Introduction: What is SEO?

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

This book covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

1. How Search Engines Work

Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about.

This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider. Spiders follow links from one page to another and crawl everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.

The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

2. Differences Between the Major Search Engines

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize for them carefully.

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.

Keywords: The Most Important Item in SEO

Keywords are the most important SEO element for every search engine, they are what search strings are matched against. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is thus the first and most crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your time and money. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best.

1. Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For

It seems that the time when you could easily top the results for a one-word search string is centuries ago. Now, when the Web is so densely populated with sites, it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search string. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more realistic goal.

For instance, If you have a site about dogs, do NOT try and optimize for the keyword "dog" or "dogs". Instead you could try and focus on keywords like "dog obedience training", "small dog breeds", "homemade dog food", "dog food recipes" etc. Success for very popular one-two word keywords is very difficult and often not worth the trouble, it's best to focus on less competitive highly specific keywords.

The first thing you need to do is come up with keywords that describe the content of your website. Ideally, you know your users well and can correctly guess what search strings they are likely to use to search for you. Run your initial list of keywords by the ‘Google keyword Suggestion tool’, you'll get a related list of keywords, shortlist a couple of keywords that seem relevant and have a decent global search volume.

When choosing the keywords to optimize for, you need to consider not only the expected monthly number of searches but also the relevancy of these keywords to your website. Although narrow keywords get fewer searches they are a lot more valuable than generic keywords because the users would be more interested in your offerings. Let’s say you have a section on your website where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a dog. You might discover that the "Adopt German shepherd" key phrase gives you better results than a keyword like "German shepherd dogs". This page is not of interest to current German shepherd owners but to potential German shepherd owners only. So, when you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site.

2. Keyword Density

After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density although no longer a very important factor in SEO is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 2-5% for your major keywords. What this means is that if you have a page of 100 words, your main keyword should appear 2-5 times on that page.

Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords – 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.

3. Keywords in Special Places

Keywords are very important not only as quantity but as quality as well – i.e. if you have more of your keywords appearing in the title, headings, and few first paragraphs – this counts more than if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page. The reason is that these sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the main sections, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Bing.

a. Keywords in URLs and File Names

If your site is mainly about adopting dogs, it is much better to name your dog site “dog-adopt.net” than “animal-care.org”, for example, because in the first case you have two major keywords in the domain, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword.

File names and directory names are also important. Often search engines will give preference to pages that have a keyword in the file name. For instance http://domain.com/dog-adopt.html is certainly better than http://domain.com/animal-care.html.

b. Keywords in Page Titles

The page title is another special place because the contents of the <title> tag usually gets displayed in most search engines, (including Google). While it is not mandatory per the HTML specification to write something in the <title> tag (i.e. you can leave it empty and the title bar of the browser will read “Untitled Document” or similar), for SEO purposes you may not want to leave the <title> tag empty; instead, you'd better write the page title in it.

Unlike URLs, with page titles you can get wordy. If we go on with the dog example, the <title> tag of the home page for the http://dog-adopt.net can include something like this: <title>Adopt a Dog – Save a Life and Bring Joy to Your Home</title>, <title>Everything You Need to Know About Adopting a Dog</title> or even longer.

c. Keywords in Headings

Normally headings separate paragraphs into related subtopics and from a literary point of view, it may be pointless to have a heading after every other paragraph but from SEO point of view it is extremely good to have as many headings on a page as possible, especially if they have the keywords in them. There are no technical length limits for the contents of the heading tags but common sense says that too long headings are bad for page readability.

Backlinks: Another Important SEO Item

What are Backlinks?

In layman's terms, there are two types of links: inbound and outbound. Outbound links start from your site and lead to an external site, while inbound links or backlinks, come from an external site to yours. e.g. if cnn.com links to yourdomain.com, the link from cnn.com is a backlink (inbound) for yourdomain.com, however the link is an outbound link from cnn.com's perspective. Backlinks are among the main building blocks to good Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Why Backlinks Are Important

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines like Google, give more credit to websites that have a large number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Therefore, when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they not only consider the number of backlinks to that site but also their quality. In order to determine the quality, a search engine considers the content of the backlinking sites. When backlinks to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these backlinks are considered more relevant to your site. If backlinks are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of backlinks, the greater is its quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned dogs, and gets a backlink from another website about dogs, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. Therefore, higher the relevance of the site linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to modify your webpages to make them more SEO friendly it is a lot harder for you to influence other websites and get them to link to your website. This is the reason search engines regard backlinks as a very important factor. Further, search engine's criteria for quality backlinks has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these backlinks by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide backlinks to websites.

Anchor Text (Link Text)

The link text may be one of the most powerful resources a webmaster has. Backlinks from multiple websites with the link text "orphaned dogs" would help your website rank higher for the keyword "orphaned dogs". Using your keyword is a superior way to utilize a link as against having links with words like "click here" which do not relate to your website. If you find that your site is being linked to from another website, but the link text is not being utilized properly, you should request that the website change the link text to something which incorporates relevant keywords. This will also help boost your rankings.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome.

1 The Webconfs.com’s Backlink Builder Tool

When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of relevant sites from where you might get some backlinks.

2 Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ.org is a must, not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

3 Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the link text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.

4 RSS Feeds

You can offer RSS feeds to interested sites for free, when the other site publishes your RSS feed you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.

5 Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

6 News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites that publish news announcements and press releases for free or for a small fee. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the past few Google updates, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine's latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site's rankings. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant backlinks were ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad apple.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP address. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing.

One thing is certain; interlinking sites doesn't help you from a search engine standpoint. The only reason you may want to interlink your sites in the first place might be to provide your visitors with extra resources to visit. In this case, it would probably be okay to provide visitors with a link to another of your websites, but try to keep many instances of linking to the same IP address to a bare minimum. One or two links on a page here and there probably won't hurt you.

Meta tags

What are Meta tags?

Meta tags are used to summarize information of a page for search engine crawlers. This information is not directly visible to humans visiting your website. The most popular are the meta keywords and description tag.

A couple of years ago meta tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization and there was a direct correlation between keywords in the meta tags and your ranking in the search results. However, algorithms have got better and today the importance of metadata is decreasing day by day.

Meta Description

The meta Description tag is are one more way for you to write a description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes and topics your web site is relevant to. Some search engines (including Google) use these meta description display a summary of the listings on the search results page. So if your meta descriptions are well written you might be able to attract more traffic to your website.

For instance, for the dog adoption site, the meta Description tag could be something like this:
<Meta Name=”Description” Content=”Adopting a dog saves a life and brings joy to your house. All you need to know when you consider adopting a dog.”>

Meta Keywords

A potential use of the Meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in the meta keywords tag. It might be a very small boost to your search engine rankings but why miss the chance?
eg.
<meta name=”Keywords” Content=”adopt, adoption, dog, dogs, puppy, canine, save a life, homeless animals”>

Meta Robots

In this tag you specify the pages that you do not want crawled and indexed. Listing this pages in the Meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed.
eg.
<META NAME=“ROBOTS“ CONTENT=“NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW“>

Content is King

If you were writing SEO text solely for machines, optimization would be simple. Sprinkle in some keywords, rearrange them at random and watch the hit counter skyrocket. Sometimes SEO copy writers forget that this isn't the case. Real people read your text and they expect something in return for the time and attention they give you. They expect good content, and their expectations have shaped how search engines rank your site.

What Is Good Content?

Good SEO content has three primary characteristics:

• Offers useful information presented in an engaging format to human readers

• Boosts search engine rankings

• Attracts plenty of links from other sites

Note that human readers come first on the list. Your site must deliver value to its visitors and do it in an engaging way. Few sites specialize in a subject so narrow that they have an information niche all to themselves. You'll have competition. Set yourself apart from it with expert interviews, meaningful lists and well-researched resources. Write well or invest in someone who does; your investment will pay off in increased traffic.

Writing SEO Content for Search Engines -- And for People

SEO no longer means scattering keywords like Hansel and Gretel throwing breadcrumbs. The newest search engines scan pages almost as your readers might. Jakob Nielsen, a researcher and expert in human-machine interaction at the Technical University of Copenhagen, found that almost 80 percent of a web site's visitors scanned the page rather than reading it line by line. They spent their first fractions of a second on the page deciding if it was worth their time. Search engine programmers still use this research to devise algorithms that provide more organic and meaningful rankings.

The same things that catch a visitor's eye will get a search engine's attention. The upper left corner of the page is the most valuable real estate on the page, as it's where a reader's eyes go first. Put important text there so search engines and people will see it immediately. It's also a good spot for boxed text and itemized lists, both of which appeal equally to carbon-based and silicon-based brains.

Bold text makes people and machines notice, but use those tags judiciously. Too much bold text looks like an advertisement and will cause search engines to devalue your site. Italic text bold HTML tags should surround meaningful concepts, not emphasis words. Bolding a "very" or italicizing a "more" means nothing to a search engine, so apply those tags to important concepts and sub-headings.

Searches now look for associated terms and relevant phrases, not just keywords. A person picks up meaning from context and readily distinguishes the term "clipping" as it applies to hair from the same word as it refers to film stock or video game graphics. Let your visitors - human and machine - know whether you're talking about ‘German shepherds’ as a dog breed or as an exciting career in European wool and mutton. In your SEO text, include synonyms and relevant terms to let search engines recognize the purpose of your site.

Happily, there's a way to work these terms into your content without monitoring keyword and keyphrase percentages: simply write the kind of engaging copy that people like to read. If you write for readers, the search engines will follow.

SEO Killers - Duplicate Content, Spam and Filler

You have a handle on what modern SEO content should be, but it's also vital to understand what it shouldn't be. Duplicate content can sink a site. Even legally obtained duplicate content such as articles linked whole from news feeds and large blocks of attributed quotes diminish a site's SEO value. Readers have no reason to visit a site that gives them other sites' news verbatim. Page ranks will decline over time without original content.

Build fresh new content on the foundation of other information whenever possible. It takes more effort to assimilate and summarize a news story or to use it as a link within an original article, but doing so will cast your site in a more positive light. If you add sufficient value with sharp writing and relevant links, you'll find yourself in the search engine stratosphere.

Heavy keyword-loading is the hallmark of advertising web sites, and search engines know it. Using related words and relevant phrases to enhance topic recognition marks your site as valuable and drives its search engine value higher. Varied writing is also more readable to your human visitors.

Nielsen found that human readers shunned sites full of filler phrases. Clear, concise web writing has greater value than sprawling pages full of fluff. Hyperbole and promotional language - describing a product as "the best ever" or "the perfect solution," for example - contributes nothing to the meaning of the text. Human readers filter out fluff and software ranks down sites with too much of it, so eliminate it from your site.

Search engines change their algorithms regularly in an effort to provide their users with more relevant results. The state of SEO art changes with them. The only constant in web writing is its human audience. Pages that provide novel, appealing content in a reader-friendly format will rise to the top of the rankings.

Visual Extras and SEO

As already mentioned, search engines have no means to index directly extras like images, sounds, flash movies etc. Instead, they rely on your to provide meaningful textual description and based on it they can index these files. In a sense, the situation is similar to that with text 10 or so years ago – you provide a description in the metatag and search engines uses this description to index and process your page. If technology advances further, one day it might be possible for search engines to index images, movies, etc. but for the time being this is just a dream.

1. Images

Images are an essential part of any web page and from a designer point of view they are not an extra but a most mandatory item for every site. However, here designers and search engines are on two poles because for search engines every piece of information that is buried in an image is lost. When working with designers, sometimes it takes a while to explain to them that having textual links (with proper link text) instead of shining images is not a whim and that clear text navigation is really mandatory. Yes, it can be hard to find the right balance between artistic performance and SEO-friendliness but since even the finest site is lost in cyberspace if it cannot be found by search engines, a compromise to its visual appearance cannot be avoided.

With all that said, the idea is not to skip images at all. Sure, nowadays this is impossible because the result would be a most ugly site. Rather the idea is that images should be used for illustration and decoration, not for navigation or even worse – for displaying text (in a fancy font, for example). And the most important – in the <alt> attribute of the <img> tag, always provide a meaningful textual description of the image. The HTML specification does not require this but search engines do. Also, it does not hurt to give meaningful names to the image files themselves rather than name them image1.jpg, image2.jpg, imageN.jpg. For instance, in the next example the image file has an informative name and the alt provides enough additional information: <img src=“one_month_Jim.jpg” alt=“A picture of Jim when he was a one-month puppy”>. Well, don't go to extremes like writing 20-word <alt> tags for 1 pixel images because this also looks suspicious and starts to smell like keyword-stuffing.

2. Animation and Movies

The situation with animation and movies is similar to that with images – they are valuable from a designer's point of view but are not loved by search engines. For instance, it is still pretty common to have an impressive Flash introduction on the home page. You just cannot imagine what a disadvantage with search engines this is – it is a number one rankings killer! And it gets even worse, if you use Flash to tell a story that can be written in plain text, hence crawled and indexed by search engines. One workaround is to provide search engines with a HTML version of the Flash movie but in this case make sure that you have excluded the original Flash movie from indexing (this is done in the robots.txt file but the explanation of this file is not a beginners topic and that is why it is excluded from this book), otherwise you can be penalized for duplicate content.

There are rumors that Google is building a new search technology that will allow to search inside animation and movies and that the .swf format will contain new metadata that can be used by search engines, but until then, you'd better either refrain from using (too much) Flash, or at least provide a textual description of the movie (you can use an <alt> tag to describe the movie).

3. Frames

It is good news that frames are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. 5 or 10 years ago they were an absolute hit with designers but never with search engines. Search engines have difficulties dealing with framed pages because the contents of the page are spread across multiple URLs.

If you still insist on using frames, make sure that you provide a meaningful description of the site in the <noframes> tag. The following example is not for beginners but even if you do not understand everything in it, just remember that the <noframes> tag is the place to provide an alternative version (or at least a short description) of your site for search engines and users whose browsers do not support frames. If you decide to use the <noframes> tag, maybe you'd like to read more about it before you start using it.

4. JavaScript

This is another hot potato. It is known by everybody that pure HTML is powerless to make complex sites with a lot of functionality (anyway, HTML was not intended to be a programming languages for building web applications, so nobody expects that you can use HTML to handle writing to a database or even for storing session information) as required by today's web users and that is why other programming languages (like JavaScript, or PHP) come to enhance HTML. For now most search engines just ignore JavaScript they encounter on a page. If you have links that are inside the JavaScript code, chances are that they will not be crawled. Just for your information, there is a <noscript> tag that allows providing a textual alternative to running the script that can be interpreted by search engines.

Static versus Dynamic URLs

Based on the previous section, you might have gotten the impression that the algorithms of search engines try to humiliate every designer effort to make a site gorgeous. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either. Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like http://domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not tell much about the contents of the page.

Once upon a time search engines did not index dynamic pages at all, while today they do index them but generally slower than they index static pages.

The idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are special tools (different for different platforms and servers) that rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like normal HTML pages.

Promoting your site to increase Traffic

The main purpose of SEO is to make your site visible to search engines, thus leading to higher rankings in search results pages, which in turn brings more traffic to your site. And having more visitors (and above all buyers) is ultimately the goal in sites promotion. For truth's sake, SEO is only one alternative to promote your site and increase traffic – there are many other online and offline ways to do accomplish the goal of getting high traffic and reaching your target audience. We are not going to explore them in this book but just keep in mind that search engines are not the only way to get visitors to your site, although they seem to be a preferable choice and a relatively easy way to do it.

1. Frequently update the contents of your site

If you expected some shocking secrets revealed, you might be a bit disappointed. One of the first steps in getting traffic for free is trivial but vital – get great content and frequently update it. In terms of SEO, content is king. If your content is good and frequently updated you will not only build a loyal audience of recurring visitors, who will often come to see what is new, but search engines will also love your site.

2. Take advantage of social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites (especially the most popular among them) are another powerful way to get traffic for free. If you want to learn how to do it, check the ‘How to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking sites’ article on webconfs.com, where we have explained what to do if you want to get free traffic from sites such as Digg, Delicious, etc.

3. Use your Twitter and Facebook accounts

Social networks are also a way to get traffic for free. If you are popular on networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, the traffic you get from there can easily surpass the traffic from Google and the other search engines. It is true that building a large network of targeted followers on Twitter and supporters on Facebook takes a lot of time and effort but generally the result is worth.

4. Get links with other sites in your niche

Another way to get traffic for free is from other sites in your niche. Getting links with other sites in your niche is also good for SEO, especially if you manage to get links without the famous nofollow attribute. But even if the links are nofollow (i.e. they are useless for SEO), they still help to get traffic to your site. If you manage to put your link in a visible place on a site with high volumes of traffic, you can get thousands of hits from this link alone.

5. Use any chance to promote your site for free

Free promotion is always welcome, so don't neglect it. There are many ways to promote your site for free and some of the most popular ones include free classified ads, submissions to directories, inclusion in various listings, etc. It is true that not all free ways to promote your site work well but if you select the right places to promote your site for free, this can also result in tons of traffic.

6. Create a free product or service

Content drives most traffic when you offer something useful. There are many types of useful content you can create and they largely depend on the niche of your site. You can have articles with tons of advice, or short tips but one of the most powerful ways to get traffic is to create a free product or service. When this product or service gets popular and people start visiting your site, chances are that they will visit the other sections of the site as well.

7. Use viral content

Free products and services are great for getting free traffic to your site and one of the best varieties in this aspect is viral content. Viral content is called so because it distributes like a virus – i.e. when users like your content, they send it to their friends, post it on various sites, and promote it for free in many different ways. Viral content distributes on its own and your only task is to create it and submit it to a couple of popular sites. After that users pick it and distribute it for you. Viral content can be a hot video or a presentation but it can also be a good old article or an image.

8. Use offline promotion

Offline promotion is frequently forgotten but it is also a way to get traffic for free. Yes, computers are everywhere and many people spend more time online than offline but still life hasn't moved completely on the Web. Offline promotion is also very powerful and if you know how to use it, this can also bring you many visitors. Some of the traditional offline ways to promote your site include printing its URL on your company's business cards and souvenirs or sticking it on your company vehicles. You can also start selling T-shirts and other merchandise with your logo and this way make your brand more popular.

9. Include your URL in your signature

URLs in forum signatures are also a way to get traffic for free. There are forums, which get millions of visitors a day and if you are a popular user on such a forum, you can use this to get traffic to your site. When you post on forums and people like your posts, they tend to click the link to your site on your signature to learn more about you. In rare cases you might be able to post a deep link (i.e. a link to an internal page of the site) rather than a link to your homepage and this is also a way to focus attention to a particular page. Unfortunately, deep links are rarely allowed.

SEO Checklist

Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to Bing, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance.

Keywords

Keywords in <title> tag +3
This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the <title> tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the keyword must be near the beginning.

Keywords in URL +3
Keywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. - http://domainname.com/seo-services.html, where “SEO services” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don't have the keywords in other parts of the document, don't rely on having them in the URL.

Keyword density in document text +3
Another very important factor you need to check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text.

Keywords in anchor text +3
Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.

Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags) +3
One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.

Keywords in the beginning of a document +2
Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.

Keywords in <alt> tags +2
Spiders don't read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.

Keywords in metatags +1
Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and Bing still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or Bing, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it.

Keyword proximity +1
Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “dog food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.

Keyword phrases +1
In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO services”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “services”) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.

Secondary keywords +1
Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, “real estate new jersey” might have thousand times less hits than “real estate” only but if you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less but considerably better targeted traffic.

Keyword stemming +1
For English this is not so much of a factor because words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog, dogs, doggy, etc.) are considered related and if you have “dog” on your page, you will get hits for “dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them.

Synonyms +1
Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well, when ranking sites but for many other languages synonyms are not taken into account, when calculating rankings and relevancy.

Keyword Mistypes 0
Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings (i.e. Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to optimize for them. Yes, this might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you'd better don't do it, or do it only in the metatags.

Keyword dilution -2
When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.

Keyword stuffing -3
Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.

Links - internal, inbound, outbound

Anchor text of inbound links +3
As discussed in the Keywords section, this is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don't, it is still OK.

Origin of inbound links +3
Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.

Links from similar sites +3
Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.

Links from .edu and .gov sites +3
These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc. domains. Additionally, such links are hard to obtain.

Number of backlinks +3
Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. Also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they, etc.

Anchor text of internal links +2
This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links.

Around-the-anchor text +2
The text that is immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or it naturally flows in the text.

Age of inbound links +2
The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.

Links from directories +2
Great, though it strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and similar directories is a great boost for your ranking but having tons of links from PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links.

Number of outgoing links on the page that links to you +1
The fewer, the better for you because this way your link looks more important.

Named anchors +1
Named anchors (the target place of internal links) are useful for internal navigation but are also useful for SEO because you stress additionally that a particular page, paragraph or text is important. In the code, named anchors look like this: <A href= “#dogs”>Read about dogs</A> and “#dogs” is the named anchor.

IP address of inbound link +1
Google denies that they discriminate against links that come from the same IP address or C class of addresses, so for Google the IP address can be considered neutral to the weight of inbound links. However, Bing and Yahoo! may discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it is always better to get links from different IPs.

Inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites 0
This does not affect you in any way, provided that the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is beyond your control to define what a link farm links to, so you don't get penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault but in any case you'd better stay away from link farms and similar suspicious sites.

Many outgoing links -1
Google does not like pages that consists mainly of links, so you'd better keep them under 100 per page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse.

Excessive linking, link spamming -1
It is bad for your rankings, when you have many links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a cross- linking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it suggests link buying or at least spamming. In the best case only some of the links are taken into account for SEO rankings.

Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites -3
Unlike inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites, outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of the sites you link to because sometimes good sites become bad neighbors and vice versa.

Cross-linking -3
Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A. This is the simplest example but more complex schemes are possible. Cross-linking looks like disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized.

Single pixel links -3
when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.

Metatags

<Description> metatag +1
Metatags are becoming less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are the <description> and <keywords> ones. Use the <Description> metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags still rock on Bing and Yahoo!, the <Description> metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results.

<Keywords> metatag +1
The <Keywords> metatag also matters, though as all metatags it gets almost no attention from Google and some attention from Bing and Yahoo! Keep the metatag reasonably long – 10 to 20 keywords at most. Don't stuff the <Keywords> tag with keywords that you don't have on the page, this is bad for your rankings.

<Language> metatag +1
If your site is language-specific, don't leave this tag empty. Search engines have more sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the <language>metatag but they still consider it.

<Refresh> metatag -1
The <Refresh> metatag is one way to redirect visitors from your site to another. Only do it if you have recently migrated your site to a new domain and you need to temporarily redirect visitors. When used for a long time, the <refresh> metatag is regarded as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. In any case, redirecting through 301 is much better.

Content

Unique content +3
Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's rankings.

Frequency of content change +3
Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.

Keywords font size +2
When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it is more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text.

Keywords formatting +2
Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise you might achieve just the opposite effect.

Age of document +2
Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored.

File size +1
Generally long pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones.

Content separation -2
From a marketing point of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search engines get confused what the actual content of the page is.

Poor coding and design -2
Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when the design and/or coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all, so in this sense poor code and design can harm you a lot.

Illegal Content -3
Using other people's copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.

Invisible text -3
This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.

Cloaking -3
Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.

Doorway pages -3
Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.

Duplicate content -3
When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned – i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and prosper.

Visual Extras and SEO

JavaScript 0
If used wisely, it will not hurt. But if your main content is displayed through JavaScript, this makes it more difficult for spiders to follow and if JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can't follow it, this will definitely hurt your ratings.

Images in text 0
Having a text-only site is so boring but having many images and no text is a SEO sin. Always provide in the <alt> tag a meaningful description of an image but don't stuff it with keywords or irrelevant information.

Podcasts and videos 0
Podcasts and videos are becoming more and more popular but as with all non-textual goodies, search engines can't read them, so if you don't have the tapescript of the podcast or the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be indexed by search engines.

Images instead of text links -1
Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you don't fill in the <alt> tag. But even if you fill in the <alt> tag, it is not the same as having a bold, underlined, 16-pt. link, so use images for navigation only if this is really vital for the graphic layout of your site.

Frames -2
Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.

Flash -2
Spiders don't index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give it an alternative textual description.

A Flash home page -3
Fortunately this epidemic disease seems to have come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is a SEO suicide.

Domains, URLs, Web Mastery

Keyword-rich URLs and filenames +3
A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing.

Site Accessibility +3
Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.

Sitemap +2
It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.

Site size +2
Spiders love large sites, so generally it is the bigger, the better. However, big sites become user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that are penalized because they are 10,000+ pages, so don't split your size in pieces only because it is getting larger and larger.

Site age +2
Similarly to wine, older sites are respected more. The idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy (they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just poped up and might soon disappear.

Site theme +2
It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter. The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme.

File Location on Site +1
File location is important and files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below.

Domains versus subdomains, separate domains +1
Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead of having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a separate blablabla.com domain.

Top-level domains (TLDs) +1
Not all TLDs are equal. There are TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular TLD – .com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but (all equal) nothing beats an old .edu or .org domain.

Hyphens in URLs +1
Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. This applies both to hyphens in domain names and in the rest of the URL.

URL length 0
Generally doesn't matter but if it is a very long URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is acceptable).

IP address 0
Could matter only for shared hosting or when a site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when the IP or the whole C-class of IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal practices.

Adsense will boost your ranking 0
Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has nothing to do with your search rankings.

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