Post

Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

An SEO ("Search Engine Optimization") expert is someone trained to improve your visibility on search engines. Now we talk about the basics of Search Engine Optimization.

Posted
Preview Image
By Theodore Cooper
3 min read
Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What’s SEO

​ An SEO (“Search Engine Optimization”) expert is someone trained to improve your visibility on search engines. So, it’s important to learn about SEO.

Title

​ What is a page title? This is the HTML title tag, which we also call the page title. The page title is the most influential place to have your keyword phrase. Must make sure a title is good enough. Here are some recommendations for you:

  • Length: Between 50 - 60 characters, make it “simple”, remember do not make it too long.
  • DO NOT overdo keywords in title like: “Title TITLE title…”. That’s really not a good idea…
  • Unique title: don’t use same titles… You know…
  • Separate keywords with “ - “, “ ** ** “…

Keywords Tag

​ You can put keywords into a keywords tag in <head></head> like this:

1
2
3

<head>
	<meta name="keywords" content="Keywords, blog, SEO">
</head>

ALSO:

  • DO NOT overdo keywords!!!

Descriptions Tag

​ A description tag contains the… description😅. All right, search engines may use the description provided in the description tag in the search engine results page (SERP). A well-written description that pertains to the content of the page and that is relevant to the searcher’s intent can help you increase traffic since it can help improve the click-through rate of your page in search. Add a description to the <head></head> section of the page source:

1
2
3

<head>
	<meta name='description' content='Descriptive, Now we talk about the basics of Search Engine Optimization.'>
</head>

Heading Tag

​ Heading is the collective name for the 6 tags: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6. The weights of the 6 tags are from big to small, that is, h1 is the big heading, h6 is the smallest heading:

1

<h1>Heading 1</h1>

​ The h1 tag can only be used once. If it is used multiple times, it is easy to be regarded as cheating by search engines.

No follow

​ The nofollow tag tells search engines to ignore that link. Because nofollow links do not pass PageRank they likely don’t impact search engine rankings. Nofollow links are links with a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag applied to them:

1

<a href = "https://theodorecooper.github.io/" rel = "nofollow">

Sitemap

​ A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.

Sitemaps (XML) look like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
	<url>
		<loc>https://theodorecooper.github.io/</loc>
		<lastmod>2020-10-31T16:12:20+03:00</lastmod>
	</url>
</urlset>

​ Of course, there are HTML sitemaps, even TXT sitemaps…

How to get a sitemap?

robots.txt

​ A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request from your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests.

robots.txt looks like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Allow: /archives/
Allow: /categories/
Allow: /tags/ 
Allow: /resources/ 
Disallow: /vendors/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /css/
Disallow: /fonts/
Disallow: /vendors/

Sitemap: ...

​ The value of Allow is the content that allows search engines to crawl the area.

​ The distance between the home page and other pages cannot be too large, it means: keep your URL short.

​ DO NOT

1

https://theodorecooper.github.io/blog/2020/12/25/seo/index.html

​ DO

1

https://theodorecooper.github.io/2020/seo/index.html

​ In a word: SIMPLE.

Image ALT

​ When inserting a picture, you will be prompted to enter text. The keywords appearing in the image ALT also have a certain impact on page relevance. Similarly, DO NOT overdo keywords!!!

More…

Blogging
Blogging Hexo SEO
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.