A focus on natural search (beginner's guide to SEO)

Important Accessibility Issues

First things first. Before worrying about anything else, make sure the housekeeping has been done. Clean up broken links, invalid HTML and other code and minimise webpage file sizes.

With the basics taken care of, you can start worrying about the rest:

Clean URLs

Spiders don't like messy URLs - Your URL needs to be descriptive yet as brief and "clean" as possible. Dirty URLs are those which use too many dynamic parameters. These can be troublesome for Search Engine spiders, making it less likely that they will properly crawl your site.

Frames

Frames are evil. Don't use them unless you really, really need to. And trust me, you don't need to. Frames cause major issues for Search Engines, and as a general design technique, they're bad news. The use of tables or CSS is far better.

Flash

Flash websites are another no-no. Yes, they can look good, and are often visually impressive. Unfortunately though, their content is largely invisible to Search Engine spiders. Clever designers incorporate flash elements into their content-based web pages, creating a site that offers both the visual strength of flash and the content bias of HTML based pages.

Feeding the Spiders - Links

Now that we've created a website that is full of relevant content and is search engine friendly, allowing the spiders to crawl and index, we need to make sure the spiders come crawling. Spiders crawl pages that they find via a link from another page they were crawling. So if you want something crawled, make sure it's being linked to.

That's where links come in. Links play a huge role in SEO;

Inbound links (IBL) are perhaps the most significant single factor influencing rankings.
Outbound on page links help establish relevance to your page theme.
Interlinking of your pages, both via content and via your navigation, helps establish the relationships between your pages, bolstering the themes you are trying to establish.

Inbound Links

Search Engines want to provide users with results that are both relevant and important. While to some extent relevance can be gauged by on page factors, as mentioned above, it's what other "people" say about your site that is a real indicator of what it's about. Inbound links are these "votes from other people".

Search Engines consider an inbound link as a vote for your site. Lots of votes from sites, which are in turn considered authoritative within your niche, create an indication of importance and relevance.

Outbound Links

Links on a page provide some indication of the theme of that page. Lots of links out to irrelevant sites might be detrimental to your ranking. Links to relevant authority sites can be useful to your visitors and help establish the page's relevance on the topic. Interlinking

Carefully considered interlinking of pages is important for creating defined themes within your site. For important and competitive key phrases, it's useful to create content pages which link to and support the pages you want to rank well.

Sitemaps

An on-site sitemap is a web document, which lists all the pages you'd like the Search Engine spiders to find. This is a good method of getting a reasonably deep crawl on your site.

An XML sitemap is a document submitted to a Search Engine, informing them of your content. It's a bit like a note to the spider saying,
"Dear Spidey, I've put out some yummy new content for you to enjoy. This is where you'll find it."

Link Building

The process of generating inbound links is a highly specialised and involved practice, which we cannot explore here in too much detail. There are many different means of building links. Links are not all created equal and as a general rule, the most valuable links are not easy to obtain - if they were, they'd not be as valuable as they are.

The most valuable links are those which come from authority sites, relevant to your targeted key phrases. Links can be gained by request, content exchange and a number of other initiated means.

Perhaps the best strategy for link building is to create content of exceptional value - valuable content becomes a link magnet, attracting links by virtue of its usefulness to others. In a later chapter, we'll look specifically at link creation through valuable, viral content.

Coming soon: Chapter 5. What should you expect?

An SEO case study - we'll look at how the principles outlined here are put into practice to generate high Search Engine rankings and ultimately, traffic.

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