Monday 23 April 2012

Off-Page SEO

Perhaps you'll be a little surprised, but off-page optimization starts with the content (which is the king, as you remember). The very first step you should accomplish before starting any link building is quality content. Remember, it is much easier to get a link onto some amazingly creative or informative article rather than onto a scanty set of trivialities. Deliver the content and the qualtiy backlinks will become much more closer to you than you think.

Nevertheless, the content alone is not enough. You still need to put some efforts into your link building strategy. Here is the rough step-by-step:

  1. Know your product
    Seems stupid at first, isn't it? But surprisingly many people all over the world simply do not know what do they offer! They simply cannot explain what they sell, what product they deal with, what's its features, why do other people need this product and what differs this product from other 2567 products of that kind. They simply do not know. But you must know that! Think of your product or service. What's unique in it? How can it help others? Who are your potential customers? You see, you cannot offer your services or products to some average and faceless customers. You must clearly understand who your customers are and why do they need you product. Start with that, figure it out for yourself, then formulate it into words to explain this for other people as well.

  2. Set objectives
    Now as you know who are your target audience, you should set the objectives - what is the purpose for you in reaching that audience? Money? Fun? Word of mouth? Fame? Popularity? Why do you need those people linking to your site? Spare a few minutes (or maybe few days) onto thinking of it - that's worth it. Without that answer you won't succeed.

  3. Research
    The next vital step is research. Before diving into the link building, you should gather as much information on the market as you can. The key to the success is information. But the value of the info is inverse of its age. So investigate the market, find the fresh info on your theme, conduct some personal researches or experiments if needed, talk with specialists in your industry - that's all count. What's the point in writing an article if the story it tells to your potential buyers is old as your granny? Well, of course, there is always someone who didn't hear it yet, but some recent news will attract much more interest anyway and that mean much more inbound links too.

    You should also probe the market - what is popular, what are alternatives, how much does it cost, what are the bottle-necks, what's the ROI and so on and so further. Base your link building strategy on the current trends of the market in your niche.

  4. Build content
    As it was said above, the quality content opens the door to many inbound links to your site. At this step you should already know who are your potential visitors, who do you target, what objectives do you pursue and so on. Also you have a handful of great, freshly squeezed information. Now it is time to clothe all of this into tasty marketing texts. If you can do it with your own strengths - that's great, do it! If you cannot write persuasive selling copy yourself - hire someone who can.

    Use the on-page optimization section as a guide on content writing.

  5. Acquire links
    You can refer to the above part to learn what works in the current off-page optimization world and what not. One of the today's buzz words is link baiting. The term describes the way how the links are acquired. The technique does not intend to ask webmasters to put a link to you, instead it encourages them to do that. Just like the fisherman baits a fish to the hook, you can bait a webmaster with your website. Why would a webmaster want to link to you? Because your site has some value. Because it provides some services that others do not. Because it has unique content. Because it is funny. Because it's authoritative and trustworthy. There are plenty of possible reasons. But what common about them is: the link bait is never an easy money! You need to thought it out well. The bait needs to be well researched. It must fill some gap in the market to attract high value links.

    Don't think of acquiring links as a part-time job. Treat it as something big, something that takes all of your efforts and something that you would be proud of when it would be done. Then it will amaze other people. Then it will attract their attention. Then webmasters will be happy to put a link to you.

    Ok, let's suppose you have written a good content, but how do you promote it? How do you make others link to it? Where to start from? The best place to start is other resources at your theme - forums, personal blogs, some authority sites in your field etc. You could also research your competitors and find who links to them and why. Try to suggest better solution (read: your solution) to them. If you have a mass product - try offering it to respected bloggers for free. By the way, some free stuff always helps to get a link or two. Hope you got the idea. If you made a tool - ask others to test it for bugs, if you write an article - ask for a review etc. People are often eager to help, why not let them?

  6. Keep working
    Once again, as soon as you got some results of your link campaign (or even if you didn't get any) - do not stop. Keep working. Repeat the steps 1-5. Build content, acquire links and then build content again.

    Learn new tricks, read industry news, interview interesting persons (why not?), communicate with related sites of your field. SEO is dynamics. Every day something happens and your website is better to reflect the changes, otherwise your competitors do that.

Friday 13 April 2012

On-Page SEO

The content is the king. Your main on-page SEO strategy is to build the content interesting to your visitors, providing info and value, correctly describing the services you offer, but not being a dull piece of text leaving the memory two seconds after you have finished reading it. At the same time, the content must serve its SEO purpose - to be a landing page for search engine queries. Surely, the process of writing a good copy is a creation, not the hack-work, but nevertheless there are few steps that you can follow walking this path of easy seo:
  1. Discover your keywords
    This is the first thing you should think of while starting to optimize your site content. It doesn't matter what industry you're working in - every industry, every sphere of human work can be described in hundreds if not thousands of different words! And your potential customers enter many of those words in the search box every day! You can't afford yourself to sit and look how this money river just flows downwards passing you by.

    Think of what you're doing. Think of what your customers want from you. Try to figure this out with simple keywords. Then use synonyms. That would be the basis of your keywords. Then use Google Keyword Tool or Search-based keyword tool to find more synonyms and related searches that other people type in the search box. Conveniently, you can see the search volume per month and the approximate competition for each keyword which also helps you much to filter out the best terms to target.

    Write your keywords down and sort them by demand (the amount of searches according to Google keyword tool) and then by relevance. Then, make a quick Google search for those keywords to reveal your competitors and analyze their websites to extract a bit more keywords of your niche. Select the most relevant and demanded keywords of the final list and proceed to the next step.

  2. Prepare the content
    Now, as you know which keywords people are searching, you need to give them what they want - that is you should prepare a landing page for each search term. Obviously, it is not enough to simply write a copy and stuff it with the keyword. Quite the contrary, you should build your copy around the chosen keyword and the theme it describes. Write naturally, don't neglect the headers and the loud speaking title with sticky words in it attracting the attention of the reader.

    Remember the important places where your keywords should appear? We thoroughly covered this matter earlier in this FAQ. Write a plain, natural-language title with the target keyword placed somewhere in the beginning of the title, write a couple of headers, name the file accordingly etc. How many keywords should each page cover? The best strategy here is to make a landing page for 2-3 keyword phrases, no more. You don't want to disperse the focus of your efforts. Each page should concentrate on several short-tail keywords and a dozen or two long-tail ones.

    Repeat the step for all of your keywords. It may take a while to write a proper content for each of your target pharses, and more importantly it may be hard to write a unique, non-duplicate content for each of the pages. Do not simply copy-paste one text to another changing then "gadgets" to "widgets" and "foo" to "bar". That's won't work. Instead, write with normal language, write for humans (I never tired of repeating this one!). You don't have to prepare all of the pages at once - this is a marathon, not a sprint.

  3. Interlink your pages
    A very important step! As you already know, the relevant links to a page with the proper anchor text are one of the most important ranking factors. Most likely, at this time you don't have many backlinks from other websites so building the internal links is crucial for you as it gives the very first boost to your search engine position.

    So, review the pages you have and make links on them to each other. I do not mean the usual navigation stuff here. I mean find some keyword on a page and enclose it into the anchor tag, pointing to the page that is closely relevant to that keyword. Here is a picture to illustrate this concept:

    Interlinking the pages with proper anchor text


    You can see that the gadgets page links to the widgets page with some general term and to some more detailed page (or a product page) with the "orange gadgets" anchor text. Interlinking your pages is extremely important, but please do not overload your pages with links! Too many links hurt your positions and make it difficult to read the page. Try using link only when it's necessary, that is: when a link helps a visitor to better understand the info, or to choose a proper product, or simply adds some other value to a page. Also, you should keep in mind that only the first link counts, so you must assure that your navigation menu links are placed at the very bottom of your HTML source, while the links with proper anchor text - somewhere near the top.

  4. Create navigation and site map
    Aside from the interlinking, your site must provide the proper navigation both for humans and for search engines. Ensure you have linked all the pages, check the whole site for broken links, create a site map that puts all pages together in one place and make it accessible with one click from any other page of your site. It is not necessary though to create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google - it won't give any preferences anyway.

  5. Keep working
    While your newly-created pages start to obtaining their positions in SERPs, you should continue working - keep writing the content, optimize or change it if needed, monitor your competitors and so on. Things usually get changed pretty fast in SEO, so don't let yourself to rest on the laures.




Monday 9 April 2012

How To Do Local SEO For Your Website in Five Minutes


SEO, the art and science of ranking well in search engines, is one among those things that's straightforward to be told however exhausting to master, therefore let’s concentrate on the simple half. You’ve got an internet site and it’s not ranking in Google therefore well for no matter search term you're coveting. Therefore what does one do?


Here is some (hopefully) easy SEO stuff you will do, or maybe higher tell somebody else to try and do, to induce your SEO strategy in gear:

1. Discover Your target market

Until you recognize who you're targeting there's not a lot of purpose in doing SEO. What words are your customers looking with once you need to be found? What are completely different modes are they in after they are searching? Are they able to buy? Are they merely doing research? Are they massive spenders or are they cheapskates? In general choose terms that match up along with your service, that you just suppose can convert well (conversion may be another 5 minute discussion altogether btw) which have sensible search volume.

2. Update Your Page Titles

The page title or “title tag” is maybe the foremost necessary part of SEO. These are the words that seem at the highest of your internet browser once you are on a page. They’re conjointly the words that show up within the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you're targeting in your page titles. Generally keep the titles as transient as doable whereas at a similar time creating them appealing to searchers. No straightforward trick. Place the foremost necessary keywords at the start of the title. Doesn’t worry regarding obtaining this excellent the primary time as these are terribly straightforward to vary and Google typically reacts to those change quickly.

3. Build every Page Title distinctive

It is conjointly necessary that every one of the pages on your web site have distinctive page titles. A fast thanks to see if you've got over one page with a similar title is to try and do the subsequent search in Google:

site: yoursite.com intitle”the words within the title”

The results of this search can show all of the pages in Google that have these words within the title. Once you establish these drawback pages you'll be able to update the titles to form them distinctive.

And ensure you add your town name to the titles as lots of individuals explore for your service in your town.

H1 tag used to given the headline of the page.  You also ought to check the Meta descriptions tags of every page to form certain those are distinctive still.

4. Add some Internal Links

The number of links a page gets from its own web site and that pages link to it matters. The house page is that the most necessary on the location and therefore the pages that are linked to from the house page are important. discover that pages you wish to rank the foremost (and don’t say all of them) and add links from alternative pages to those pages. Ensure you employ relevant keywords within the text of these links. for instance if you wish to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” within the text of the links that attend that page. Strive to not use the precise same phrases in every link to form it look additional “natural”. For instance in a number of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to each Page

Ideally each page ought to have your address and phone range. This is often useful for users however it conjointly reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has many locations then you will need to make a separate page for every location or a minimum of one page that lists all locations. Ensure you link to those pages from as several pages as doable on the location. it might in all probability be a decent plan to list as several location names as doable on the house page too.

6. Claim Your Profile on Merchant Circle, Google native Business Center, Yahoo native, etc.

There are an enormous range of yellow pages-like sites that permit you to update your business data at no cost. These sites get lots of traffic and have a tendency to rank well. At the smallest amount you ought to attend every one, claim your profile and ensure they're linking to your web site. you will be shocked at what proportion business you'll be able to get from these free listings. Here’s of websites that supply a free Online Business

7. Build a Video

And I am not talking a few multimillion greenback productions. Raise your child to purpose the camera at you and begin talking. Justify your service and take a look at to be charming. Mention your web site lots. Then upload it to YouTube and each alternative free video web site and title the video along with your prime keywords. Make sure your web site is linked to from your profile. Then link to those video pages from your web site with the keywords within the link text. You’ll be amazed at how straightforward it's for these pages to rank for your search terms.

8. Add a Blog To Your web site

A blog is simply straightforward thanks to add pages to your web site. A good, or maybe dangerous, internet developer ought to be ready to got wind of a straightforward blog for you during a jiffy. If you don’t need it super customized it shouldn’t price that a lot of. Once it’s up begin writing. I’m not talking novels or maybe journalism. Attend http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and put in your blog’s URL to Google’s blog search engine. Currently every time you write one thing on the blog it'll instantly be added to Google, and every of these posts encompasses a probability of ranking for the term you're targeting.

9. Ensure You Don’t Have Any Technical problems

There is variety of technical problems that would be preventing your web site from ranking. A simple thanks to establish them is to sign in your web site to Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start. By repetition a brief line of code to your web site you'll be able to get a thought of a number of the common issues that Google has with it. Google provides you with some detail regarding the matter. There’s not a lot of you yourself will possible do regarding these issues, however you'll be able to a minimum of show them to your web site developer or a SEO guy and raise him/her to work it out.

10. Get Links

Now none of these things can work alright if you don’t have any links to your web site. The large search engines check up on links from alternative sites as a symptom of quality and trust. Therefore you ought to pay the rest of your 5 minutes wondering what alternative sites you think that you'll be able to get links from. Here are a number of the apparent ones:
- Chambers of commerce/local business teams
- Native business directories/Local newspaper web site
- Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)
- Partners/Vendors

There are many alternative ways in which to induce links like writing articles for alternative sites, sending out press releases, adding your business information to social media sites, creating a fool of yourself in public, etc.