8 Easy to Understand SEO Strategies Even Beginner Can Do (1 - 4)

I can't believe my first post is about SEO. Managing SEM campaigns for years, SEO is never a stranger to me but I have not tried to overcome it until now.
I start my reading on SEO, subscribe SEO blogs and forums. For newbie like me, I would recommend you read this The Beginning Guide to SEO - MOZ

I read through the download in two days, found out part of the concepts are overlapping.
Thus I de-duplicate the content and extract the SEO essences based on my 120 hours knowledge about this science.

BEGINNING GUIDE TO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Part 1 - What Do The Search Engines Tell You?

Part 2 - On-Page Optimization

Part 3 - Common Reasons Why Pages May Not Be Reachable

Part 4 - How Usability, User Experience & Content Affect Search Engine Rankings

Part 5 - Off-Page Optimization

Part 6 - Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines

Part 7 - Spam Analysis

Part 8 - Measuring & Tracking Success

Part 1 - What Do The Search Engines Tell You?

SEO Information from Google Webmaster Guidelines

• Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking.
• Use clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• <title> elements and ALT attributes.

SEO Information from Bing Webmaster Guidelines

• Clean and keyword rich URL structure.
• Content is not buried inside rich media.

Part 2 - On-Page Optimization

On-Page Optimization = Search Engine Friendly Design & Development

• Use the keyword in the title tag at least once.
• Once prominently near the top of the page.
• At least 2-3 times, including variations, in the body copy on the page.
• alt attribute of an image on the page.
• Once in the URL.
• At least once in the meta description tag.

1. Indexable Content

• Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned “alt attributes” in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content.
• Video & audio content should have an accompanying transcript.

2. Title Tags

• 65-75 characters of a title tag in the search results.
• However, if you're targeting multiple keywords (or an especially long keyword phrase) and having them in the title tag is essential to ranking, it may be advisable to go longer.
• Place important keywords close to the front.
• Every title tag with a brand name.

3. Meta Description

• Meta description tag serves the function of advertising copy.
• Search engines generally will cut snippets longer than 160 characters.

4. URL Construction Guidelines

• Keyword use is important.
• Use hyphens to separate words.
• Not all web applications accurately interpret separators like underscore "_," plus "+," or space "%20," so use the hyphen "-" character to separate words in a URL.

5. Anchor text

• eg. <a herf "http://www.jonwye.com">Jon Wye's Custom Designed Belts</a>

6. Canonical and Duplicate Versions of Content

• Canonicalization is the practice of organizing your content in such a way that every unique piece has one and only one URL 301-redirected.
• <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.seomoz.org/blog”/>
• The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective.

7. Rich Snippets

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

<div>

SEO Conference<br/>

Learn about SEO from experts in the field.<br/>

Event date:<br/>

May 8, 7:30pm

</div>

• Now, by structuring the data, we can tell the search engines more specific information about the type of data. The end result might look like this:

<div itemscope

itemtype="http://schema.org/Event">

<div itemprop="name">SEO Conference</div>

<span itemprop="description">Learn about SEO

from experts in the field.</span>

Event date:

<time itemprop="startDate" datetime="2012-05-

08T19:30">May 8, 7:30pm</time>

</div>

8. Defending Your Sites Honor

• Rather than linking to your home page using:

<a href="../>Home</a>

• You would instead use:

<a href="http://www.seomoz.org">Home</a>

9. Keyword Density

• KD should be less than 7-8%
• Keyword density is divorced from content, quality, semantics, and relevancy.

If two documents, D1 and D2, consist of 1000 terms

(l =1000) and repeat a term 20 times (tf = 20), then a

keyword density analyzer will tell you that for both

documents Keyword Density (KD) KD = 20/1000 =

0.020 (or 2%) for that term. Identical values are

obtained when tf = 10 and l = 500.

10. H1 Tag

• The six heading elements, H1 through H6. 
• <h1>Earth</h1>
  <h2>Europe</h2>
  <h3>France</h3>
  <h4>Paris</h4>
  <h5>Sightseeing in Paris</h5>
  <h6>Eiffel Tower</h6>

Part 3 - Common Reasons Why Pages May Not Be Reachable

• If you use Javascript for links, you may find that search engines either do not crawl or give very little weight to the links embedded within.
• Links pointing to pages blocked by the meta robots tag or robots.txt
• Frames and I-Frames.
• Non-crawable link structure.
• Links on pages with many hundreds or thousands of links.
• Nofollowed link
• Nofollowed links carry no weight and are interpreted as HTML text
• <a href="http://www.seomoz.org" rel="nofollow">Lousy Punks!</a>
• Yahoo search results, has also stated that they do not include nofollowed links in the link graph.

Part 4 - How Usability, User Experience & Content Affect Search Engine Rankings

Signals of Quality Content

• Engagement Metrics - Bounce Rate
• If you hit the first link, then immediately hit the "back" button to try the second link, this indicates that you were not satisfied with the first result.
• Higher quality sites and information earned more links than their less useful, lower quality peers.

Crafting Content

• Developing "great content" may be the most repeated suggestion in the SEO world.