Teach Yourself VISUALLY Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Rafiq Elmansy

• Publisher: Visual
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118470664
• eBook ISBN: 9781118675373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

The perfect guide to help visual learners maximize website discoverability

Whether promoting yourself, your business, or your hobbies and interest, you want your website or blog to appear near the top when your customers search. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is increasingly essential to businesses. This full-color, step-by-step guide demonstrates key SEO concepts and practices in an easy-to-follow visual format. Learn how to set up your website and what to implement to help your business or product make a great showing in search results.

• Helps visual learners understand and practice important SEO concepts
• Uses full-color, step-by-step tasks to teach the elements of SEO
• Provides information you can quickly and easily implement to enhance your site's search engine rankings
• Demonstrates how to make your site attractive to casual web surfers as well as to the algorithms and spiders used by Google and other search engines

Teach Yourself VISUALLY SEO will demystify search engine optimization, helping you boost search engine rankings and improve the visibility of your website. Note: Per the Penguin Policy 2.0 update, some of the tasks in Chapter 6 may present a risk to Google page rank. Please read the latest policy update from Google to know fully what will work best for increasing and maintaining Google Page Rank

Chapter 1
Understanding the SEO Process

When you have a website or a blog, most of your visitors find you using a search engine. The search engine user types his keywords or questions and the search engine displays the results from the indexed web pages that are relevant to the user search. Optimizing your website for search engines can help bring more traffic to your website and help it achieve better rankings in different search engines.

• Introducing Search Engine Optimization
• Consider SEO Techniques
• Discover Search Engine Optimization
• Understanding How People Use Search
• Using Different Types of Searches
• Understanding the Search Page Layout
• Explore Different Search Engines
• Set Up a Default Search Engine

Introducing Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to methods and techniques that you can apply to a website to increase its traffic, rank, and visibility in a search engine’s results page. When you optimize your website, it has a greater chance of appearing in the search engine top results, which subsequently increases the traffic to your website. The optimization process includes many techniques and methods that are applied to the website itself or other sites that are related to the website content. Understanding the SEO process requires learning about how the search process works, the search page layout, and the different search engines that you target in the process.

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Discover What SEO Is

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is a process that you apply to a website to increase its rank and traffic from organic search engine searches. The process targets the free search, where users use any of the existing search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, to search for a product, service, or information. It is different from a paid search, where the webmaster pays to appear at the top of the search pages, as discussed in Chapter 11.

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Explore a Brief History of SEO

The process of optimizing web content first occurred in 1990, when search engines began indexing websites’ content. It was much simpler than today, where website owners submit their sites to search engines. The search engines started and continue to use computer programs called web spiders or crawlers to crawl a website’s pages and index them based on the site’s niche and keywords. Early SEO was as simple as adding meta tags, which are HTML codes that include information about a website. Meta tags help search engines determine how the website content will be indexed using data such as the site’s title, description, and keywords.

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Look at the Google and SEO Relationship

With the launch of the Google search engine, the SEO process became more complex. It was developed to ensure better and more accurate indexing as well as identify the misuse of search engine optimization tactics such as keyword stuffing, which refers to including irrelative keywords in a web page to mislead the search engine crawlers. Then, Google started to refine the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Credits
• About the Author
• How to Use This Book
• Chapter 1: Understanding the SEO Process
• Chapter 2: Preparing Your Website for SEO
• Chapter 3: Building an SEO Friendly Website
• Chapter 4: Mastering Keywords
• Chapter 5: Building On-Page SEO
• Chapter 6: Building Off-Page SEO
• Chapter 7: Working with Content
• Chapter 8: Working with Google Analytics
• Chapter 9: Using Search Engine Webmaster Tools
• Chapter 10: Working with Social Media and SEO
• Chapter 11: Working with AdWords
• Chapter 12: Applying SEO to WordPress Blogs
• Chapter 13: Monetizing Your Website
• Chapter 14: Building and Managing an SEO Team
• End User License Agreement