getting up to speed??

[Guest marcus]

After reading through the rules and me being completely GREEN to the world of web design I will try my best not to be a "help vampire". I do need some expert advice on direction

though. So here is my situation I have a website that someone else built and I ultimately want to learn to do my own SEO and Web work. The question I have is which tutorial would best help me with understanding how my site is built and would show me how to understand where to start with seo?

 

Any help is appreciated

[perryc]

Learn Html and CSS first and then go from there. You most likely need to understand those to to understand where to start on your site.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks,

 

 

 

haseo15

[BeeDev]

SEO is a very broad field. There's so many things involved, and they all work together to contribute to your search engine ranking. Things like (in no particular order):

- Good quality Inbound links, from high ranked websites (a link from BBC.co.uk will greatly boost your rankings)

- Non-duplicated Title tags for your pages, and also non-duplicate "description" meta tag

- Content-relevant "Description" meta tags

- Having content at the top of the HTML structure

- Having only one (and at least one) "h1" tag on the page, and use h2, h3 for other headings (as many as u want on a page).

- Having Semantic HTML (<h1>About Us</h1> is semantic, instead of <span class="heading1">About Us</span> which is not very semantic)

- Speeding up your page loading times (This is a very broad field too...)

- Submitting and confirming your site on "Google Webmaster Tools" and also submitting your XML sitemap there so Googlebot knows which pages you have on your website. (Unless you haven't already done so)

- Submitting your site to other search engines (Unless you haven't already done so)

- Most important: Having unique content, and updating your site regularly with new unique content, and don't forget to update your sitemap on Google Webmaster Tools after you create new content.

 

... and much more. Don't mean to overwhelm you though, it's just the way it is

 

So start small, and work your way up, and don't take shortcuts, learn things properly from the beginning and you will set a good foundation for yourself to work on. Good luck.

Edited December 7, 2010 by BeeDev

[newseed]

In addition to BeeDev's post, just don't expect overnight results. Results may vary from one day to the next as well. Too many times people expect to be on the first page of the search results with no real effort at all.