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In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization is making a web site search engine friendly through HTML manipulation so that the search engine spiders can crawl every page of the site and return the web site to its index. With that being said, there are actually a lot more variables included in actually getting rankings. In fact, search engine optimization is comprised of on page coding and off-site marketing in the form of links.

Getting into the Search Engine

There is one or two ways for your site to be added to a search engine depending on which engine you are targeting. One way is to submit your site to a search engine. Sometimes this method includes a submission fee for each page to be submitted. With other engines, such as Google, the submission is free. The other option is more natural and consists of getting linked from reputable sites on the web; this allows search engines spiders to access your by theirs.

Getting rankings

Now that your site has been included into the search engine’s index, you can now start to optimize your site accordingly (even better would to have had your site optimized before submissions). The most basic optimization consists of concentrating on your Meta Tags, Title tag, Content and Links. The Meta tags tell the spiders what your site is all about. There are many Meta tags that have the ability to hold a variety of very specific information, from who the author of the site is to what language the site is in or whether or not the spider should follow the links on the page. The Content on your web site should be original and thorough. Try to have at least 300-500 words on your web page and make sure you target your core keywords repeatedly. You should also get your site linked with as many sites as you can. This will build your popularity on the web and in the eyes of engines such as Google, the more relevant you are to the rest of the web, the more important you are to their index. In short, the better your site will be ranked.

Following the links below or at the upper right of the page to get familiar with the basic tags to optimize when starting your Search Engine Optimization.

Title Tag
Meta Description Tag
Meta Keywords Tag

Lastly, there are no magic solutions to search engine rankings. Yes, there are many important things that will help tremendously towards your placement. In the end, good lasting rankings will come from a lot of hard work and depending on the industry you are in, you may have to work that much harder.

Top 20 SEO Tips for Webmasters

Wouldn’t it be great if someone compiled a list of the top SEO success factors? You know, something simple you could consult to get a better idea of the types of things you should be doing plus maybe a few things you shouldn’t do…

Oh wait, we just did.

Now just to be clear, this is not an exact science. It would be great if it was but unfortunately Google supposedly uses hundreds of ranking factors (and they don’t want to give up their secret recipe) and other search engines use a lot as well. It would be impossible to try and breakdown each factor in a useful way even if we knew every single one. So rather than try, we opted to compile a list of the important areas that have a big impact on you visibility and rankings. This is both a great starting point for some and nice reminder for others about what your focus should be on when talking about SEO.

Top 20 SEO Success Factors

Content Quality – Content is still king and you need well-written pages with quality content.
Links Quality – Are you links coming from trusted or respected sites?
Authority – Is your site a trusted authority? Think of Consumer Reports of Men’s Health.
Titles – The HTML title tags should have keywords that match each page’s topics.
Crawlability – Can each page be crawled easily?
Research Keywords – Do you know what keywords perspective clients will use?
Country – This is a personalized aspect; within the same country?
Locality – This is a personalized aspect; within the same area? Does your site pop up in the proper local directories and is it listed on Google+?
History – This is a personalized aspect; do you have repeat visitors? This plays a bigger role now that search history has a larger role with results.
Description – The Meta Tags need to describe the page.
Words – You need to use both words and phrases in your pages people search for.
Social Reputation – Are you being shared socially by well-respected people?
Duplication – Do you have issues with duplicate content?
Engaging Content – How long do people read your content? The longer the better!
Text Links – Your links pointing at pages need to use keywords people use.
Fresh Content – How often do you add new information, trending information, and trending topics?
Speed – Sites need to load fast, especially those used a lot by mobile users.
Headers – Your headlines and sub headers need to use relevant keywords in the header tags.
Number of Links – In theory more links pointing at your page is better than less!
Social Shares – You want people to share your content on various social sites.

Top 5 Negative SEO Factors

These would be those things you don’t want to do unless you are specifically trying to tank a site.

Paid Links
Cloaking
Thin or Junk Content
Spam Links
HTML Stuffing

The Bottom Line

While these are ranked somewhat in order, they are also all important. Factors can work together in a way that if you use 4 to 5 items on the bottom of the list they can achieve better results than the top 2 being used together. Of course ideally, you are using a lot more than 4 to 5 items here on your site. In the very least, you should be aware of everything on the list and attempt to touch upon it at some point to make your site as successful as possible from a SEO standpoint.

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Advanced SEO Techniques

For every main website you have in your portfolio you need to treat it on its own merit. If you only have one main website then brand dilution shouldn’t be a problem, but you still need to ensure you promote it the right way and maintain brand integrity. A main or parent site is your money site. Any additional sites you create to help build authority in a niche are child websites.

Each parent site needs to establish trust and credibility while each child site needs to have reputable links into it. The mistake most people make is creating a child site and leaving it as an orphan or they only link to the parent site from the child site. This is a huge mistake. It will result in failure as it will not establish any credibility for the parent site and will not drive much traffic due to no reputable links into the child site.

What you need to think about is how the child site can thrive on its own, but at the same time direct visitors to the parent site. This means the child site should be set up in such a way that it can attract search engine traffic for popular keywords in a niche. The keywords do not have to be at the end of the buying cycle as it is better if the parent site ranks for these types of keywords. However, the child site needs to attract traffic that is in the early buying stages. These keywords fall into the problem recognition, product research and product evaluation stages of the buying cycle.

Search engines play a key role in the product research and evaluation stages. If your competitor dominates the evaluation keywords it stands to reason that they will end up making the sale as every keyword points to the same result. You need to get your child sites ranking for these types of keywords to improve the chances of your parent site converting more visitors.

Five SEO tips from SMX Advanced on surviving/recovering from Google’s Panda: Part 2

At last week’s SMX Advanced conference, SEOin the aftermath of Google’s Panda update was one of the leading discussion topics. In Part 1 of this blog series, we looked at two tips experts offered on how marketers can break down their faulty notions of SEO (and their Panda-prone sites).

This second article looks at ways to build a Panda-friendly (and user-friendly) site to increase your chances of SEO success.

3. Build up good content.
In case this isn’t obvious enough, providing good content is a leading way to survive in Google – or any other search engine. (We wrote an article on Bing’s Duane Forrester stating that content is still king, and one from Matt Cutts on content marketing.)

During SMX Advanced’s Q&A session with Matt Cutts, he indicated that marketers need to start thinking about how they can be creative with content. He emphasized that focusing on the original value of site copy and content is key.

“If you’re rehashing content or writing low quality content, that’s not good for the internet,” he said.

Similarly, during a link building panel, Roger Montti, owner of Martini Buster, advised that marketers not only offer valuable content, but also go a step further by working with writers who are industry authorities. Montti was discussing how marketers might position themselves as appealing guest bloggers to gain site links, but the same approach can be applied to writing for your own sites: Work with credible writers.

Once you’re working with credible writers (whether in-house experts or hired industry writers), offer author bios and accomplishments so that site visitors know they can trust they information on your pages. This step also ensures brands can fulfill the check list Google offered marketers looking to boost their SEO – “Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?” (Plus, Google’s new authorship markup makes clear that the search giant is paying attention to author credibility…)

4. Pay attention to interaction metrics.
Mark Munroe from MerchantCircle theorized that Panda is a behavioral update. This seems to fit nicely with the other SEO tips all aimed at improving user experience. (If you add quality to the SERP with relevant information, provde good content, etc., you’ll be more likely to catch clicks from users who really engage your pages.)

Seo tips and tricks what Google Really thinks about seo

Google works like a big accountant firm counting up links and votes to your site from other sites. What is a link? A link is a piece of text or a picture that when clicked goes to your site. Example of this Ebay now sells SEO services. You see if you click on the word SEO it brings you simply to another page I wrote about my SEO Services.

Now Google basically is a huge computer analyzing millions of websites and it determines what websites have more links going to them. Usually the sites with the most links wins. Getting links is basically the most time consuming process to undertake so google knows that and gives more power, or weight to those people that have put the energy or money into getting and building links. Building links is time consuming so of course if you have many links say 100 its safe to say you put perhaps hundreds of hours into building your site vote popularity.

Keep in mind I am not discussing SEO tags here etc., I am covering the actual link building strategies. IF you are looking to get alot of links you can surely call your competitors on the phone and ask them to place a link back to your website (unlikely) or you can write a blog. The problem is even after you create your blog thats just 1 blog. 1 vote, while your compeitors often have hundreds if not thousands and they too are contsantly working on getting more votes. Its an ongoing battle to stay in business.

Thus, you might try to create another blog, register an account etc., but after a few days of signing up and trying to get articles up believe us it gets tiring. Very tiring and difficult because each and every article and each and every article should be unique. After a while you realize this blog progress is near impossible. However, not if you are our company …..YOU see we sell discount engagement rings and a variety of other jewelry related products. Our staff of SEO workers work round the clock for us. But recently I realized that our work methods allow for my company to use these same staff members to start getting you to the top of the search engines too. Who wouldnt want an army of workers at their disposal for simply 1 dollar per unique article, with a unique link on each?

IF you are seriously wanting to get found on google or any search engine you will not rise to the top unless you get votes known as links. We write articles and put the links right into your unique articles. Each Blog article is on a different domain, and provides great link building. There is no miracle, no silver bullet this is just old fashion work and logic at a very low price. Hope this article explains about Link building if you like it, please vote the information was helpfull thanks!!!

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Advanced SEO Tips to get a maximum page rank for your website

Of all the buzz words capturing airwaves, there’s nothing quite like SEO. Search Engine Optimization refers to a set of words or terms being included in your articles, website or business page for better visibility when content is searched.

Ultimately, the idea is to show up at the top of the food chain(read, search results) and not somewhere in the end, the next page or even the middle. If typical user behavior is to not go beyond the first two or three results a search engine throws up, then it is essential that you stay there.

This is easier said than done. The onus now is not only on gaining that top position but also in ensuring you are not penalized for doing the same. Popular search engines like Google are cracking down hard on SEO, having come under fire itself from many an internet watchdog.

The company has been accused of manipulating results to benefit its own products and it has also been besieged by complaints from small and big companies to look into unfair dominance of their competitors. In times like these, Google has resorted to changing its algorithms that run its searches making it a tad difficult to keep yourself in the top ten. Here are a few ways that might help-

Connect to pages that count

We’re talking education or government sites. Search engines love .edu and .gov and you can generate buzz just by asking young kids and employees to link up to your site. Make interesting offers to members of the teaching profession or government employees. Find link partners that tie into your business and leverage that as well.

Three-way

At one point of time it was enough to have good quality one-way links on your site- they generated quite a lot of traffic. But now, it is the world of the three-way link. This means using three websites, each connecting to other-a to b to c. The third site seems to function independently and so for Google, this comes across as a single link. Do this if you own the sites and you need to really know your SEO. This is an advanced tool and is very useful, but you need to know your stuff.

Blogs

A blog that has high visibility is where you should be. Posting on a high page ranking blog with links to your site is useful and an effective way to drive traffic to your site.

Make a bargain

Nothing’s free except advice these days and when you find a page with a great ranking, it won’t be enough to approach them for permission to link up. You will need to offer them something in return, by way of a service or freebie products. You should seriously consider this keeping in mind the long term benefits.

Pay if required

Yahoo has a directory where you need to pay to be registered. This is for its commercial listing. Non- commercial works too but it takes a while and you may not also get lucky. If you’re paying top dollar, do ensure your site is well executed and has great performance across the board.

Keep the old

An oldie is a goodie as far as search engines go because it shows them lineage and longevity. So keep the links from an older time and when looking for links, look for long term staying rather than short terms bursts of activity.

SEO offers many benefits to your page, so make sure you use it wisely and well.

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Free Seo Tutorial Step by Step

How to do Seo

You will never know where to start seo if you do not have a target

1) Set your target

In SEO, your target is your keyword phrase (aka anchor texts). This is where keyword research comes in.

You need to decide what keyword phrase you want to optimize for every web page that you wish to rank in the search engine.

Every web page, including the homepage, should be optimized for one (or at most three) keyword phrase. Be focused.

If you want to target more keyword phrases, you should add more web pages to your website, instead of trying to make one web page optimized for different keywords.

2) Get the fundamentals right

Check and make sure that the followings are correctly done for every web page:

– Keyword phrase found in title tag

– Keyword phrase found in description meta tag

– Keyword phrase found in the url (if possible)

– Keyword phrase found within the content

3) Build backlinks to the homepage

The strategies to build backlinks to the homepage is different from the strategies to build backlinks to the internal pages because of 2 reasons:

1. Some link building methods can only be used to build backlinks to the homepage. For example:

– Submitting your website to link directories

– 3 way link

2. Some link building methods are too tedious and it’s almost impossible for you to do them for all your web pages. For example:

– Press release

– Many other methods explained in SEO Link Building – Free SEO Tutorial (Part 3)

Regardless of how tough or how tedious the method is, do all of them for your homepage. You need to give your website homepage a backlink boost in order to build up your website authority as explained in Free SEO Tutorial (Part 1) – The Fundamentals.

4) Build backlinks to the internal web pages.

It’s almost impossible to build backlinks for every internal web page, unless you run a popular site with lots of people pinging and digging your pages.

Choose 5 internal pages, prepare 5 new articles, submit them to hundreds of article directories and build backlinks to these 5 internal pages. (Note: You should have done this for your homepage in Step 3. If not, make sure that you do it for your homepage too.)

Whenever time allows, find 5 other internal pages and repeat the process.

5 ) Search engines trust aged sites. Unless you buy an aged domain, there is nothing you can do about the age of your domain. All you can do is Step 1 to 4 and then….. wait, trusting that things will happen eventually. Like it or not, waiting is one of the most important process in SEO, that’s why it’s our Step 5!

In the mean time, if you are building niche content websites, continue to build more sites and rinse and repeat Step 1 – 4. Some websites will turn out to be winners while some may just survive. If you only plan to have one website and intend to live and die with it, then while waiting, you should establish other ways to get traffic.

For more seo tips and articles visit http://www.olxonline.com

SEO Tutorial

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

This tutorial will teach you simple SEO techniques to improve visibility of your web pages for different search engines specially for Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Audience

This tutorial has been prepared for the beginners to help them understand simple but effective SEO characteristics. After completing this tutorial you will find yourself at a moderate level of expertise in using simple but effective SEO techniques from where you can take yourself to next levels.

Prerequisites

We assume you are aware of simple web technologies like HTML, XHTML, Style Sheet etc. If you already have developed any website then it is an added advantage and it will help you understand SEO concepts very easily.

1 – SEO Useful Resources

A collection of SEO Sites, Books and Articles is given at this page.

SEO Useful Resources

2 – SEO Tools

A list of great SEO tools available freely to help you to improve your website.

SEO Tools

3 – HTML Tutorial

If you are willing to learn HTML to start developing webpages then you can start with.

HTML Tutorial

SEO – Hiring an Expert

Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. If you are really serious about SEO and you are not getting expected result then better choice is to hire an SEO expert. There are following tasks which should be taken care by SEO experts

Code validation and clean up – Ensure that code is SE Friendly and standards compliant.
Site Structure – Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure URL’s are spider friendly.
On Page optimization – Page Title, copy writing, Call to action etc.
Quality link building – Securing one way links from relevant sites.
Keyword research – Building a list of key-phrases relevant to your business.
Creating Quality Content – Build optimized pages around terms discovered through keyword research.
Off Page Optimization – Blogs, Press Releases, Article Submissions

If you are confident that you have the required skills then you can take care of doing all the above activities otherwise its worth taking help from SEO Companies or to hire any SEO Specialist.

Choosing a SEO Expert or Company:

This is most difficult part to choose a correct SEO Expert or SEO Company. But we are giving you few guidelines which can help you for the same.

Start searching through your friends and business partners.
Post your queries in SEO Forums to get feedback from the community.
Check other sites rank which they already have optimized.
Don’t go for SEO companies doing automated submission etc.
Don’t go for SEO companies doing Balk Hat tricks.
Don’t look for cheap SEO because of some pennies you can loss more. But take care, high price also does not guarantee high quality.
Take guarantee if possible for a particular rank and any particular search engine.
User SEO Expert or Company name in Google to find more information about them.
Don’t go just because of their fancy site and good article available on their site.
Don’t go testimonials available on their sites.

I can not list out all the factors here because there may be different situations and different views. So you should be smart enough to think what’s bad and what’s good.

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How to SEO – 10 SEO Tips for 2013

How to SEO-10 SEO tips for 2013 is the first post that I write for this blog in 2013. Although you have read many SEO tips posts, I write this as the first post for 2013 because after reading this you will be able to know at least one thing about SEO that you might not heard earlier.

How to SEO – What is SEO

SEO is search engine optimization. SEO can be mainly divided in to two parts; they are on page optimization and off page optimization.

10 SEO tips for 2013

1. Quality Content

Although you believe or don’t, quality content is the most important thing for SEO. Even though you do everything about SEO and if you don’t have quality content you can’t get a good search engine rank.

2. Important HTML Tags

Few years back, Meta description and Meta keyword tags were very important for SEO, but now major search engines like Google don’t care Meta keywords.

I can mention that Title tag, Meta description tag, Image alt tag, H1 tag and H2 tag are the most important tags for SEO.

If your blogging platform is WordPress you can use Yoast plugin as a SEO plugin.

3. Post Length

Before panda and Penguin updates, writing five posts each of hundred words better than writing a post with five hundred words, but now it is different as writing a post with five hundred words is more worth than writing five posts with hundred words.

You should write 300+ words posts and it is better if you can write 600-2000 words posts. But don’t forget that quality is better than quantity. So don’t write useless sentences to increase word count.

4. Pay attention about other search engines

There is no doubt that Google is the best search engine. Almost every blogger tries to optimize posts for only Google, they don’t think about other search engine like Yahoo or Bing.

Every search engine has their own algorithm to index web pages. So, do a small research about how to optimize posts for yahoo and Bing. If you studied well, you can easily drive more traffic via Yahoo and Bing because many bloggers don’t try to optimize posts for Yahoo and Bing (Never forget Google).

5. Link Building

Link building is the main off page optimization technique. When creating backlinks, pay attention about the following points.

1. Always try to create quality backlinks.

2. Don’t use any script or software to create backlinks (A quality backlink is more powerful than 100 bad backlinks).

3. Create both no-follow and do-follow backlinks(Don’t create only do-follow backlinks because Google might take it is unnatural)

4. Don’t use any spam method to create backlinks.

Generally you can use the following technique to create backlinks.

1. Guest Posting

2. Forum Posting

3. Blog Commenting

4. Submitting to Web Directories

5. Article Submission

6. Don’t buy Fiverr Gigs

Fiverr is good place to make money online as well as buy services. As a buyer, Fiverr is good for graphic design works.

As a buyer, Fiverr is very bad place for SEO works because more than 95% SEO related gigs are fake gigs.

For the example, please check the following gig.

I will manually build 300 High PR backlinks for 5$.

Now think about this gig. If you were the seller, would you able to create 300 high PR backlinks manually for only 5$? I know that your answer is “No” because anyone don’t do this type of big work for only 5$. They use software or web scripts to create backlinks. Google hate this type of works.

Now I know that you have a question. The question is, how do they have so many positive feedbacks if backlinks are low quality?

The simple answer is people who buy SEO services from Fiverr, don’t have good knowledge about SEO. They don’t know difference between quality backlines and bad backlinks. So after getting any backlinks, they put a positive feedback.

7. Keyword Researching

Keyword researching is a must thing you have to do. If you don’t like to go premium products you can use Google Adword keyword Tool.

Many new bloggers don’t know how to use Google Adword keyword Tool. If you also don’t have good knowledge about Google Adword keyword Tool, go to YouTube and search “Google Adword keyword Tool tutorials” and study them.

8. Keyword Placement

Now you have selected keywords for your next post. Then you have to place your main keywords in the correct places in the post to get 1st rank in Google.

1. You must include your main keywords to title tag.

2. You must include your main keywords to Meta description tag.

3. You must include your main keywords to post URL.

4. Try to include your main keywords to 1st sentence and last sentence in the post.

5. You should include your main keywords to H1 tag and H2 tag.

6. You should include your main keywords to image alt tag.

9. Adding a Sitemap to Your Blog

When talking about SEO tips, we can’t forget about the sitemap. So add a sitemap for your blog. If your blogging platform is WordPress, use a plugin such as Google XML Sitemaps to generate a sitemap.

10. Learn SEO

My last SEO tip is that learn SEO, don’t read only one seo tips article and don’t trust it because there are many opinions about SEO among bloggers. You can find many SEO tips articles using Google search engine. Then read many SEO tips given in those posts. After that decide what the correct SEO tips are and what the wrong SEO tips are.

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Arif AnjumArif Anjum – SEO Expert – PPC Expert – SEM, SEO Services Lahore|Pakistan

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Advanced SEO Techniques

For every main website you have in your portfolio you need to treat it on its own merit. If you only have one main website then brand dilution shouldn’t be a problem, but you still need to ensure you promote it the right way and maintain brand integrity. A main or parent site is your money site. Any additional sites you create to help build authority in a niche are child websites.

Each parent site needs to establish trust and credibility while each child site needs to have reputable links into it. The mistake most people make is creating a child site and leaving it as an orphan or they only link to the parent site from the child site. This is a huge mistake. It will result in failure as it will not establish any credibility for the parent site and will not drive much traffic due to no reputable links into the child site.

What you need to think about is how the child site can thrive on its own, but at the same time direct visitors to the parent site. This means the child site should be set up in such a way that it can attract search engine traffic for popular keywords in a niche. The keywords do not have to be at the end of the buying cycle as it is better if the parent site ranks for these types of keywords. However, the child site needs to attract traffic that is in the early buying stages. These keywords fall into the problem recognition, product research and product evaluation stages of the buying cycle.

Search engines play a key role in the product research and evaluation stages. If your competitor dominates the evaluation keywords it stands to reason that they will end up making the sale as every keyword points to the same result. You need to get your child sites ranking for these types of keywords to improve the chances of your parent site converting more visitors.

Your link building plans needs to take into account the fact that each child site needs a different link building strategy than your parent site. If you follow the exact steps for each site and acquire links from exactly the same sources for every site, it is easy for search engines to devalue every link. The smart option is to mix things up a bit and continually acquire links from different resources for different parent and child sites. You should never apply the same link building strategy to more than one site. Each strategy should be unique.

It is also important to seek out new link sources. Google alerts is something that can help find new sources quickly. Alerts can help a parent or child site establish its own voice and quickly react to changes in a niche.

The time taken to develop individual backlinking strategies can become overwhelming. There are many sites offering comprehensive SEO packages at grossly inflated prices, but simply apply the same strategy to every site. This can result in an easily identifiable footprint for search engines to follow and devalue. A better option is use multi backlinking approach.

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Arif Anjum Firdous market Gulberg III Lahore, Pakistan ..

SEO|Advanced level SEO Training Program Advanced SEO Techniques|Lahore pakistan|ARIF ANJUM

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Arif AnjumArif Anjum – SEO Expert – PPC Expert – SEM, SEO Services Lahore|Pakistan

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10 Advanced SEO Tactics That Will Increase Your Blog’s Traffic

Posted on july 5, 2013 by Arif anjum

Starting a blog is pretty simple. Actually getting people to visit it is hard. It’s not enough to just create great content and hope they will come…

Because they won’t.

Today’s successful blogs dig into a deep bag of tricks that include SEO, design and analytics…and then combine these elements into ever more advanced tactics that help them drive traffic to their sites, grow their audience and rank high in the search engines.

Here’s a list of ten of those tactics that I’ve had great success with in the last couple of years to help you i ncrease the traffic to your blog.

Make it easy for people to find your content over the web

One of the latest developments at Google is author markup. This feature allows you to connect all of your content across the web beneath one author/bio profile.

For instance, here’s what Danny Sullivan looks like on the search engine results page on a search for “SEO advice”:

As you can see adding author markup feature to you social identity will improve your chances in search results, increasing click throughs to your content.

Implementing author markup isn’t easy, however, unless you check out AJ Kohn’s guide on how to implement REL=AUTHOR. This is a great guide that AJ put together with the help of three Google engineers.

Strategically join relevant audience communities

One thing about link building and SEO strategy that gets missed so often is the relationship…actually getting to know people is the bedrock to getting links.

You do this by participating with your audience where they are hanging out. A really great way to make this very strategic is to use Google’ doubleclick planner.

You can start at the top of that list and start visiting, reading and sharing comments on those sites. In time you will start to create relationships with some of the other readers that will lead to links and traffic.

Doubleclick will also give you an idea of the typical interests of your audience (based upon the web address you enter):

I’ve found this list great for strategically pursuing other industries that might need my help. It’s also a great way to come up with content for guests posts.

As you add value to these different communities, people will start rewarding you with links and traffic. Avoid spamming and dropping self-promotion links…the community will ignore you if you do that.

Use Super-Sized Images, Photos and Illustrations

Last year the 2011 Technorati State of the Blog report stated that 90 percent of bloggers share some type of media on their blogs.

Photos are the most popular:

But when it comes to great blog/site design and attracting links, just sharing any old photo won’t do the trick. Besides, why not leverage the excellent resolutions of new monitors by sharing beautiful photos?

This was the very point behind
. Every day they share some of the best photos on a certain topic. The images are big and bold…filling up at over 990 pixels wide. They are hard to ignore and got the blog picked up by Time as one of 2011’s best blogs.

Now that’s a great link to have!

Even though it’s been less than a year since their last redesign, Fast Company redesigned their blog so they emphasize photos and images on their site.

It’s reviving it’s readership with these outsized photos, drawing readers and links alike. Some sites like Cabin Porn are even taking it farther by filling the entire screen. This kind of out-sized use of photos leads to new viewers and links.

Think Outside of the Social Media Sharing Box

Facebook, Twitter and Google+ aren’t the only social sites that have the power to push traffic to your site. Other niche communities can do the same thing:

The idea is to go through a list of social networking sites, identify the ones that would be relevant to your industry and then systematically add value. As you build up relationships with users of those sites you’ll eventually start to gain links and followers.

Working these other social sites will also help you develop content for you blog posts. Watch to see what is gaining popularity in content and discussions and then create posts that address those issues.

By the way, back in December Reddit served over 2 billion page views:

…so you should not ignore that source for an opportunity. See if there is a subreddit you should join.

Join Question-and-Answer Sites

People come to the web looking for answers. That’s why sites that specialize in answering questions have become popular…sites like Answers.com, Formspring, Yahoo! Answers andQuora.

The best way to leverage these question-and-answer sites is to try to provide value on discussions that are important, interesting but have not had a lot of answers.

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You can also look for questions that are getting a lot of attention because they are on the site’s home page, making the rounds on the social web or ranking well in search engines.

When you answer in a way that provides a substantial solution to a person’s problem, providing relevant links and data, you will get the attention of anyone who is in the discussion or joins.

I’ve also found that you can put links back to your site and not get called a spammer as long as they are significant to the conversation.

Jump into Trending Discussions with Thought Leaders

There are a few sites out there that present a great opportunity for engaging readers on important issues and getting the attention of those thought leaders.

As you strategically choose these sites and dive into the conversation, you could get some links and traffic as part of the process.

A great example of this was when Rand Fishkin jumped on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog to disagree about a post Fred had written about marketing. Fred wrote a follow up the next day with a link back to Rand’s post.

You can find the latest buzz and trending conversations by using sites like TechMeme, Topsy,Alltop, MediaGazer and PopURLs. These are quick sites you can scan to find headlines that might be of interest to you.

Design Around These 3 Crucial Elements

A lot of the things I’ve been discussing up to this point are off-page optimization and link building tactics…so now it s a good time to discuss what your site looks like and how it performs.

You could spend a substantial amount of time involved in all of the above tactics, but if your site is not clean and beautiful, then you may not get the links. So you’ve got to build great, usable design.

But it also needs to be fast. So, when designing your site and to make the most out of your SEO link building efforts, follow these three tips ruthlessly!

Build a beautiful web design – We are in a time where sentiment search is growing, so what a user actual thinks and feels about your site will impact rank, links and conversion. Invest in a great design!
Site speed – This is essential. A slow site will drive traffic away. In fact, Google proved that users are much happier when search is faster. To test this they slowed down their results by as little as 400 milliseconds and reduced the number of searches by half a percent! So, evaluate your site speed.
Important content above the fold – Research has shown that people do scroll, but more than 80% stay above the fold. Keep the critical stuff in that top 768 pixels.

Use Egobait

In this particular case, the Power 150 is called “ego bait” because it appeals to the ego of those on the list. And if you are on the list, then you have the option of embedding the Power 150 badge on you site, which then…you guessed it…links back to Ad Age.

That’s a very powerful SEO traffic driver.

This can work for you by creating a top ten list and then offering a badge for those who make it on to the list. Write to Done’s Top Ten Blogs for Writers is a great example.

Crawl and Validate Your Site

By the way, one of your first steps to enhancing your site and using advanced SEO tactics to drive traffic to your site is to determine where your site is by crawling and validating it.

What exactly should you validate? Here’s a checklist:

HTML/XHTML
CSS
Accessibility (Section 508 and WAI Standards)
Dead links
Feeds
Multiple browsers
Multiple devices

Now, more importantly, how do you validate your site? Use these two tools: Crawl Tools by SEOmoz or visit the W3C validation tools. Both of these tools will help you find all the problems that need to be fixed on your site…and the priority…before you start link building.

Repeat the process until you’ve got a clean site.

Test, Track, Measure and Tweak to Improve Success

No campaign is complete without analytics. So all this SEO and link building work you are pouring into your site can not be improved if you don’t measure results.

Here’s what you have to do at the minimum:

Google Analytics – Create an account, embed the tracking code on your site and start collecting data. Do this immediately to create a benchmark before you start any kind of campaign. Understand where you are before you try to grow. That’s your simplest measure of success.
Webmaster Tools – Sign up for both Google and Bing webmaster tools to stay on top of the data that your site is generating. Bing may not deliver the same amount of traffic as Google, but it is sending roughly 30% of search traffic, and is likely to grow.Don’t ignore it!
RSS Feed Analytics – More than likely you will be pushing out content through an RSS feed so make sure you are paying attention to these metrics, too. You can do this with Google Analytics.
Browser Tests – You’ll also want to make sure that your design and the photos that you are sharing on your site are looking good across browsers. This doesn’t mean allbrowsers, but a general rule of thumb is to test on a browser with at least 2% market share. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari are all safe bets.
Online Usability – While code analytics are great for tracking online behavior you are still left to interpret the results. With a usability test you can listen to what the user was thinking while they navigated through your site. For $40 a test, usertesting.comwill give you a video of the person going through your site and typed comments about issues encountered.

You will never know if you are winning or losing if you don’t track your results. Analytics will help you learn from your mistakes, jump on new opportunities and reach your site’s fullest potential.

Conclusion

Increasing traffic to your blog is an art that combines more and more advanced techniques…and as you pile up these techniques (and the links!) you will slowly grow your blog and ultimately dominate in your industry.

And by the way, SEO link building is progressive and never-ending, so don’t give up if you aren’t getting the kind of results you want right away.

What new and advanced SEO tactics have you been using to drive traffic to your blog?

Arif Anjum – SEO Expert – PPC Expert – SEM, SEO Services Lahore|Pakistan

1 Reply

SEO Tutorial For Beginners 2013

July 2nd , 2013 |By Arif Anjum

Here are some free search engine optimisation tips for you to create a successful site. I deliberately steered clear of things that might be a bit grey, as what is grey today is often black hat tomorrow, as far as Google is concerned.

What is SEO?

There are a lot of definitions of SEO (spelled Search engine optimisation in the UK, or search engine optimization in the US) but lets face it, SEO in 2013 is about getting free traffic from Google, the most popular search engine in the world.

It’s about KEYWORDS and LINKS. It’s about RELEVANCE and REPUTATION. Search engine optimisation is about a web page being relevant enough for a query, and being trusted enough to rank for it. It’s about ranking for popular keywords for the long term,on merit. You can play by ‘white hat’ rules laid down by Google, or you can choose to ignore those and go ‘black hat’ – a ‘spammer’. But MOST SEO TACTICS still work, for some time, on some level, depending on who’s doing them, and how it’s deployed.

Whichever route you take, know that if Google catches you trying to “modify your rank”, then they will class you a spammer, and your site will be penalised (you wont rank for important keywords). Google does not want you to try and modify your rank. They would prefer you paid PPC to do that. The problem is – traffic from SEO is valuable. REALLY valuable. And FREE, once you’ve pleased Google enough.

In 2013, you need to be aware that what works to improve your rank can also get you penalised (faster, and a lot more noticeably). In particular, Google is currently waging war on unnatural links and manipulative tactics if it detects them.

Welcome to the tightrope that is SEO.

Lets touch on a few simple things to begin with:

To begin with….

If you are just starting out in seo, don’t think you can fool Google about everything all the time. Google has probably seen your tactics before. So, it’s best to keep it simple. GET RELEVANT. GET REPUTABLE. If you are just starting out – you may as well learn how to do it within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines first.
Don’t expect stellar results without a lot of work, and don’t expect them too fast. Expecting too much too fast might get you in trouble.
You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing natural, or free listings (SERPS). It’s common for the major search engines to find your website pretty easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so much easier if your website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content (via XML sitemaps for instance).
To stay in Google and other search engines, you you really should consider and largely abide by search engine rules and guidelines for inclusion. With experience, and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules can be bent, and which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be avoided.
Google ranks websites by the number and quality of incoming links to a site from other websites (amongst hundreds of other metrics). Generally speaking, a link from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page the link points to. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Rankings are HUGELY affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page is on.
I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with ORIGINAL COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t found before. It indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start. So – make sure each of your pages has content you have written specifically for that page – and you won’t need to jump through hoops to get it ranking.
If you have original quality content on a site, you also have a chance of generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is found on other websites, you will find it hard to get links, and it probably will not rank very well as Google favours diversity in it’s results. If you have decent original content on your site, you can let authority websites, those with online business authority, know about it, and they might link to you – this is called a quality backlink.
Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be ignored by search engines (the attribute nofollow effectively cancels out a link, for instance)
Search engines can also find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted my site to a search engine in the last 10 years – you probably don’t need to do that.
Google spiders a link to your home page, finds your site, and crawls and indexes the home page of your site, and will come back to spider the rest of your website if all your pages are linked together (in almost any way).
Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google – I think this depends on the quality of the incoming links. Sometimes your site will rank high for a while then disappear for months. This is called the “honeymoon period”.
Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site – and this classification can have a DRASTIC affect on your rankings – it’s important for Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do you want to classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a domain holding page, or a small business website with a real purpose? Ensure you don’t confuse Google by being explicit with all the signals you can – to show on your website you are a real business, and your INTENT is genuine. NOTE – If a page exists only to make money from Google’s free traffic – Google calls this spam.
To rank for specific keyword searches, you generally need to have the words on your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) – ultimately it is all dependent on the competition for the term you are targeting) or in links pointing to your page/site.
As a result of other quality sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain amount of Pagerank that is shared with all the internal pages that make up your website that will in future help determine where this page ranks.
Yes, you need to build links to your site to acquire more Google Juice. Google is a links based search engine – it does not quite understand ‘good’ content – but it does understand ‘popular’ content.
When you have Google Juice or Heat, try and spread it throughout your site by ensuring all your pages are linked together
I think your external links to to other sites should probably be on your single pages, the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the higher pages in your site (the home page, your category pages).It’s not JUST a numbers game, though. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could be all you need. Of course, the more “trusted” links you build, the more trust Google will have in your site. it’s pretty clear that you need MULTIPLE trusted links from MULTIPLE trusted websites to get the most from Google.
Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with keywords in it – not, for instance, in blogrolls or sitewide links. Try to ensure the links are not obviously “machine generated” ie site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from pages, that in turn, have a lot of links to them.
Internally, consider linking to your other pages by linking to them within text – I usually only do this when it is relevant – and recently, I’ll link to relevant pages when the keyword is in the title elements of both pages. I don’t really go in for auto-generating links at all. Google has penalised sites for using particular auto link plugins, for instance.
Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all search engines when you want to feature for specific key-terms. ie “seo scotland” as opposed to http://www.olxonline.com
I think the anchor text links in internal navigation is still valuable – but keep it natural. Google needs links to find your pages. Don’t underestimate the value of a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for instance how many words Google counts in a link, but don’t overdo it.
Search engines like Google ‘spider’ or ‘crawl’ your entire site by following all the links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your pages. Google will crawl and index your pages, and within a few days normally, begin to return your pages in search results (SERPS)
After a while, Google will know about your pages, and keep the ones it deems ‘useful’ – pages with original content, or pages with a lot of links to them . Ideally you will have unique pages, wtih unique page titles and unique page descriptions if you deem to use the latter – most search engines don’t use the meta description when actually ranking your page for specific keyword searches if not relevant – I don’t worry about meta keywords these days.
Google chews over your site, analysing text content and links
If you have a lot of duplicate crap found on other websites Google knows about, Google will ignore your page. If your site has spammy signals. Google will penalise it.
You don’t need to keyword stuff your text and look dyslexic to beat the competition. Generally it’s good to have keywords in links, page titles and text content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density. Keyword stuffing is a tricky business.
I prefer to make sure I have as many UNIQUE relevant words on the page.
If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too – but again, it depends on the site in question. Who you link to, or HOW you link to, REALLY DOES MATTER – I expect Google to use your linking practices as a potential means by which to classify your site. Affiliate sites for example don’t do well in Google these days without some good quality backlinks.
Many SEOs think who you actually link out to (and who links to you) helps determine a topical community of sites in any field, or a hub of authority. Quite simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages, but I have never really seen any granular ranking benefit (for the page in question) from linking out.
Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” – in Google’s opinion. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site, but again. I usually err on the safe side – I go for massive diversity in my links – to make them look more natural. Actually, I go for natural links in 2013 full stop. Google can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary”.
Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and who you link to.
Google decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can help Google by linking to your important pages.
It is of paramount importance you spread all that Google juice to your sales keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site pages, so Google does not”demote” starved pages into it’s reserves, or “supplementals”.
Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and via the template navigation on the site.
Focus on RELEVANCE first. Then get REPUTABLE. The key to ranking in Google is actually pretty simple.
Every few months Google changes it’s algorithm to punish sloppy optimisation or industrial manipulation. Google Panda and Google Penguin are two such updates, but the important thing is to understand Google changes it’s algorithms to control it’s listings pages. The art of SEO is to rank without tripping these algorithms – and that is tricky!

Keyword Research

The first step in any seo campaign is to do some keyword research. There are many tools on the web to help with basic keyword research (including the free Google Keyword Research Tool and SEMRUSH). You can use these tools to quickly identify opportunities to get more traffic:

Example Keyword	Search Volume
seo tutorial for beginners	1900
seo tutorials	1600
seo tutorial pdf	1000
how to seo a website	880
seo tutorial step by step	720
how to seo your website	720
google seo tutorial	320
best seo tutorial for novices	260
free seo tutorial	210
free seo tutorials	210
on page seo tutorial	170
seo tutorials for beginners	170
all in one seo tutorial	170
seo tutorial video	140
how to seo website	140
seo tutorial in urdu	110
how to seo my website	110
seo tutorial download	91
joomla seo tutorial	91
online seo tutorial	91
seo tutorial in Lahore pakistan	91
seo tutorial free	73
optimizare seo tutorial	73
best seo tutorial	58
basic seo tutorial	58
bing seo tutorial	58
step by step seo tutorial	46
beginners seo tutorial course	46
seo tutorial google	46
seo tutorial ppt	36
search engine optimization seo tutorial	36
seo tutorial w3schools	28
best seo tutorials	28
website seo tutorial	28
seo tutorial for beginners lesson 1	28
seo tutorial youtube	22
google seo tutorials	22
link building in seo tutorial	22
black hat seo tutorial	22
how to work seo tutorial	16
youtube seo tutorial	16
drupal seo tutorial	16
seo tutoriale	16
seo tutorial blog	16
seo tutorial 2011	12
seo tutorial online	12
seo tutorial printable	12
seo tutorial beginners	12
online seo tutorials

Getting a site to the top of Google eventually comes down to your text content on a page and external & internal link profile. All together, Google uses this analysis to determine whether your no1 in Google or number 32, or de-indexed. There’s no magic bullet.

At any one time, your site is under some sort of filters designed to keep spam sites out and deliver relevant results to human visitors. One filter may be kicking in keeping a page down in the serps, while another filter is pushing another page up. You might have poor content but excellent incoming links, or vice versa. Try and identify the reasons Google doesn’t link a particular page. Too few quality incoming links? Too many incoming links? No keyword rich text? Linking out to irrelevant sites? Too many ads? Affiliate links on every page of your site, found on a thousand other websites? Whatever, identify issues and fix them. Get on the wrong side of Google and your site might well be MANUALLY reviewed – so seo your site as if, one day, you will be geting that review.

The key to successful seo, I think, is persuading Google that your page is most relevant to any given search query. You do this by good unique keyword rich text content and getting “quality” links to that page. Next time your developing a page, consider what looks spammy to you is probably spammy to Google. Ask yourself which pages on your site are really necessary. Which links are necessary? Which pages are getting the “juice” or “heat“. Which pages would you ignore?

You can help a site along in any number of ways (including making sure your page titles and meta tags are unique) but be careful. Obvious evidence of ‘rank modifying’ is dangerous.

I prefer simple seo techniques, and ones that can be measured in some way. I don’t want to just rank for competitive terms, I want to understand the reason why I rank for these terms. At Hobo we try to build sites for humans AND search engines. Make a site relevant to both for success in organic listings and you might not ever need to get into the techy side of SEO like redirects and URL rewriting. Of course, to beat the competition in an industry where it’s difficult to attract quality links, you have to get more “technical” sometimes.

There are no hard and fast rules to long term seo success, other than developing quality websites with quality content and quality links pointing to it. You need to mix it up and learn from experience. Remember there are exceptions to nearly every rule, and you probably have little chance determining exactly why you rank in search engines. I’ve been doing it for over 10 years and everyday I’m trying to better understand Google, to learn more and learn from others’ experiences. It’s important not to obsess about the minute seo specifics unless you really have the time to do so!

THERE IS USUALLY SOMETHING MORE VALUABLE TO SPEND THAT TIME ON.

There are some things that are apparent though.

Don’t build a site in Flash
Don’t build a site with Website Frames
Don’t go mad generating thousands of back links
Don’t hide lots of text from visitors but show to Google
KISS – Keep it simple, stupid.

Page Title Tag Best Practice

<title>What Is The Best Title Tag For Google?</title>

The page title tag (or HTML Title Element) is arguably the most important on page seo factor. Keywords in page titles can HELP your pages rank higher in Google results pages (SERPS). The page title is also often used by Google as the title of a search snippet link in search engine results pages.

For me, a perfect title tag in Google is dependant on a number of factors;

The page title is highly relevant to the page it refers to, it will probably be displayed in a web browsers window title bar, and the clickable search snippet link in Google, Bing & other search engines. The title is the “crown” of a keyword targeted article with important keyword featuring AT LEAST ONCE, as all search enignes place a lot of weight in what words are contained within this html element.
Google displays as many characters as it can fit into ”a block element that’s 512px wide and doesn’t exceed 1 line of text”. So – THERE IS NO AMOUNT OF CHARACTERS any seo can lay down as exact best practice to GUARANTEE your title will display, in full in Google, at least. Ultimately – only the characters and words you use will determine if your entire page title will be seen in a Google search snippet. Google used to count 70 characters in a title – but not in 2012. If you want to ENSURE your full title tag shows in Google SERPS, stick to about 65 characters. I have seen ‘up-to’ 69 characters in 2012 – but as I said – it depends on the characters you use.
Google will INDEX perhaps 1000s of characters in a title… but no-one knows exactly how many characters or words Google will actually count AS a TITLE when determining relevance for ranking purposes. It is a very hard thing to try to isolate accurately. I have had ranking success with longer titles – much longer titles – Google certainly reads ALL the words in your page title (unless you are spamming it silly, of course).
You can probably fit up to 12 words that will be counted as part of a page title, and consider using your important keywords in the first 8 words.
Some page titles do better with a call to action – one which reflects exactly a searcher’s intent (e.g. to learn something, or buy something, or hire something. Remember this is your hook in search engines, if Google chooses to use your page title in its search snippet, and there is now a lot of competing pages out there!
When optimising a title, you are looking to rank for as many terms as possible, without keyword stuffing your title. Often, the best bet is to optimise for a particular phrase (or phrases) – and take a more long-tail approach. Yes – that does mean more pages on your site – that’s the reality in 2012. Content. Content. Content.
The perfect title tag on a page is unique to other pages on the site. In light of Google Panda, an algorithm that looks for a ‘quality’ in sites, you REALLY need to make your page titles UNIQUE, and minimise any duplication, especially on larger sites.
I like to make sure my keywords feature as early as possible in a title tag but the important thing is to have important keywords and key phrases in your page title tag SOMEWHERE.
For me, when SEO is more important than branding, the company name goes at the end of the tag, and I use a variety of dividers to separate as no one way performs best. If you have a recognisable brand – then there is an argument for putting this at the front of titles.
I like to think I write titles for search engines AND humans.
Know that Google tweaks everything regularly – why not what the perfect title keys off? So MIX it up…
Don’t obsess! Natural is probably better, and will only get better as engines evolve. As I said – these days – I optimise for key-phrases, rather than just keywords.
Generally speaking, the more domain trust/authority your SITE has in Google, the easier it is for a new page to rank for something. So bear that in mind. THere is only so much you can do with your page titles – your websites rankings in Google are a LOT more to do with OFFSITE factors than ONSITE ones.
Also bear in mind, in 2012, the html title element you choose for your page, may not be what Google chooses to include in your SERP snippet. The search snippet title and description is very much QUERY dependant these days. Google often chooses what it thinks is the most relevant title for your search snippet, and it can use information from your page, or in links to that page, to create a very different SERP snippet title.
Click through rate is something that is likely measured by Google when ranking pages (Bing say they use it too, and they now power Yahoo), so it is really worth considering whether you are best optimising your page titles for click-through rate or optimising for more search engine rankings.
Google has been recorded recently discussing an ‘over-optimisation’ penalty. I would imagine keyword stuffing your page titles could be one area they look at.
Remember….think ‘keyword phrase‘ rather than ‘keyword‘, ‘keyword‘ ,’keyword‘…

A Note About Title Tags;

When you write a page title, you have a chance right at the beginning of the page to tell Google (and other search engines) if this is a spam site or a quality site – such as – have you repeated the keyword 4 times or only once? I think title tags, like everything else, should probably be as simple as possible, with the keyword once and perhaps a related term if possible.

I always aim to keep my html page title elements things as simple, and looking as human-generated and unique, as possible.

Meta Keywords Best Practice

A bastian of crap and unethical search engine optimisation companies – the meta-keywords tag. How many crap seo companies mention cleaning and optimising this tag in their presentations? Companies that waste time on these waste clients money.

<meta name="Keywords" content="seo, search engine optimisation, optimization">

I have one piece of advice with the meta keyword tag, which like the title tag, goes in the head section of your web page, forget about them.

If you are relying on meta-keyword optimisation to rank for terms, your dead in the water. From what I see, Google + Bing ignores meta keywords – or at least places no weight in them to rank pages. Yahoo may read them, but really, a seo has more important things to worry about than this nonsense.

What about other search engines that use them? Hang on while I submit my site to those 75,000 engines first [sarcasm!]. Yes, 10 years ago search engines liked looking at your meta-keywords. I’ve seen OPs in forums ponder which is the best way to write these tags – with commas, with spaces, limiting to how many characters. Forget about meta-keyword tags – they are a pointless waste of time and bandwidth. Could probably save a rain-forest with the bandwidth costs we save if everybody removed their keyword tags.

Tin Foil Hat Time

So you have a new site….. you fill your home page meta tags with the 20 keywords you want to rank for – hey, that’s what optimisation is all about, isn’t it? You’ve just told Google by the third line of text what to sandbox you for and wasn’t meta name=”Keywords” originally for words that weren’t actually on the page that would help classify the document? Sometimes competitors might use the information in your keywords to determine what you are trying to rank for, too….

If everybody removed them and stopped abusing meta keywords Google would probably start looking at them but that’s the way of things in search engines. I Ignore them. Not even a ‘second order’ effect, in my opinion.

Meta Description

Like the title element and unlike the meta keywords tag, this one is important, both from a human and search engine perspective.

<meta name="Description" content="Get your site on the first page of Google,
Yahoo and Bing too, using simple seo. Call us on+923124484957
Call : +923134991116 
. A company based in Pakistan." />

Forget whether or not to put your keyword in it, make it relevant to a searcher and write it for humans, not search engines. If you want to have this 20 word snippet which accurately describes the page you have optimised for one or two keyword phrases when people use Google to search, make sure the keyword is in there.

I must say, I normally do include the keyword in the description as this usually gets it in your serp snippet, but I think it would be a fair guess to think more trusted sites would benefit more from any boost a keyword in the meta description tag might have, than an untrusted site would.

Google looks at the description but there is debate whether it actually uses the description tag to rank sites. I think they might at some level, but again, a very weak signal. I certainly don’t know of an example that clearly shows a meta description helping a page rank.

Some times, I will ask a question with my titles, and answer it in the description, sometimes I will just give a hint;

It’s also very important in my opinion to have unique title tags and unique meta descriptions on every page on your site. It’s a preference of mine, but I don’t generally autogenerate descriptions with my cms of choice either – normally I’ll elect to remove the tag entirely before I do this, and my pages still do well (and Google generally pulls a decent snippet out on it’s own which you can then go back and optimise for serps. THere are times when I do autogenerate descriptions and that’s when I can still make them unique to the page using using some sort of server-side php.

Tin Foil Hat Time

Sometimes I think if your titles are spammy, your keywords are spammy, and your meta description is spammy, Google might stop right there – even they probably will want to save bandwidth at some time. Putting a keyword in the description won’t take a crap site to number 1 or raise you 50 spots in a competitive niche – so why optimise for a search engine when you can optimise for a human? – I think that is much more valuable, especially if you are in the mix already – that is – on page one for your keyword.

So, the meta description tag is important in Google, Yahoo and Bing and every other engine listing – very important to get it right. Make it for humans.

Oh and by the way – Google seems to truncate anything over @156 characters in the meta description, although this may actually be limited by pixel width in 2013.

Google SEO: Robots Meta Tag

OK – So I’ve theorised about the Title Element, the Meta Description Tag and the pointless Meta Keywords Tag. Next:

The Robots Meta Tag;

<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />

I could use the above meta tag to tell Google to index the page but not to follow any links on the page, if for some reason, I did not want the page to appear in Google search results.

By default, Googlebot will index a page and follow links to it. So there’s no need to tag pages with content values of INDEX or FOLLOW. GOOGLE

There are various instructions you can make use of in your Robots Meta Tag, but remember Google by default WILL index and follow links, so you have NO need to include that as a command – you can leave the robots meta out completely – and probably should if you don’t have a clue.

Googlebot understands any combination of lowercase and uppercase. GOOGLE.

Valid values for Robots Meta Tag ”CONTENT” attribute are: “INDEX“, “NOINDEX“, “FOLLOW“, “NOFOLLOW“. Pretty self explanatory.

Examples:

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”
META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOSNIPPET”

Google will understand the following and interprets the following robots meta tag values:

NOINDEX – prevents the page from being included in the index.

NOFOLLOW – prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page. (Note that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents Googlebot from following an individual link.)

NOARCHIVE – prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.

NOSNIPPET – prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.

NOODP – blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.

NONE – equivalent to “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”.

Robots META Tag Quick Reference

Terms	Googlebot	Slurp	MSNBot	Teoma
NoIndex	YES	YES	YES	YES
NoFollow	YES	YES	YES	YES
NoArchive	YES	YES	YES	YES
NoSnippet	YES	NO	NO	NO
NoODP	YES	YES	YES	NO
NoYDIR	NO	YES	NO	NO
NoImageIndex	YES	NO	NO	NO
NoTranslate	YES	NO	NO	NO
Unavailable_After	YES	NO	NO	NO

I’ve included the robots meta tag in my tutorial as this is one of only a few meta tags / html head elements I focus on when it comes to Google (and Bing) seo. At a page level – it is quite powerful.

Title Element – Important – Unique
Meta Description (optional but advisable in most cases) – Unique
Robots Meta Tag (optional) – Be Careful
Canonical Meta Tag (optional – recommended) – Be Vigilant

These tags go in the [HEAD] section of a [HTML] page and represent the only tags for Google I care about. Just about everything else you can put in the [HEAD] of your HTML document is quite unnecessary and maybe even pointless (for Google optimisation, anyway).

If you are interested in using methods like on-page robots instructions and the robots.txt file to control which pages get indexed by Google and how Google treats them, Sebastian knows a lot more than me

H1-H6: Headers

I can’t find any definitive proof online that says you need to use Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) or that they improve rankings in Google, and I have seen pages do well in Google without them – but I do use them, especially the H1 tag on the page. For me it’s another piece of a perfect page, in the traditional sense, and I try to build a site for Google and humans.

<h1>the WST SEO Company, Pakistan</h1>

I still generally only use one <h1> heading tag in my keyword targeted pages – I believe this is the way the W3C intended it be used – and ensure they appear at the top of a page and written with my main keywords or keyword phrases incorporated. I have never experienced any problems using CSS to control the appearance of the heading tags making them larger or smaller.

I use as many H2 – H6 as is necessary depending on the size of the page, but generally I use H1, H2 & H3. You can see here how to use header tags properly.

How many words in the H1 Tag? As many as I think is sensible – as short and snappy as possible usually. Aaron Wall at SEOBook recommends not making your h1 tags the exact same as your page titles, although I personally have never seen a problem with this on a quality site. I also discovered Google will use your Header tags as page titlesat some level if your title element is malformed.

As always be sure to make your heading tags highly relevant to the content on that page and not too spammy, either.

Google SEO: How Many Words & Keywords?

I get asked this all the time –

how much text do you put on a page to rank for a certain keyword?

Well, as in so much of SEO theory and strategy, there is no optimal amount of text per page.

Instead of thinking about the quantity of the text, you should think more about the quality of the content on the page. Optimise this with searcher intent in mind. Well, that’s how I do it.

I don’t subscribe that you need a minimum amount of words or text to rank in Google. I have seen pages with 50 words out rank pages with 100, 250, 500 or 1000 words. Then again I have seen pages with no text rank on nothing but inbound links or other ‘strategy’. In 2012, Google is a lot better at hiding away those pages, though.

At the moment, I prefer long pages and a lot of text, still focused on a few related keywords and keyphrases to a page. Useful for long tail keyphrases and easier to explore related terms.

Every site is different. Some pages, for example, can get away with 50 words because of a good link profile and the domain it is hosted on. For me, the important thing is to make a page relevant to a user’s search query.

I don’t care how many words I achieve this with and often I need to experiment on a site I am unfamiliar with. After a while, you get an idea how much text you need to use to get a page on a certain domain into Google.

One thing to note – the more text you add to the page, as long as it is unique, keyword rich and relevant, the more that page will be rewarded with more visitors from Google.

For instance, this page might be relevant to a search for;

How many words on the page for Google?
How many words to rank in Google?
How many words and characters on the page for SEO?
How many words on the page for Yahoo?
How many words on the page for Bing?
What is the optimal amount of text on a page for search engines?

OK so I cheated a bit there, and normally I would take more time to work these questions into the text – but hopefully you get my drift.

There is no optimal number of words on a page for placement in Google. Every website – every page – is different from what I can see. Don’t worry too much about word count if your content is original and informative. Google will probably reward you on some level – at some point – if there is lots of unique text on all your pages.

TIP: The ‘inverted pyramid‘ – pictured above – is useful when creating pages for the web too – very useful.

Keyword Density?

The short answer to this is – no. There is no one-size-fits-all keyword density, no optimal percentage. I do not subscribe to the idea that there is a certain percent of keywords per 1000 words of text to get a page to number 1 in Google. Search engines are not that easy although the key to success in many fields is simple seo. I write natural page copy where possible always focused on the keyterms – I never calculate density in order to identify the best % – there are way too many other things to work on. Hey, I have looked, a long time ago. If it looks natural, it’s ok with me. Normally I will try and get related terms in the page, and if I have 5 paragraphs, I might have the keyword in 4 or 5 of those as long as it doesn’t look like I stuffed them in there.

I think optimal keyword density is a bit of a myth these days, although there are many who disagree. Crazy stuff. I think the page I just linked to is the longest page on the internet debunking keyword density.

Internal Links To Relevant Pages

I’ll lay down my thoughts on internal linkoptimisation later in this seo tutorial, but onpage, I link internal to relevant pages in my site all the time.

I silo any relevance or trust mainly though links in text content and secondary menu systems and between pages that are relevant in context to one another.

I don’t worry about perfect silo’ing techniques any more, and don’t worry about whether or not I should link to one category from another, as I think the ‘boost’ many proclaim is minimal on the size of sites I manage.

Sometimes I will ensure 10 pages link to 1 page in a theme, and not reciprocate this link. Other times, I will. it depends on the PR google juice I have to play with and again, if it feels right in the circumstance to do so, or the size of the site and how deep I am in the structure.

There’s no set method I find works for every site, other than to link to related internal pages often and where appropriate – it’s where I find some creativity.

Link Out To Related Sites

Sticking firmly in on pageseo territory, I regularly link out to other quality relevant pages on other websites where possible and where a human would find it valuable.

I don’t link out to other sites from homepage. I want all the PR residing in the home page to be shared only with my internal pages. I don’t like out to other sites from my category pages either, for the same reason.

I link to other relevant sites (a deep link where possible) from individual pages and I do it often, usually. I don’t worry about link equity or PR leak because I control it on a page to page level.

This works for me, it allows me to share the link equity I have with other sites while ensuring it is not at the expense of pages on my own domain. It may even help get me into a ‘neighbourhood’ of relevant sites, especially when some of those start linking back to my site.

Linking out to other sites, especially using a blog, also helps tell others that might be interested in your content that your page is ‘here’. Try it.

Generally I wont link out to sites using the exact keyword /phrase I am targeting, but I will be considerate, and usually try and link out to a site using keywords these bloggers / site owners would appreciate.

Redirect Non WWW To WWW

I can’t even say this word properly – Canonicalization. Does your site have canonicalization problems?

Simply put,http://www.olxonline.com can be treated by Google as a different url than even though it’s the same page, and it can get even more complicated. It’s thought Pagerank and Google Juice can be diluted if Google gets confused about your URLS and speaking simply you don’t want this PR diluted (in seo theory).

That’s why many, including myself, redirect non-www to www (or vice versa) if the site is on a linux/apache server (in the htaccess file –

Do you need to do this? No. As standard these days, I do however. It keeps it simple, when optimising for Google. It should be noted, it’s incredibly important not to mix the two types of www/non-www on site when linking your own internal pages!

Google can handle most sites no problem even without this measure being taken, and it’s certainly no magic bullet implementing this canonicalization fix. On it’s own I see little boost. I am not an expert when it comes server side, of course, so I would love to hear other views.

In my experience it depends on the type of site. Are people linking to your site other than you?

If there are a lot of people linking to you, I would implement it. Imagine you have 10 links from relatively untrusted sites with the www and all of a sudden you get a link from a trusted site without the www (non www) – that’s when you might not get the most out of a link, it’s thought.

Note in 2013 Google asks you which domain you prefer in Google Webmaster Tools.

Alt Tags

NOTE: Alt Tags are counted by Google (and Bing), but I would be careful over-optimizing them. I’ve seen a lot of websites penalized for over-optimising invisible elements on a page. Don’t do it.

ALT tags are very important and I think a very rewarding area to get right. I always put the main keyword in an ALT once when addressing a page.

Don’t optimise your ALT tags (or rather, attributes) JUST for Google!

Use ALT tags (or rather, ALT Attributes) for descriptive text that helps visitors – and keep them unique where possible, like you do with your titles and meta descriptions.

Don’t obsess. Don’t optimise your ALT tags just for Google – do it for humans, for accessibility and usability. If you are interested, I ran a simple test using ALT attributes to determine how many words I could use in IMAGE ALT text that Google would pick up.

And remember – even if, like me most days, you can’t be bothered with all the image ALT tags on your page, at least use a blank ALT (or NULL value) so people with screen readers can enjoy your page.

Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF)

Clean URLS (or search engine friendly urls) are just that – easy to read, simple. You do not need clean urls in a site architecture for Google to spider a site successfully (Update 23/9/08 – apparently confirmed by Google), although I do use clean urls as a default these days, and have done so for years.

Is there a massive difference in Google when you use clean urls?

No, in my experience it’s very much a second or third order effect, perhaps even less, if used on it’s own. EDIT: Recent observations I have made seem to indicate they might be more valuable in 2010.

The thinking is that you might get a boost in Google SERPS if your URLS are clean – because you are using keywords in the actual page name instead of a parameter or ID number. Google might reward the page some sort of relevance because of the actual file / page name.

On it’s own, this boost, in my experience is virtually non-detectable. Where this benefit is slightly detectable is when people (say in forums) link to your site with the url as the link. Then it is fair to say you do get a boost because keywords are in the actual anchor text link to your site, and I believe this is the case, but again, that depends on the quality of the page linking to your site – ie if Google trusts it and it passes Page Rank (!) and anchor text relevance. And of course, you’ll need citable content on that site of yours.

Sometimes I will remove the stop-words from a url and leave the important keywords as the page title because a lot of forums garble a url to shorten it.

It should be remembered it is thought although Googlebot can crawl sites with dynamic URLs, it is assumed by many webmasters there is a greater risk that it will give up if the urls are deemed not important and contain multiple variables and session IDs (theory).

As standard, I use clean URLS where possible on new sites these days, and try to keep the URLS as simple as possible and do not obsess about it. That’s my aim at all times when I seo – simplicity.

Be aware though – Google does look at keywords in the URL even in a granular level. Having a keyword in your URL might be the difference between your site ranking and not – check out

Keywords In Bold Or Italic

As I mentioned in the ALT Tag seo tip, some seo proclaim putting your keywords in bold or putting your keywords in italics is a benefit in terms of search engine optimizing a page – as if they are working their way through a check list.

It’s impossible to test this, and I think these days, Google might be using this to identify what to derank a site for, not promote it in SERPS.

I use bold or italics these days specifically for users. Only if it’s natural or this is really what I want to emphasise!

Don’t tell Google what to sandbox you for that easily! I’m currently cleaning up the Hobo blog to reflect this, too.

I’ve been meaning, maybe forgetting, to pint out in these posts I think Google treats every website differently to others in some respect. That is, more trusted sites might get treated differently than untrusted sites.

2c.

Which Is Best? Absolute Or Relative URLS

This is another one of those areas in SEO or website development that you shouldn’t be concerned about. My advice would be to keep it consistent.

Which Is Better? – Absolute Or Relative URLS?

I prefer absolute urls. That’s just a preference. Google doesn’t care so neither do I, really. I have just gotten into the habit of using absolute urls.

best
What is a relative URL? Example – /search-engine-optimisation.htm

Relative just means relative to the document the link is on. Move that page to another site and it won’t work. With an absolute URL, it would work.

Which Is Best For Google – Subfolders or Files?

Another one to forget about. Sometimes I use subfolders and sometimes I use files. I have not been able to decide if there is any real benefit (in terms of seo) to using either. A lot of CMS these days (2012) seem to use subfolders in their file path, so I am pretty confident Google can deal with either.

I used to prefer files like .html when I was building a new site from scratch, as they were the ’end of the line’ for search engines, as I imagined it, and a subfolder (or directory) was a collection of pages.

I used to think it could take more to get a subfolder trusted than say an individual file and I guess this sways me to use files on most websites I created (back in the day). Once subfolders are trusted, it’s 6 or half a dozen, what the actual difference is in terms of ranking in Google – usually, rankings in Google are more determined by how RELEVANT or REPUTABLE a page is to a query.

In the past, bubfolders could be treated differently than files (in my experience).

Subfolders can be trusted less than other subfolders or pages in your site, or ignored entirely. Subfolders *used to seem to me* to take a little longer to get indexed by Google, than for instance .html pages.

People talk about trusteddomains but they don’t mention (or don’t think) some parts of the domain can be trusted less. Google treats some subfolders….. differently. Well, they used to – and remembering how Google used to handle things has some benefits – even in 2012.

Some say don’t go beyond 4 levels of folders in your file path. I haven’t experienced too many issues, but you never know.

UPDATED – I think in 2012 it’s even less of something to worry about. There’s so much more important elements to check.

Which Is Better For Google? PHP, HTML or ASP?

Google doesn’t care. As long as it renders as a browser compatible document, it appears Google can read it these days.

I prefer php these days even with flat documents as it is easir to add server side code to that document if I want to add some sort of function to the site.

Does W3C Valid HTML / CSS Help SEO?

Does Google rank a page higher because of valid code? The short answer is no, even though I tested it on a small scale test with different results.

Google doesn’t care if your page is valid html and valid css. This is clear – check any top ten results in Google and you will probably see that most contain invalid HTML or CSS. I love creating accessible websites but they are a bit of a pain to manage when you have multiple authors or developers on a site.

If your site is so badly designed with a lot of invalid code even Google and browsers cannot read it, then you have a problem.

Where possible, if commissioning a new website, demand at least minimum accessibility compliance on a site (there are three levels of priority to meet), and aim for valid html and css. Actually this is the law in some countries although you would not know it, and be prepared to put a bit of work in to keep your rating.

Valid HTML and CSS are a pillar of best practice website optimisation, not strictly search engine optimisation (SEO). It is one form of optimisation Google will not penalise you for.

Where can you test the accessibility of your website

Addition – I will be following W3C recommendations that actually help seo;

301 Old Pages

I’ve not got any proof this actually happens, but I do it. Rather than tell Google via a 404 or some other command that this page isn’t here any more, I have no problem permanently redirecting a page to a relatively similar page to pool any link power that page might have.

My general rule of thumb is to make sure the information (and keywords) are contained in the new page – stay on the safe side.

Most already know the power of a 301 and how you can use it to power even totally unrelated pages to the top of Google for a time – sometimes a very long time.

Google seems to think server side redirects are OK – so I use them.

You can change the focus of a redirect but that’s a bit black hat for me and can be abused – I don’t really talk about that sort of thing on this blog. But it’s worth knowing – you need to keep these redirects in place in your htaccess file.

Redirecting multiple old pages to one new page – works for me, if the information is there on the new page that ranked the old page.

NOTE – This tactic is being heavily spammed in 2013. Be careful with redirects. I think I have seen penalties transferred via 301s. I also WOULDN’T REDIRECT 301s blindly to your home page. I’d also be careful of redirecting lots of low quality links to one url. If you need a page to redirect old urls to, consider your sitemap or contact page. Audit any pages backlinks BEFORE you redirect them to an important page.

Penalty For Duplicate Content On-Site?

I am always on the look for duplicate content issues. I think I have seen -50 positions for nothing more than a lot of duplicate content although I am looking into other possible issues. Generally speaking, Google will identify the best pages on your site if you have a decent on-site architecture. It’s usually pretty decent at this but it totally depends on where you are linkbuilding to within the site and how your site navigation is put together.

Don’t invite duplicate content issues. I don’t consider it a penalty you receive in general for duplicate content – you’re just not getting the most benefit. You’re website content isn’t being what it could be – a contender.

But this should be common sense. Google wants and rewards original content. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, and it’s a footprint of most spam sites. You don’t want to look anything like a spam site.

The more you can make it look a human built every page on a page by page basis with content that doesn’t appear exactly in other areas of the site – the more Google will like it. Google does not like automation when it comes to building a website, that’s for clear. (Unique titles, meta descriptions, keyword tags, content.)

I don’t mind Category duplicate content – as with WordPress – it can even help sometimes to spread PR and theme a site. But I generally wouldn’t have tags and categories, for instance.

I’m not that bothered with ‘themeing’ at this point to recommend silo’ing your content or no-indexing your categories. If I am not theming enough with proper content and mini-silo’ing to related pages from this page and to this page I should go home. Most sites in my opinion don’t need to silo their content – the scope of the content is just not that broad.

Keep in mind Google won’t thank you for spidering a calendar folder with 10,000 blank pages on it – why would they. They may even algorythmically tick you off.

PS – Duplicate content found on other sites? Now that’s a totally diferent problem.

UPDATED: See Google Advice on Duplicate Content.

Broken Links Are A Waste Of Link Power

The best piece of advice I ever read about creating a website / optimising a website was years ago:

make sure all your pages link to at least one other in your site

This advice is still sound today and the most important piece of advice out there in my opinion. Yes it’s so simple it’s stupid.

Check your pages for broken links. Seriously, broken links are a waste of link power and could hurt your site, drastically in some cases. Google is a link based search engine – if your links are broken and your site is chock full of 404s you might not be at the races.

Here’s the second best piece of advice in my opinion seeing as we are just about talking about website architecture;

link to your important pages often internally, with varying anchor text in the navigation and in page text content

…. especially if you do not have a lot of Pagerank to begin with!

Do I Need A Google XML Sitemap For My Website?

What is a xml sitemap and do I need one to ‘seo’ my site for Google?

(The XML Sitemap protocol) has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft

No. You do not need a XML Sitemap to optimise a site for Google, again, if you have a sensible navigation system.

A XML Sitemap is a method by which you can help a search engine, including Google, find & index all the pages on your site. Sometimes useful for very large sites, perhaps if the content chases often, but still not necessary if you have a good navigation system.

Make sure all your pages link to at least one other in your site
Link to your important pages often, with varying anchor text, in the navigation and in page text content

Remember Google needs links to find all the pages on your site.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

I don’t use xml sitemaps that much at all, as I am confident I can get all my pages indexed via links on the website and via RSS feed if I am blogging. I would however suggest you use a ‘website’ sitemap – a list of the important pages on your site.

Some CMS can auto-generate xml sitemaps, and Google does ask you submit a site map in webmaster tools,

Does Only The First Link Count In Google?

Does the second anchor text link on a page count?

One of the more interesting discussions in the seo community of late has been trying to determine which links Google counts as links on pages on your site. Some say the link Google finds higher in the code, is the link Google will ‘count’, if there are two links on a page going to the same page.

Update – I tested this recently with the post Google Counts The First Internal Link.

For example (and I am talking internal here – if you took a page and I placed two links on it, both going to the same page? (OK – hardly scientific, but you should get the idea). Will Google only ‘count’ the first link? Or will it read the anchor txt of both links, and give my page the benefit of the text in both links especially if the anchor text is different in both links? Will Google ignore the second link?

What is interesting to me is that knowing this leaves you with a question. If your navigation aray has your main pages linked to in it, perhaps your links in content are being ignored, or at least, not valued.

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Arif Anjum Firdous market Gulberg III Lahore, Pakistan ..

Arif Anjum – SEO Expert – PPC Expert – SEM, SEO Services Lahore|Pakistan

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7 Basic SEO Techniques All Webmasters Must Know

Last week, we talked about what search engine optimization is

and why you – as a small business owner – should care. But that said, knowing what SEO is pretty different from knowing how to implement this science on your own website!

Now, what you need to keep in mind is that SEO can be complex. Companies like Google and Microsoft employ some of the smartest scientists and mathematicians to make their algorithms as effective as possible. If you dig too deeply into the recommendations made by SEO strategists, you’re bound to feel overwhelmed.

So instead of stressing yourself out, start with any of the following seven SEO techniques. All of them can be easily implemented whenever you have a spare hour, making proper website optimization an attainable goal for even the “non-techiest” of small business owners.

Technique #1 – Optimize your title tags

Every page on your website should have its own unique title tag. However, not all title tags are created equally!

From an SEO perspective, a good title tag should:

Be no more than 70 characters (including spaces)

Include both product- or service-related keywords and your company’s brand name

Be both intriguing and informative enough to prompt search engine users to click through to your page (as title tags are typically used in the snipped displayed in the natural search results)

To see what this all looks like in real life, let’s look at a hypothetical example of how this and the following SEO techniques could be put into practice…

Suppose you run an auto body shop in San Francisco, CA. You’ve recently launched a new website which includes a page on your current specials. After conducting your keyword research, you’ve decided to target the phrase “auto body coupon,” along with location modifiers that put your website in front of consumers in your city.

In this case, a good title tag could be:

“Auto Body Coupons and Discounts | Frank’s Auto – San Francisco, CA”

In addition, as you’re crafting your title tags, avoid “keyword stuffing” these important fields. Title tags that are no more than a string of all your website’s target keywords (in this example, something like “Auto Body Coupons, Auto Body Discounts, Auto Body Savings”) frustrate visitors and can lead to over-optimization penalties by the search engines.

Technique #2 – Create compelling meta descriptions

Along with your title tags, the section of every page on your website should contain a customized meta description. These brief page summaries should be no more than 150-160 characters long and should include at least one mention of your page’s target keyword phrase.

Following our previous example, your meta description could read something like this:

“Need quality auto body repair work done at a discount price? Check out the latest auto body coupon codes from Frank’s Auto of San Francisco, CA.”

While meta descriptions don’t hold nearly the SEO weight that they used to, their presence in the snippets found on search engine results pages plays an important role in your site’s overall click-through rate (CTR). By writing your meta descriptions in a way that captures search users’ attention, you’ll increase the number of visitors who choose to click on your listing compared to your competitors’.

Technique #3 – Utilize keyword-rich headings

Both the title tag and meta description should be included in the section of every page on your website – but what about the rest of your page’s content?

When it comes to your pages’ body text, one of the best things you can do to improve your overall SEO value is to include <h2> and heading tags containing your target keyword phrases in your content. Not only do the search engines place added weight on the words found in these particular tags, the visual relief they provide to your website’s readers will help them to move more efficiently through your site’s content.

Technique #4 – Add ALT tags to your images

If you choose to add images to your web pages, make sure to add ALT tags to them as well.

ALT tags originally came about to provide visually impaired website visitors using text-to-speech devises with additional information about the content on their screens. And though this initial purpose is still valid, the content found in these fields is also important when it comes to SEO.

Again, you shouldn’t “stuff” your ALT tag full of target keywords and keyword variations. Instead, use your ALT tags to clearly and accurately describe your website’s images, working in keyword phrases as they occur naturally.

Technique #5 – Create a sitemap

In the world of SEO, the search engines’ indexing programs – commonly referred to as “spiders” – play the important role of analyzing new websites (or new content added to existing websites) and adding their content to the lists of pages that can be displayed in response to user queries.

As a result, facilitating the easy movement of these spider programs throughout your own site is an important part of optimizing your content for natural search traffic.

One of the best things you can do to help the spiders index your website is to create a sitemap – a page listing links to all the other pages on your site. There are plenty of different automated tools that can generate these important pages for you, though you can always create a sitemap by hand if your site is small.

Technique #6 – Build internal links between pages

Another way to help the search engine spiders to catalogue all of your site’s pages is to create internal links that connect your different pieces of content.

As an example, instead of simply linking to your “Contact” or “About Us” page from your navigation bar, consider adding text links to these pages from within the body content found on your home page. Doing so is a great way to help your visitors find the information they’re looking for, in addition to providing a major SEO boost to your site’s content.

Technique #7 – Update your site regularly

One final SEO technique you’ll want to implement is to update your site periodically. Because the search engines’ top priority is serving up the results that will best meet their users’ needs, they prefer to share websites that contain the latest, most up-to-date information. In addition, the more content you post to your site, the more keywords your website will include – increasing your odds of generating search engine traffic.

The easiest way to make regular updating a part of your SEO strategy is to create a company blog or news section. Either one of these tools will help you to connect with your readers, while also appeasing the search engines’ desire for fresh content.

Unfortunately, implementing these seven basic SEO techniques on your website alone isn’t enough to guarantee that your site will reach the coveted top spot in the search engine results pages for your chosen keyword phrases overnight. Realistically, SEO is a process that takes time to deliver results – though many new webmasters find this frustrating.

Instead of getting overwhelmed by the number of different SEO techniques out there, start with these seven basics. Over time and with continued commitment to pleasing both your readers and the search engines, you will start to see results!

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Top 20 SEO Tips for Webmasters

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Advanced SEO Techniques

Five SEO tips from SMX Advanced on surviving/recovering from Google’s Panda: Part 2

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Advanced SEO Tips to get a maximum page rank for your website

Connect to pages that count

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Free Seo Tutorial Step by Step

SEO Tutorial

Audience

Prerequisites

1 – SEO Useful Resources

2 – SEO Tools

3 – HTML Tutorial

Choosing a SEO Expert or Company:

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How to SEO – What is SEO

10 SEO tips for 2013

1. Quality Content

2. Important HTML Tags

3. Post Length

4. Pay attention about other search engines

5. Link Building

Generally you can use the following technique to create backlinks.

6. Don’t buy Fiverr Gigs

7. Keyword Researching

8. Keyword Placement

9. Adding a Sitemap to Your Blog

10. Learn SEO

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Top 10 SEO Content Writing Tips

1. Write for Humans optimize for search engine robots

2. Forget keyword density concentrate on quality

3. Use related keywords and synonyms

4. Write detailed and in depth content

6. Write what your prospects looking for

7. Write something Unique to be discussed and shared in social media

8. Use title tag and snippets properly

9. Use internal links and related article links in content

10. Use images, rich media and info-graphics

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10 Advanced SEO Tactics That Will Increase Your Blog’s Traffic

Make it easy for people to find your content over the web

Strategically join relevant audience communities

Use Super-Sized Images, Photos and Illustrations

Think Outside of the Social Media Sharing Box

Join Question-and-Answer Sites

Jump into Trending Discussions with Thought Leaders

Design Around These 3 Crucial Elements

Use Egobait

Crawl and Validate Your Site

Test, Track, Measure and Tweak to Improve Success

Conclusion

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SEO Tutorial For Beginners 2013

Keyword Research

Page Title Tag Best Practice

A Note About Title Tags;

Meta Keywords Best Practice

Meta Description

Google SEO: Robots Meta Tag

Robots META Tag Quick Reference

H1-H6: Headers

Google SEO: How Many Words & Keywords?

Keyword Density?

Internal Links To Relevant Pages

Link Out To Related Sites

Redirect Non WWW To WWW

Alt Tags

Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF)

Keywords In Bold Or Italic

Which Is Best? Absolute Or Relative URLS

Which Is Best For Google – Subfolders or Files?

Which Is Better For Google? PHP, HTML or ASP?

Does W3C Valid HTML / CSS Help SEO?

301 Old Pages

Penalty For Duplicate Content On-Site?

Broken Links Are A Waste Of Link Power