SEO Tutorial Part-4

Introduction
Today we will be learning how to make your URLs Search Engine Friendly, I will also show you Powerful Tips and Secrets of SEO and When I say “Secrets” I truly do mean secrets because not many bloggers write about the secrets for free, most of the tips I will give away are tips that people charge for, I don’t know if you are familiar with the famous motto of online e-books that say “We’ll make you rich in a day with this SEO book!“. Well my motto should be “I won’t make you rich in a day, but I will save you money from buying a useless e-book!”
I will also explain how to set up a 301 Redirect for your website. And finally, I’ll be telling you how to properly implement ads to your web site.

Making your URLs Search Engine Friendly
Introduction

Search Engine Optimization is fairly easy, but this is one of the parts of SEO that I had the most trouble learning when I was beginning to learn about SEO. I found this part hard because it requires you to edit important files from your website’s directory, and if you make a mistake your website can end up getting weird error messages (It happened 2 times to me while editing my .httacess file). But don’t let me scare you, because Once you get the hang of it you’ll be glad you did it.
SEF URLs, or Search Engine Friendly URLs are important because it helps your site get indexed better.
How to make your URLs Search Engine Friendly.
Search Engine Optimization is fairly easy, but this is one of the parts of SEO that I had the most trouble learning when I was beginning to learn about SEO. I found this part hard because it requires you to edit important files from your website’s directory, and if you make a mistake your website can end up getting weird error messages (It happened 2 times to me while editing my .httacess file). But don’t let me scare you, because Once you get the hang of it you’ll be glad you did it.

So let’s begin, SEF URLs, or Search Engine Friendly Uniform Resource Locators are important because they help your site get indexed better. As I have said before, in my other series of SEO tutorials, Search Engines use robots to index websites, and in the process of indexing a site they have to analyze your website’s URL.

Search Engines prefer websites with static URLs rather than dynamic URLs. A Static URL is a URL that always stays the same unless the webmaster edits its HTML code. A Dynamic URLis the address of a Web page with content that depends on variable parameters that are provided to the server that delivers it.

Since dynamic urls are always changing Google and other search engines can categorize your website to having duplicate content and they can often end up penalizing your website for having such content, the reason this happens is because search engines ignore anything after a character, so if you have a website and the URL of a certain page of that site is:

http://www.example.com/search?q=cache:HiUG4YdCNyIJ:www.google.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

A search engine will not index that URL or it will index it very slowly because search engines can recognize dynamic URLs from Static URLs, and when they recognize a Dynamic URL there is a high chance that that URL will not get crawled because the search engine’s spider does not want to get stuck on an endless annoying string of Dynamic URLs, so it may simply skip that URL or it may not index it at all.

In order to change your Dynamic URLs to Static URLs you need Apache in your server (Apache is not required, as there are other ways of doing this but I’m only gonna write about Apache and Wordpress). Once you have apache in your server you need to make a .htaccess file.
For this example I will be using the following URL which does not exist:

http://www.thegermz.com/page.php?id=about&section=me

Once we are done with this process our URL will end up looking like this:

http://www.thegermz.com/page/id/about/section/me /


First, we must separate the URL into different parts like so:

http://www.thegermz.com/page/id/[VALUE]/section/[VALUE]/

And then we add this code to the .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule page/id/(.*)/section/(.*)/ page.php?id=$1&section=$2

I hope that helped you, and I hope that cleared some questions, I will now show you how to do this in Wordpress.

Search Engine Friendly URLs with Wordpress
Like I said before, Google, and other search engines like static URLs better than dynamic URLs, so we must learn how to make static URLs with Wordpress, and here is a step by step guide on how to do it.

• First log in to your Wordpress Admin Panel.
• Look for the “Options” Menu
• After clicking Options, click where is says “Permalinks”, as you can see there are different options for you to choose, but in this case you should choose “Custom”.
• Enter the following code in the Custom box “/%category%/%postname%”
• Click on Update Permalink Structure

Sometimes, when you update the Permalink structure, you will get 404 Pages (It happened to me while updating my permalink structure) to fix this you add this code to your .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

That should fix any 404 pages that you are getting.

Setting your Preferred Domain

During your time browsing the internet you may have noticed that URLs can be written in many different ways, especially if you write a url like this:
thegermz.com
It will take you to
http://thegermz.com
The same thing happens if you type:
www.thegermz.com
It will take you to
http://www.thegermz.com
It is good to set a preferred domain while having a website and sticking with that URL, otherwise you will the same pages having different page ranks from Google.
I should note, that having a preferred domain does not mean that people won’t be able to link to your site using a certain URL like “thegermz.com” when your preferred domain is “www.thegermz.com” An easy way to set your preferred domain is to create an account at Google’s webmaster tools and setting your preferred domain name there.

When you set your preferred domain name, it is suggested that you add a 301 redirect to your .htaccess file, and to do so you must add this code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Paste that code to your .htaccess file, and change the word “domain” to the name of your domain name.

Properly Adding Ads to your Website
Introduction
As you can see, the internet is full of ads! There are ads on almost every site that you see, whether it be Youtube, Forbes, or even Myspace! The reason these sites are very successful is because they earn a good profit from the ads that they place on their sites, I’m not saying that the ads are the main source of their income, but it does make a good difference.

Where to find ads
There are many places where you can find Ads, some of the most popular are Google’s Adsense, Yahoo’s Publisher Network, and Adbrite. If I had to reccomend you one of them, I would choose Yahoo’s Publisher Network, and the reason I choose this one is because I have had a very bad experience with Google Adsense, as they simply decided to close my account for no reason at all. And I wouldn’t choose Adbrite because I have no experience with it at all. In my time with Yahoo they have been great, I have had no problems at all, the only thing that I dislike about Yahoo’s Publisher Network, is the fact that they do not have image ads, which I really like as they make a website look as if it had more content.

How do ads work?
When people want to get more traffic for their websites they buy ads from certain places, in this case I will use Google as an example. So, people buy ads from google and they choose certain keywords like for example “cars” once the keyword is chosen, Google searches for partner websites with keywords that contain the name “cars”, once they find the keyword they simply put the ads on that site, and Google charger per click to the customer, it could range from a dollar to 20 dollars. There is not set price for keywords, as the price is always changing.

Inserting ads on your website
The best place to place ads on your website is on places where people have a good look at them. The best thing to do with ads is to make them blend in with your layout so that people will find the ads more attractive and are more inclined to clicking on them. The best thing to do while having ads on a website is to have one on the Header and 2 in the body. You should not use the Footer for your primary ads as some people do not scroll down up until the footer, so can end up loosing potential profit.
If you have a blog, then you should put an ad on the header of your site, put 1 on the middle of a post you have made, and you can put another ad on either a sidebar or on another post you have made.
One of the best tips I’ve gotten to earn better profits, is to stop being obsessed with earning money with ads, because after all, you should be building your website because you like what you are doing, not because you want to make a profit out of it otherwise, your work won’t be as good as if you actually liked what you were doing.

Tips and Secrets of SEO
As you can see from the title I will teach you different tips and secrets that others have given me so that my site will get more traffic.

1. Write comments on others peoples blogs. The more comments you write the more backlinks you get, and the more people will be interested in visiting your site. Remember to write helpful comments, and remember not to spam while doing it or else you could get banned from the site or your comment could be deleted.
2. When you are trying to get very good keywords for a search engine, then write the keywords that you want extensively. What I mean by this is, when you write your content try to add that keyword as many times as you can. For example if you were to want the word “cars” to be your keyword then you would write a paragraph like this:
   this is my cars paragraph, in this cars paragraph i will talk about cars, because cars are a part of a humans life. Cars are used by almost everyone in the world and we could not imagine living without them. Even though cars take up a lot of energy, cars are very useful because they take us everywhere we want to go, so cars are ....
   As you can see I used the word Cars many times in this sentence, that piece of a paragraph would be a very good article with good keywords.
3. Create an Advertise Page. When you first start your blog, you should make an Advertise page so that others can buy advertising off you. If you want people to get more interested, then you should first make the Advertise page free so that anyone can sign up, once a lot of people are interested you can start charging. But always remember not to charge too much, especially when you are starting up because otherwise people just won’t sign up with your advertising program.
4. Write new articles daily! This is something I have a lot of trouble with because I have way too many things to do and most of the time I don’t get a chance to sit down and review a site or just write a random article. But remember that the best thing to do is to keep a pattern when you write your articles. If you can’t write an article a day then write an article every 2 days or 3, but always remember to keep a pattern or else your reader will just leave.
5. Write Tutorials. When you write tutorials, like the one I’m currently writing, remember to make different parts of an article so that if a person liked your first article, then they will be interested in reading the second part of your article. If you don’t have time to write articles in different days and would rather just get it out there in one day, then pay someone to do it for you, or if you have Wordpress then use ‘Timestamps’ and it will post articles for you on the day and time that you decide.
6. Make online videos. I should recommend you this because a lot of people have told me about it and they say that it works, especially when you create a viral video. I have never tried this as I have no time to create videos, but I might start to make viral videos once I find some time. When creating your videos it is recommended that you put a lot of time in it and make it as funny and as interesting as you can. Look on your old VHS videos, maybe you have an old video when you were doing something funny, upload that video and post it on Youtube, and once you do that then simply add your link to the video. According to others who have told me this, once a video becomes popular you’ll get tons of people visiting your site hoping to watch other videos that you’ve made.

Conclusion
This is the end of the tutorial, I will be writing a SEO Tutorial Part 5 in which I will talk about .ico files, how to get more visitors to your site and many other things as well.
I hope this tutorial helped you, and I hope that you subscribe to my feeds.