Many people think search engine optimization is some kind of black magic — charging lots and lots of money for it. Let’s come to reality for a moment, and talk about this seriously: it’s really (like most competitions not involving physical ability) just a popularity contest (that and you do actually have to have relevant content).
There are 6 basic rules to achieving search engine stardom, listed below, and how Red Rocket will help you squeeze every last ounce of SEOness out of your site.
What does this mean? It means if you are searching for "apple", and your url is:
http://www.orange-stuff.com/page.html
it’s not going to help you one bit. However, if your url is:
http://www.apple-stuff.com/page.html
it will help quite a bit — it tells the search engine your site has something to do with apples. Now if the url is:
http://www.apple-stuff.com/all-about-apples.html
it’s even better. Not only is your site relevant, but the title of the page is also relevant — really the best option. The great news is this functionality is already built into Red Rocket. Red Rocket automatically takes the title of your content pages, and creates unique, contextual urls for each page. so if your page is titled "All About Apples", the url that gets indexed by search engines will be:
http://www.yoursite.com/publish/all-about-apples-#####/index.html
where the "#####" is a unique identifier (so that you could have two different, unique "All About Apples" pages). So, that is how contextual urls are handled automatically, but if the content on the page is irrelevant, it won’t be much use to you, and so, onto the next rule:
If people are searching about apples, and your site is dedicated to oranges, all the popularity in the "orange" circuit world is not gonna help you place effectively — no matter how many times you copy the word "apple" in the data field.
Search engines programatically understand contextual content, and content that is just repeated incessantly (in fact non-contextual repetition will work against you as spam). So take your time to create valid, contextual, and relevant information in your site, and you are on your way to SEO bliss. Unfortunately, Red Rocket isn’t a copywriter — it’s software — so you are on your own on this one, and undoubtably it’s the most important part. If high-ranking results are really what you are after, consider hiring an expert to write your copy for you.
For sites like Google (who did you think we have been talking about all this time) your popularity is in direct relation to how many people link to your website. So … get people to link to your site. Consider them like votes for student president — the more you get, the more likely you are to win the race. Most importantly, it’s not how many links you get, but it’s how many contextual links you get. You know the underlined part of the text that is the link? That’s the context:
click here
is just ok. It’s certainly a link to your website — which is good — but it doesn’t tell search engines why they are linking to you:
click here for great resources on apples
is WAAAY better. It links to you and gives contextual information about the link. So how do you get links to begin with? As with anything that is is popular — having good, interesting, engaging content that either looks amazing, offers some kind of valuable information/product for free, or allows people to make money effortlessly — just being honest here.
First off — never use a shared hosting url. The domain name
http://apple-stuff.yahoohosting.com/
is neither professional nor contextual. Pony up and get a real domain name. Next — search engines know when urls were registered, and know when brand new urls are on the map. In a competition for a search on "apple" on two sites with the exact same contextual information, seniority is gonna win. The longer a url has been in "play" the more you’d like to think they know what they are doing. Brand-spanking-newly-registered domains names are always going to be taken with a grain of salt — they might not be there tomorrow whereas the other guys have already proved themselves. So — pick a domain name and stick to it FOREVER. The only reason you would want to change is either to consolidate multiple names into one (and forward the old one) or if the url is so non-contextual that getting a new domain would help you in the long run (see rule #1).
Nothing is gonna turn away a search engine more than a website or webpage that hasn’t changed in 6 years — it’s not likely to be very current nor contextual.
So, if you can, try and keep your site as updated as possible. But what are you gonna do when there is really nothing to update? Well, Red Rocket has a little trick up it’s sleeve: META tags.
Now i know that you know, that everyone knows that search engines know to ignore the content in META tags. And it’s true — they are useless for the most part. However, what Red Rocket does is each time you do a full publish on your site, the META tags on each page get randomly shuffled and assembled. So even if the content is exactly the same the page has changed — and search engines don’t know any different. All they know is that the data on the page has changed, and the file is new, so they need to re-index it. Pretty cool huh? But don’t go using this as a crutch — you should try as much as possible to maintain and update your content to continue bringing people to your site (but we’re just trying to help where we can).
If your site is primarily images — fill in your ALT tags in the Asset Library. Search engines don’t know if an image is of an orange or an apple — so you better tell it. No need to get crazy on the details — keep it as short and contextual as possible — it could help a great deal.
If your site is primarily photo albums and there isn’t any text showing up — fill out some titles and descriptions anyway. It will give search engines something to display in the search results instead of "image0043284732984.jpg".
Open and fill out the Site & SEO settings tab in Red Rocket! All that stuff makes it on each page, so get to it and make sure your most important terms are in there! If you fill out this information (without over-doing it) you will find it will make a big difference depending on the terms you use.
Now off you go. Sure, there are high-level tricks like putting important keywords in H1 tags — but you leave those technical details to us. Focus on the above 6 rules of SEO sweetness and you’ll see big changes on your rankings — promise.