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I have asked What should i know about search engine crawling? Now i would like to know where can i learn about search engines and search engines optimization? Instead of reading dozen of articles with most saying the same thing as another i would like to read one book or resource and find everything i need to know.
The best kind of SEO is having really good and readable content on your site. :)
That's hard to answer.
I wouldn't recommend a book, because before anything about SEO gets into print, a lot of it will be outdated, so I'd rather stick to up-to-date online resources.
There are different approaches to SEO (e.g. "black hat" / "white hat" SEO) so considering only one resource will only give you part of the picture.
Some approaches will only be opinions so checking different resources should clear things up for you better than a single one could.
So I guess to "find everything you need to know" you'll have to check a lot of different resources / articles / forums, etc. etc. and then see what works best for you (and how much time and effort you'd like to spend) ...
I'd say don't bother spending too much time. SEO is simple:
Titles in URL
Title in h1
Have a sitemap
Get links from popular sites into your site
and... QUALITY & SPECIFIC CONTENT
I know this doesn't answer your question directly, however I feel you'll probably find better answers on stack overflow than in a book. That link to Google Webmaster Guidelines is a good resource too.
For SEO and crawling, instead of trying to outsmart Google and others, it is easier and more effective to listen to Google and follow their guidelines.
Here is a 22 page PDF about SEO from Google: Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
Another useful Google PDF: Making the Most of your Content
Matt Cutts's blog (a Google engineer): PageRank and other SEO Topics
How PageRank works from Wikipedia: PageRank in Wikipedia
Avinash Kaushik is a well known expert on all things web/analytics/customer related.
His first book "Web Analytics, an hour a day" is excellent. He has since released a second book, "Web Analytics 2.0", which I own but have yet found the time to read. He used to work for Intuit, now works for Google.
You can read his blog, Occam's Razor. Both of his books are mentioned on the right hand side (scroll down a bit).
If you are going to read one book, read either of the two books written by him.
I read his book after reading other books dedicated to just SEO, or just Google. I still found interesting things in his book that I didn't elsewhere. After reading his book you'll have a lot to think about and some very good ideas what you want to read next (or not read).
I've seen some slideshows/webinars given by him. He is entertaining, humourous, engaging, definitely intelligent and doesn't mince his words about stuff he doesn't like. If you get a chance to watch any of his stuff, do so.
Unlike many bloggers, you can find his email address AND he actually answers email you send him.
If you want a straight SEO book this isn't it, but highly recommended nonetheless.
A lot of this comes from personal information so go and ask anyone who has a website. You will find most of it is intuitive and common sense. What my friend does is get a little kid to look at it and point to whatever sticks out. It is an easy way to check what is showing up on your website. Try to draw attention to the key parts of the website. http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/.
Also, check out
http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html
http://www.seotutorial.info/
http://www.webconfs.com/seo-tutorial/
SEO Book is a very informative website.
http://www.seobook.com/
Check that out.
Go to http://www.seomoz.org. You'll find a ton of information and a number of tools to get you started.
Related
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I want to build a simple blog which contains:
A home page with blogs listed in the typical fashion: Title and content, plus read more to open a single entry.
A publish area: Title and Content
admin area to delete and modify posts.
No need for tags, users, or dates.
Take a look at this draft:
I have been looking for tutorials on the internet, but haven't found something simple enought to start working with.
EDIT
Found two nice tutorials. Haven't tested them, but looking at the
comments they seem reliable.
In this tutorial the steps look pretty straightforward and basic.
I'm still a noob in OOP, so this might be right for me:
http://css-tricks.com/1907-php-for-beginners-building-your-first-simple-cms/
This one is more elaborated, it contains users, dates, and tags. I
put it here for future reference:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/how-to-create-an-object-oriented-blog-using-php/
But since you can't use WordPress, what do you need?
You obviously got a pretty concrete idea of how to build it. I think you should refine that further, and start building.
Don't overdo it in the beginning. Start by designing a very simple blog. Each post containing just a title and contents. Skip the use of WYSIWYG editors, and advanced admin options. Just make a view page for a post, a view page for the list (chronological), and an admin page to edit or add posts. Publishing can be done by just adding a simple 'published' field, which you can toggle using a checkbox.
Don't bother with users yet. Just use basic authentication.
If you stick to those simple definitions, you should be able to get a working blog in a short time. After that, you will have some idea of the possibilities (of your possibilities too) and you'll be able to build on the base you got.
If there would be a very extensive tutorial on building a blog, you would eventually still just be copying the samples in that tutorial. It's more fun to think of something yourself and search or ask help for specific problems you run into.
Maybe you will have to start over at some point. Remember, if you build something for the second time, you'll build it faster, and it will be better.
But it won't be good until the third time. ;)
Just do it. If you want to learn anything, simply figure it out. This is straightforward stuff. It'll teach you basic HTTP processing, some simple DB design and integration. Set up PHP/Perl/Python/Java/R/Common Lisp, add in MySQL or SQLite or whatever, follow a couple of HOWTOs, and just do it.
Really, you "don't need us" for this. Just break it down in to pieces. What are the right pieces? Whatever feels right to you. Seriously, unless you plan on hosting it to the wild world with some sensitive information, you really have nothing to lose here by just doing it yourself and pulling it off with amazing perfection or having it come out as a complete disaster. Both are rewarding in its own way.
If you have a specific question about a specific piece, you can come back, or head over to ServerFault, but you will likely be able to pull this off with even a teeny bit of persistence.
So just do it. Grab the keyboard by the plug and work the problem. It's better this way.
Found two nice tutorials. Haven't tested them, but looking at the
comments they seem reliable.
In this tutorial the steps look pretty straightforward and basic.
I'm still a noob in OOP, so this might be right for me:
http://css-tricks.com/1907-php-for-beginners-building-your-first-simple-cms/
This one is more elaborated, it contains users, dates, and tags. I
put it here for future reference:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/how-to-create-an-object-oriented-blog-using-php/
For me this is just great run on tornado and app engine very basic and very good but i don't like comments and fb plugins etc try it source code.
A previous ver without tornado is also available: GitHub
I'm seeing a lot of "meta" questions about software testing lately. These are questions like, "What do I need to know to become a tester?", "How do testers do their work?", and "How well do I need to be able to code to be a good automation tester?" These sorts of meta questions are not appropriate for Stack Overflow, but there isn't another Stack Exchange site where this really fits. Where should questions like this be directed?
I will accept an answer in about two days. I want to give people time to answer.
http://programmers.stackexchange.com
I upvoted programmers since I think it's the best choice right now. Several career testers hang out there, so you would probably get a good answer.
We have a SE 1.0 site (testing.stackexchange.com), but the traffic is pretty light, so you may not get a great answer. We're working through a 2.0 proposal combining a few communities, so hopefully there's a better answer in the long term.
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I am charging SEO of my company's SEO, which I really hate. I believe a web site with decent web design and semantic code(structure), spiced up with attractive content is the best thing we should do. Yet, we are still far from there, in me case especially. So usually I take a very close look at other sites, their design, code, etc. And I suspect I got paranoid on this.
Today, I find a highly respected site which is using absolute internal links while we are using relative links. As far as I know, it does not matter, but I can not help asking you guys to make sure about this.
If this is a ridiculous question, then I am sorry. As I said I become a paranoia.
Taken from the Search Engine Optimisation FAQ at the SitePoint Forums:
Should I use relative links or absolute links?
Absolute links. It is recommended by Google as it is possible for crawlers to miss some relative links.
If I can find the link that Google states this I'll update this post.
EDIT: This might be what the post is referring to, but I've stated my reasons as to why this might be correct in the comments.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35156
I never heard or seen anything that indicates it matters. All you're likely to do is complicate your development. The "highly respected" site is getting good ranking because it's popular, that's all.
It's pretty well a given that search engines store the full path at some point, it's unlikely they wouldn't perform this conversion during the crawl process to remove duplicates.
I don't really follow your logic anyway. You know good structure, relevant content and popularity are the key to ranking so what makes you think you'll gain anything by spending even a minute on random optimisations like this?
I highly doubt Google will be missing any relative links. Apparently the latest version of their Crawler will even execute some javascript. Don't bother with absolute links, instead, great a good sitemap and submit it to google through webmaster tools. Yahoo and Microsoft also allow you to submit your sitemap so it might be worthwhile to look into that too - google it.
I don't think there is an answer to this question, but I will weigh in anyways. Personally,
I think that using absolute URLs is the best. The web is full of crappy content scrapers. Many of the people who wrote these scrapers forget to change the original URLs (in absolute links) before they post the content onto their own page. So, in that regard, absolute URLs can turn into a really dodgy way to get a couple extra links.
If I follow that, it seems logical that absolute links would also be a great indicator of duplicate content caused by content scrapers.
A couple of years ago, I did some research into what happens to a page's search rankings when you dramatically change content/navigation (ie - in the case of a dramatic re-design). At that point, I found that having absolute URLs seemed to spook Google a little less. But, there were some problems with my research:
a) The 'absolute URL bonus' was barely quantifiable (an average of less than two positions of difference)
b) The 'absolute URL bonus' only lasted a few weeks before Google settled down and started treating both pages the same
c) The research is two years old and the Google algorithm has changed dramatically in that time
When I add a and b together, I'm left with a very unsettled feeling. Google gets a little weird from time to time, so the bonus may have been a fluke that I attributed to absolute URLs. Good old experimental bias.....Either way though, the difference was so slight and lasted for such a short time that I don't think it is worth spending a whole lot of extra time making absolutes!
Best of luck with your site
Greg
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Are there any tools for finding if a page is SEO complaint and if it's not then suggest something to make that page SEO complaint?
Also note that I want to do this research on offline pages i.e. these pages are not on web yet.
The best all purpose services are:
WooRank
WebsiteGrader
Xinu
Google has their own tools which as close as you can get to official 'compliance':
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Website Optimizer
Google Adwords Keywords Tool
SEO is an entire industry, and the rules are always changing.
(See here for a great list of some of the more pronounced changes on Google this year.
And here for some of the more noticeable differences from Bing.)
Some of the better SEO targeted sites are:
Web-strategist
webanalyticsbook
SeoBook
Viget
A monitoring service you should look at:
http://conjection.net/
One of the better articles I would recommend is:
- http://community.seobook.com/45711-post172.html
You should also make sure your page is loading optimally, it will effect the SEO even though it is its own field:
Load and performance - Pingdom and Uptrends.
If you are technically minded, install Yslow or PageSpeed and look at the score.
You can try the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Tried it once and it works well.
Got broken links on your site? Is your HTML SEO optimized? This fantastic free tool answers all these questions and hundreds more as it chews your angle brackets for you, creating flexible reports and a full queryable database of your site. -- Scott Hanselman
It's a bit late but I made a presentation with great tools for SEO that I used.
You will find a lot of Firefox Add-ons and Google Chrome Extensions to analyze your page and get suggestion to respect main search engines recommendations.
These slides also present other tools usefull for SEO expert like : google products, online services, wordpress plugins, ...
If it could help someone else, it's here : http://slidesha.re/KOoDad
Hope this help.
I don't know if "compliant" is the best term to use. There isn't a standard.
Rather, there is a set of best practices that have been determined through observation of search engine behavior in reaction to certain aspects of page/url structure.
That being said, I would first take a look at article on About.com titled "White Hat Vs. Black Hat SEO" You definitely want to avoid the black-tactics while abiding by the white-hat tactics.
In a nutshell, the focus on white-hat tactics is on quality content relevant to the subject. Without that, your pages are pretty much dead in the water (assuming you don't subscribe to black-hat techniques).
Offline tools, I did not know which will do this.
You could upload it for a short time or protect it with a password if you do not want that other people see the webpages.
Online-Tool: http://www.linkvendor.com/
I have found the following site useful with Keyword Destiny and more content driven queries in the past... http://www.seocentro.com/tools/seo/keyword-density.html
i use this tool quite often. it doesn't look very good but i found the data to be really useful
article underground keyword density tool
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In SEO people talk a lot about Google PageRank. It's kind of a catch 22 because until your site is actually big and you don't really need search engines as much, it's unlikely that big sites will link to you and increase your PageRank!
I've been told that it's easiest to simply get a couple high quality links to point to a site to raise it's PageRank. I've also been told that there are certain Open Directories like dmoz.org that Google pays special attention to (since they're human managed links). Can anyone speak to the validity of this or suggest another site/technique to increase a site's PageRank?
Have great content
Nothing helps your google rank more than having content or offering a service people are interested in. If your web site is better than the competition and solves a real need you will naturally generate more traffic and inbound links.
Keep your content fresh
Use friendly url's that contain keywords
Good: http://cars.com/products/cars/ford/focus/
Bad: http://cars.com/p?id=1232
Make sure the page title is relevant and well constructed
For example: Buy A House In France :. Property Purchasing in France
Use a domain name that describes your site
Good: http://cars.com/
Bad: http://somerandomunrelateddomainname.com/
Example
Type car into Google, out of the top 5 links all 4 have car in the domain: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=car
Make it accessible
Make sure people can read your content. This includes a variety of different audiences
People with disabilities: Sight, motor, cognitive disabilities etc..
Search bots
In particular make sure search bots can read every single relevant page on your site. Quite often search bots get blocked by the use of javascript to link between pages or the use of frames / flash / silverlight. One easy way to do this is have a site map page that gives access to the whole site, dividing it into categories / sub categories etc..
Down level browsers
Submit your site map automatically
Most search engines allow you to submit a list of pages on your site including when they were last updated.
Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
Inbound links
Generate as much buzz about your website as possible, to increase the likely hood of people linking to you. Blog / podcast about your website if appropriate. List it in online directories (if appropriate).
References
Google Search Engine Ranking Factors, by an SEO company
Creating a Google-friendly site: Best practices
Wikipedia - Search engine optimization
Good content.
Update it often.
Read and digest everything at Creating a Google-friendly site: Best practices.
Be active on the web. Comment in blogs, correspond genuinely with people, in email, im, twitter.
I'm not too sure about the domain name. Wikipedia? What does that mean? Mozilla? What word is that? Google? Was a typo. Yahoo? Sounds like that chocolate drink Yoohoo.
Trying to keyword the domain name shoehorns you anyway. And it can be construed as a SEO technique in the future (if it isn't already!)
Answer all email. Answer blog comments. Be nice and helpful.
Go watch garyvee's Better Than Zero. That'll motivate you.
If it's appropriate, having a blog is a good way of keeping content fresh, especially if you post often. A CMS would be handy too, as it reduces the friction of updating. The best way would be user-generated content, as other people make your site bigger and updated, and they may well link to their content from their other sites.
Google doesn't want you to have to engineer your site specifically to get a good PageRank. Having popular content and a well designed website should naturally get you the results you want.
A easy trick is to use
Google webmaster tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
And you can generate a sitemap using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Then, don't miss to use www.google.com/analytics/
And be careful, most SEO guides are not correct, playing fair is not always the good approach. For example,everyone says that spamming .edu sites is bad and ineffective but it is effective.