Quick SEO Guide! 12 Steps of Search Engine Optimization Process by Asif Iqbal

There are just 12 simple steps to follow basic Search Engine Optimization for SEO starters, expertise and in-depth knowledge of these steps can take you to the expert level as well, this article has just an overview of the basic SEO.

1- Research and select appropriate keywords to target

2. Effective page Title Tags

Title tag is the most important tag, almost all search engines evaluate webpage with title tag and check the relevancy with other elements of the page as well, and search engines also present results of a search by displaying webpage titles as links in the first line of each query result.

3. Effective and optimized META Description Tag

Description tag is the very important tag, search engines take webpage description through this tag, though search engines don’t give any importance to this tag in their ranking algorithms but this tag can lead searchers to motivate and visit your website.

4. Effective and optimized META Keywords Tag

Keywords tag has lost its value, search engines keep getting smarter, they have set their own criterion to identify web pages with their relevancies, they take each word as “keyword phrase” that is presented at webpage and they keep those words in priorities with their densities. There is no harm in utilizing this tag for marginally better results.

5. Integrate search keywords within Website copy

Since a very early stage of search engine revolution, search engines were able to evaluate website with relevance to their content, though they were not very efficient and intelligent like they are these days, but they were able to read the content at website and content still plays very important role in top ranking positions.

6. Web design elements to avoid ensuring your site is search engine compatible

Usually a website is designed keeping few elements in mind such as user friendliness, attractive design, beautiful flash animation, easy navigation, client specific or functionality oriented. In fact all these elements are very useful and important but what benefit is your web site if it has no visitors, search engine compatible websites are designed and developed keeping search engine policies and algorithms in mind, which enable websites to be easily crawled and understood by search engines.

7. Effective Alt Image attributes

Alternate text commonly referred to as Alt, is a text description that can be added to the HTML tag that displays an image. The ALT text is displayed by the browser when the cursor is moved over the picture. If pictures are turned off in the browser, the Alt text is automatically displayed instead.

8. Effective and optimized text navigation menus

Navigation is a very important part of any website; it gives guidelines to website visitors and directs them to relevant part of the website.

9. Link titles and anchor link effectively

Link title is displayed text by the browser when cursor is moved over the link.
An Anchor link is a little different from a hyperlink, a hyperlink directs to a complete webpage but anchor link directs to a specific area of a particular webpage, it may be at same page or different page or even at different domain.

10. Set up search engine friendly site architecture

A Website's information architecture can greatly affect on its search engine visibility. Specific page elements, such as the site navigation scheme, and design technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript, can interfere with search engines ability to spider a site.

11. Creation of search engine friendly sitemap

A site map helps visitors navigate large, complicated sites by showing its entire structure. It is also used as a master diagram of the Web site for Web designers.

12. Robots.txt and its META tag

Robots.txt is a file placed on your server to guide the various search engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your site. You can use it to prevent indexing totally, prevent certain areas of your site from being indexes or to issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines.

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