 2011

Interesting I didn’t know that H1 ranks higher than H2 and so forth. As you mentioned that out links to important and use full sites is also important
Valpo Designer

24. Apr, 2011

Great list, had to compliment you on keeping it simple, short and to the point.. Very well written, no rambling, The only part i feel you left out is keyword analysis. Like everything else web related, Google also provides us all with awesome keyword analysis tools free of charge, so we can target our contents better and see how certain words perform in searches for our industry’s products/services on a local and global level.
Masoud

16. May, 2011

nice article ! thank you
j_hatfield

07. Aug, 2011

Great article, I also thought this one was helpful for SEO as well: http://webdesignledger.com/tips/10-easy-steps-to-become-a-better-web-designer
Sanju

21. Jun, 2012

Very useful for beginners !!