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By Alesya Krush in Featured

Time is precious. They say “time is money,” but I think it’s even more than that. In this post, I would like to talk about the SEO practices that are a complete waste of time.

Before writing the post, I simply sat down and penned my SEO experiences. As a beginner, I used to waste a lot of time on different SEO methods that later on turned out quite useless. So, I made a list of those. I’ve also “interviewed” some of my SEO buddies and included their piece of advice in this post, too. So, what I would like to present to you is our distilled wisdom. Enjoy!

It is NO use:

1. Hanging Out at SEO Blogs/Forums

Ironically, this is what you are doing now, aren’t you? Well, it’s not the same, and let me explain why. There is a difference between CHOOSING to read a blog post or a forum thread that looks really helpful (this is what experienced SEO’s do) and simply reading everything in sight to stay informed about everything at all times.

I remember the days when I used to read every reply in a forum thread that I started, even when I already knew the answer to the question I had asked in the thread. I was just curious! So, guess what, I don’t have the time for curiosity anymore.

By K Damian Qualter in Featured

Even though there are numerous search engines available on the internet we all know that Google is the one that counts when it comes to rankings. This means that if you want your website to be successful you need to aim your SEO campaign at Google, but how exactly can you do this if you struggle to understand the complexities of the subject?

1. Create Content That Isn’t Time Sensitive

Putting good quality content on your website that won’t go out-of-date in a few weeks or months is an easy way to boost search engine optimization. By making the content you use useful now and in the future you won’t need to remove it and replace it over and over again – you can simply add to it on a regular basis.

A website with very poor content or very little content is an SEO no-no if you want good search engine rankings so get your typing head on and create some content that people will be glad to read now and in 10 years’ time.

2. Think About Your Customer’s Needs

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about the actual words they may type into the search box in order to find your website. Then check how popular these words are with an SEO keyword tool, such as the free one supplied by Google. One of the quickest and easiest ways to achieve good SEO is with good keyword selection. Then all you need to do is include your SEO keywords in your website content.

By Scott Buresh in Featured

SEOptimizationYes, you read the title right. My company recently performed extensive search engine optimization on a client website, and the results were staggering. Within a month, organic search traffic had dropped by over 60%. Inbound leads from organic search had dropped by over 50%. And the client was absolutely thrilled with the results.

So when is less organic search traffic better? And when are fewer leads from organic traffic better?

Less traffic from organic search traffic can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of traffic, and fewer leads can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of leads.

To give you some background, this particular client offered a highly-specialized service to B2B companies. The reputation of the company and the quality of the service commanded a high dollar figure per engagement. They were THE major player in an industry that they had practically invented. However, their prior search engine optimization company did not factor in any of these very important considerations while optimizing the website.

The firm in question was clearly from the “traffic-at-any-cost” school of search engine optimization, and they never engaged the client with the type of questions that you would expect from a real business partner, including the most basic questions, such as “Who is your target market?” They were not a marketing partner – they were a traffic delivery mechanism. They were not actively involved in the client’s success, because to them, increased organic search traffic was the sole measure of success.

By Ray Whittaker in Featured

SEOptimizationWhen it comes to onpage SEO, it’s estimated that Google checks up to 200 onpage SEO parameters. And since Google keeps its ranking algorithms a secret, nobody really knows what these checks are or even if the estimate is anywhere near correct. But none of that matters when it comes down to it. As long as you can apply a handful of the top onpage SEO strategies, you can get your web pages to rank and draw traffic.

Choose the Right Key Phrase for Onpage SEO

If you want a web page in one of the top ten search engine positions, you need to perform your SEO on a keyword or key phrase that does not have too much competition. You don’t want to take on keywords that the big guys are throwing a lot of money at or ones that too many people are competing for. It’s not that you couldn’t get to page one for these keywords, but achieving, and maintaining, your ranking would be more difficult. First, you want to get to page one, then you want a good chance of staying there.

There is one method of analyzing key phrases that is not foolproof but may give you an edge. Choose keywords and key phrases that match the following criteria::

1. Find key phrases that get more than 1000 searches per month on Google. You can check this using the Google keyword tool.

2. Go to the Google search page and search on your key phrase with the word ‘allintitle:’ in front of it (remember to include the colon). So for the key phrase of ‘yoga poses’ you would use the following search command: allintitle: yoga poses.

3. When the search is entered, look at the top of the Google search screen to see how many pages are returned for that search. The number of pages must be less than 100,000.

This method of keyword analysis is simple and free but suffers from one major drawback. It assesses the competition by finding the number of pages that the search finds. This gives a guideline to the amount of competition for that search term but doesn’t give any indication of the strength of the competition. I don’t know of a simple free way to do that, but there are tools available that can provide that information for a reasonable cost.

Seven Onpage SEO Techniques

Once you have chosen the key phrase that you want your page to rank for, you need to apply some onpage SEO techniques to it. The search engines will look for the pages that best match the search term that the user enters. Hence the need for 1000 searches a month or more. It’s no good optimizing for a search term that nobody searches on. Once you know that a fair number of people are searching for your chosen key phrase, you need to make sure your web page makes good use of that key phrase. Here are seven onpage SEO techniques you can use to make sure the search engines take notice of your page for that search term.

1. Buy a domain name that matches your key phrase. For example, if your key phrase is ‘yoga poses’, the ideal domain name would be yogaposes.com. If you can’t get an exact match, try using hyphens to separate words or add a word as a suffix such as yogaposesexplained.com. You could add a prefix word but suffix words tend to rank better with the search engines.

2. Get your key phrase into the URL of the page. This is already taken care of if your key phrase is in the domain name but you can perform onpage SEO on sub-pages as well. So for instance you might have a URL like yourdomain.com/yoga-poses.

3. Make sure the keyword appears in the title of the web page and in the meta keywords tag. If you don’t know what this means, you need to make sure your web developer understands your requirement for this. The keywords tag is not as important as it used to be, but it’s still worth using as part of your onpage SEO strategy.

4. Put your keyword into headings. If you can place your keyword into heading text such as heading 1, heading 2, etc, this will highlight it for the search engines. Ideally get your keyword into level 1, level 2 and level 3 headers.

5. Make the keyword stand out. Identify your keyword to search engines by putting it in bold, underline or italic. Search engines regard words with special formatting as important.

6. If you have an image on your web page, put your keyword into the ‘alt’ tag of the image. If you don’t have an image on your web page, it might be worth finding a relevant image for the subject. Not only can you use it for your onpage SEO but it can add interest for the reader.

7. Make your keyword prominent in the first sentence and the last sentence of the text on your web page. Apparently, the search engines often pay more attention to the beginning and end of the content on your page.

Keyword Density for Onpage SEO

You will want to scatter your key phrase throughout your web page’s content. Keyword density is usually measured as a percentage of the total words on a page. So, if your web page contains 100 words and your key phrase appears three times, your keyword density should be three percent (assuming your key phrase is just one word). You might assume that the higher the keyword density, the better it is for onpage SEO, but this is not necessarily the case. Too high a keyword density will get your page penalized by the search engines. Besides, overloading your content with your key phrase will make your content less readable and therefore less appealing to your readers. There’s no point getting people to your web page just to see them leave again out of boredom or frustration.

A keyword density of around three percent is ideal, but a density anywhere between one and five percent is fine. The caveat to all this is that it should read sensibly so don’t get too hung up on getting exactly three percent. It’s far more important to keep your visitor’s interest so they keep reading. Onpage SEO is there to serve the needs of your website. Don’t make your website a slave to onpage SEO.

Ray Whittaker is an Internet Marketer, coach and mentor. He is a member of the Six Figure Mentors. If you want to read more articles on Internet Marketing, visit his blog at raywhittaker.com/blog. Get a 7-day video bootcamp to get you started with your own on-line marketing business – absolutely free at online-income-system.com

By Danielle Sage in Featured

SEOptimizationWith 2010 nearing an end, we are all looking ahead optimistically towards 2011. In the world of web technology, we have not witnessed any major upheaval this year. Being an ardent web surfer and a webmaster it’s all but natural for me to become curious about what the future holds for us in 2011. The most interesting area to look forward to is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) without which no website under the sun passes the fitness test. The SEO domain has received a tremendous boost from the growing popularity of social networking sites and various improvements in search technology. In this article and the following one, I will share with you some of the SEO trends that you can look forward to next year.

Social Media Optimization

Close on the heels of Search Engine Optimization, comes Social Media Optimization, the newest incarnation of SEO. I know that you are no longer surprised by this new term thanks to the tremendous popularity of social networking sites worldwide. Webmasters should not consider Social Media Optimization as a distraction from their normal SEO efforts; but this new activity should be deployed to boost a site’s SEO prospects. Social Media Optimization activities may include back links from individual social media sites, development of a credible profile on these sites, and targeting towards real time searching. The greater impact you can have on the social networking sites, the more your SEO prospects will improve in the coming year.

Website Speed and On-Page SEO Activities

There are some webmasters who rely on off-page optimization rather than on-page optimization. But in 2011, you should give equal, if not more, attention to on-page optimization. Most importantly, the site load time is going to be the litmus test. Google, in its effort to improve website performance, has decided to penalize those sites that have a longer load time. Also, improper use of Meta tags in website coding will have a negative effect on site rankings in the major search engines in the coming year.

By Amelia Vargo in Featured

SEO2We have written about the benefits of quality over quantity links in SEO ad nauseum, but I do still think it is a subject worthy of discussion.

As Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist at Google says in his recent blog post: Quality links to your site, published on Monday – “a quality link is always going to be worth much more than a hundred ‘spammy’ links.” So, how does a person determine which links are ‘quality’ and which are not?

Well, I think a lot of this comes down to experience. When I first started dabbling in SEO a few years ago, (and, my, how the discipline has changed since then!) I know I fell into some pretty easy traps and pitfalls when it came to link building. One thing that I do know about link building is that it isn’t easy. Whichever way you come to look at it, ‘easy’ is not a word I would use to describe it. Not that it’s technically very difficult, of course, just that it’s time consuming and requires patience, dedication, and to some extent a certain amount of luck.

By Wendy Suto in Featured

SEO2When you begin your SEO campaign, it can be difficult to separate myth from truth. It seems everyone has different ideas of what works and what doesn’t, and even someone who’s been in the business awhile can get confused as SEO trends, tactics, and techniques change over the years.

While there may be much discrepancy, these 17 tips for SEO are something most experts seem to agree on. Following these rules, you can avoid some common mistakes and launch a successful campaign.

1. Perform keyword research. This is a very important step in your SEO campaign, before you even begin. Thoroughly research all keywords you may want to use – this can make a huge difference in your strategy.

By Mike Gracia in Featured

se-optimizationIn part one of this guide, we cover everything from domain names, through to carrying out the research needed to prepare for On Page SEO. In part two, we get you started with On Page SEO practices. When looking to start a new website, or even redesign an old one, it can be confusing. There is a seemingly limitless amount of search engine optimization info on the web these days for any budding webmaster; however there is a problem…

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

Have you ever wondered why certain keywords rise faster than others? or what to do when Keywords plateau in the search engine result pages?

After performing SEO on thousands of websites over the years, you are able to discern distinct patterns that all affect why a keyword ranks and where.

For example if a website is older than 4 years old, it has gained a natural degree of trust (if the tags were follow, index and not blocked by robots.txt). Sites that have gained trust for example have certain privileges that younger websites do not (they react to link building with less effort due to trust).

Although these observations are based on personal trial and error, circumstances such as:

  • keyword discovery time (how search friendly the site providing the link is)
  • the age, authority and link from the site providing the backlink (if the link is to the domain name or anchor / keyword)
  • the amount of topical content on the target site
  • if the page was static or dynamic
  • how prominent the keywords are (a) within the site and (b) in relation to the page in question

Topical relevance is a plus (having clusters of information on a topic) however, sometimes there is no way around waiting for certain factors to age and rise above their algorithmic quarantine like repression in the SERPs.

I have seen phrases that had hundreds of thousands of competing pages acquire a ranking with moderate effort and other keywords or phrases with ten thousand competing pages take months (even though is it a less competitive phrase).

The point is, if a keyword plateaus (gets stuck after rising so far) then you can always look at some of the primary metrics used for producing rankings to assess which action to take to remedy the situation.

For example, if you are able to get a keyword to appear from off the grid (not in the top 1000 pages) and have it scale 900+ positions then fizzle out and get stuck somewhere in the 30′s (on the 4th page of search engines). Then it is time to review the timeline and conditions you utilized to create the proper finesse to allow it to scale the last few pages and reach the top 10.

Performing things like:

  • determining how many inbound links are flowing to the page from internal links
  • determining how many inbound links are linking to the page
  • which percentage of the keywords leading to the page overlap with the target phrase
  • if you need to refine the on page factors such as titles, meta data, increase the density of the keyword, adjust the prominence, add bold or H1 tags
  • going back to older links and flowing fresh link weight to them to pass more link weight to your pages

So, we know that the ratio of links in to links out to a page and the site, the age of the site providing the link, the age and authority of the aggregate sites and what amount of link juice they pass, the on page factors, the amount of internal links and the quality of the content all have an impact on the algorithm.

However sometimes, if you just let things take their course (the real ingredient of SEO, time and synchronicity) you will find that even the most competitive keywords eventually give way and rise to the top if you are aware of the nurturing process.

The takeaway here is (1) start with a stable platform that is easily crawled by search engine spiders (2) get the on page factors as solid as possible from the onset, build each page to rank for a specific range of 2-3 keywords and variations and (3) build links moderately over time (12-35 inbound links per page) to acquire a keyword that is competitive.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

By Diana Roberts in Featured

We’ve all had the experience of looking for specific information on the Internet, typing what seems like a pretty clear phrase into the search bar, and getting a mix of useful and not-so-useful websites on the results page. Wading through irrelevant sites is annoying, especially when they seem so promising from the description. Generally, more useful sites are near the top of the list. So put the shoe on the other foot: do you want to be a source of irritation in your potential customer’s search efforts, or the knight in shining armor at the top of the page? What you need, my friend, is a strong SEO campaign.

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