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But what is "Basic SEO" to you? Blogging? Adwords? Paying dudes via MechTurk to write articles for you?
Googling "Basic SEO" brings you a few good articles, but a LOT of "buy our ebook" articles too. I just feel that if it were so basic, it'd be more common to find.
So what do you consider to be "Basic SEO", HN?
1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keywords. If you want people to search for "fishing tips" and find you, then several people will need to link you something like this:
This site has great fishing tips.
3. The words you want people to search for need to be used several times on your site. You should have the words "fishing tips" on several pages and you should link to your best page on "fishing tips" by putting that phrase in your own links to your own pages.
4. Also make sure you put the keywords you want searches for in the title of your page, and enclose them in H1 tags or other bold/header tags. This won't help very much, but it's probably worth doing.
5. Links don't really help you unless they are from a real domain - a link from someblog.blogspot.com will not help your PageRank much at all. Also, the domain needs to exist for a while to help you - something like a year.
6. Good places to get links are from your college and high school newspapers, local newspapers, and anyone else who has a website that would appropriately cover you.
7. Some sites have way more PageRank than you might expect. www.cmu.edu is an anchor site for the link graph, and a link from this site will do wonders for your PageRank.
8. Here are some excellent pages on SEO:
http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/
http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-two/
9. In the end, it really boils down to having authoritative links with the right anchor text linking to you. The rest matters very little.
2. Make sure those keywords are on your page and maybe urls also.
3. Get links. More the better. Not from spammers.
0. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp. 1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keyword…
1: Making sure your site is visible to search engines. Make sure there are meta-tags, that navigation, headers and text is text, not images or flash. Have a sitemap. Make sure links to pages contain a good description of what's on the page.
2: Making sure someone's linking to your site. Pitch to blogs to get them to talk about and link to your site. Comment on blogs, putting your website in the "website" field. Have good content that people will want to come to and share - the best way to be visible is for get other people to do your promotion for you.
The reason it should be a niche, is that when there isn't too many people writing a website, it's easier to rank high for a search term. If you picked generic technology news, you'd be hard pressed to break page 10 on Google. If make a good site about how to grow your own organic hamster food, you could make page one with little effort. Picking the niche is as much basic SEO as the technical stuff for this "trick".
Finally, TANSTAAFL.
1. SEO is not keyword frequency. Although the page you are optimizing needs to contain the search term you are trying to rank for it shouldn't be saturated with that term. The first four words of the tag, the tag and maybe an alt attribute are a few good places to put a good keyword.
2. More links isn't necessarily better. A couple good links from one or two good pages can really boost your rankings more than a lot of links from unimportant websites.
3. Meta tags won't help a page rank higher. The and tags aren't used as ranking factors but it's good to include them because they do signal "about-ness" to an engine.
Some things that might hurt your SEO are frequent server downtime and site inaccessibility, cloaking by user agent, links from spammy domains and acquiring links from known "link sellers".
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
In order to find what terms you should associate with your site, do some basic research on search volume (google has some tools for this). Once you have the terms you want to rank for, it's a matter of making them more prominent in your site. Header tags, the title tag, the first 100 words of your body copy (p tags), and your URL structure (readable & hierarchical) have the strongest impact on this, as does the anchor text of both internal and external links. Meta description doesn't impact your ranking, but it does impact click-through in the search engine listings because it's the default text the search engine will display under the title.
The last part is making sure that content is available in text form on your page. Banners that are in flash or image files should either be replaced with images, or you can do graceful degradation by having the text be replaced with images via javascript (this is consider OK by google so long as the replacing image contains the same text). If you have videos, include transcripts or at least summaries. If you have lots of images, use the alt attribute. Don't make things Ajax unless you really need to.
The last recommendation is don't spam. You'll get penalized. Spamming is putting more SEO-bait than content on your page, and/or placing content that search engines will see but most users won't (putting the same content in different forms is ok). Most tricks you can think of, someone else has thought of first, and you will get burned for it. Done properly, white-hat SEO and accessibility overlap very well, since search engine spiders are basically low-capability browsers.
Basic "white hat" SEO is two things: 1: Making sure your site is visible to search engines. Make sure there are meta-tags, that navigation, headers and text is text, not images or flash. Have a sitemap. Make sure links to pages contain a good description of what's on the page. 2: Making sure someone's linking to your site. Pitch to blogs to get them to talk about and link to your site. Comment on blogs, putting your…
- Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most)
- Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul's, dl's)
- Get links from other websites (best case scenario: link's anchor text is your keyword). Higher the PageRank of the linking site the better. NoFollow's don't count.
To get links:
1) Ask directly
2) Mention them in your blog posts, hope they reciprocate
3) Pay them (but don't tell anyone you did)
4) Make interesting content on your blog that naturally gains links
That will give you a good start. From there, start a blog with interesting content, and submit it around. The idea with the blog is that the posts are more interesting than your site's copy, so people will actually link to it.