SEO Preparation

Search engine optimization should Ideally be one of the areas taken into account at the initial planning stage of a website. Thoughts on making a website search engine friendly should be made before even the first line of code is written. Careful consideration should be given to your design, site structure, navigation and internal linking structure. Do you REALLY have to use Frames for example. Is it really necessary to use active server pages (.asp) on every page of your website? Search engine friendliness should not be the only topic up for review in the planning of your website, but it is so commonly missed out completely in a websites planning phase. The major corporate websites are the most guilty of all for poor planning.
Let's however take the case that you are going to go for a search engine friendly website. No frames, no or limited use of Flash, Java applets or extensive Javascript etc.The next step is to establish your best search terms (keywords) or better phrases. This is a very important phase of search engine optimization. Just go for what you THINK are your best keywords and you may well regret it afterwards, when you find most searchers do not use the search term you thought was good. Research your keywords properly and you are halfway home. Do you know for example what users are typing into search engine boxes to find sites with similar or the same content your site provides? Do you know what two and three word combinations are most commonly being used and have relevance to your site? Do you know how many competing pages there are for each of your main keywords? Which keywords will bring you the best visit/sale conversions? What keywords your competitors are targeting?
If you don't know ALL the answers to the above then you should not skip this section of the tutorial.
There are essentially 3 main methods you can use to establish the best keywords for a given web site.
1. Send all your friends and colleagues an email or hand them a sheet of paper with the following question on it stating specifically that you need 5 answers:
If you were searching for a web site with content identical to, or of the same theme as www.yourdomain.com, what word, or better word combinations (2-4 words) would you type into the search box? Please give 5 possible search terms or search term phrases that you believe are relevant to www.yourdomain.com content. "
1 _______________
2 _______________
3 _______________
4 _______________
5 _______________

Important: Make sure you actually write a numbered list 1-5 leaving spaces for them to fill in! Otherwise in my experience you will find you generally get just the one or two possible keywords.
You then collate the results from everyone and you can normally see clearly what enters most peoples heads for the keywords relating to your site. This method is particularly useful if you have plenty of people to ask. The more the better really. Ideal for companies with more than a handful of employees. You will commonly see keywords that you would never have thought of yourself and it gives you a great start on your keyword selection process. Studies have shown that 65% of the replies will be 2 words or more combinations. This is good news, I'll tell you why later.

Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

Search engine optimization has changed dramatically over just the last 2-3 years.
A few years ago, it was for the most part sufficient to incorporate a well optimized title tag and have a few relevant search terms (aka keywords) in the meta tags to get a top 10 ranking. Those days are long gone, and yet in my estimation, over 75% of webmasters still hold on to the notion that search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking title and meta tags. It is essential today to understand that meta tags for example, carry zero to little weight in a search engine algorithm.In fact, the keyword meta tag for example, is completely ignored by the Google search engine, other search engines give it very little weight.
The main reason for the big changes has been the abuse of the meta tags on mass and the search engine results pages (aka SERPs) were becoming just a list of spam ridden sites with keyword stuffed meta tags, often not even relevant to the site in question. There are now for Google approximately 100 different HTML, design, on and off-page elements that can make the difference between a top 10 and top 100 ranking.
Of far more importance nowadays for example, is the actual body text content within a page and what I like to call off-page criteria which includes number of inbound links, anchor text of inbound links and whether the links come from "authority" / "high value" sites (in Google's case).
The design, structure and website technology used are also important ranking criteria for the major search engines. Where in a websites source code, and in which HTML tags keywords appear, is just as important as the number of occurrences and the ratio of these keywords in relation to the rest of a pages text content (known as keyword density).
Search engines use so called robots or spiders which go through a web pages source code and store the crawled page in a database. This robot will usually follow the links on a page (assuming it can read and interpret them, but more on that later) and then crawl the linked page, and store this page also in it's database, follow on to the next link and so on.
The favorite diet of these search engine robots/spiders is text. I usually call it spider food. Text embedded in images is unreadable to spiders, so are the text content in Java applets, javascript, css and in many search engines the links/text in image maps and flash objects are ignored. The links in framesets can also cause problems for some search engines.
The following pages are my attempt to dispel the common myths about achieving high rankings on the search engines and is designed to provide the basics on how to achieve a good ranking. Experienced search engine optimizers will not learn much from these pages. The place for SEO experienced webmasters would be my forum which provides up to date SEO technology, tips, views and commentary on modern SEO methodology.
To get the most of this tutorial, a little HTML and CSS knowledge is of benefit.
There is NO simple formula for getting ranked No.1 on Google for example.
Let me make that clear, there is however optimization methodology that makes it far more likely for someone to get ranked far higher than they would be without any optimization.
The best way to use this tutorial is to always click on the "next" button and not jump pages by means of the navigation on the left .
Webmasters may freely link to this tutorial either in part or entirety so long as ABAKUS is credited.
I hope you find this tutorial useful and enjoy it. Be sure to recommend it to friends and/or link to it.