10 Fundamental Tips To Improve Your SEO

10 Fundamental Tips To Improve Your SEO

In my colleague Matt Lester’s recent Search Engine Land column, he discussed ten tips for a more effective paid search campaign. For this article, I’ll follow up Matt’s advice with ten tips to help you develop a more effective search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. But before we dive into the tips, let’s briefly look at what SEO is and its key concepts.

SEO, quite simply, involves designing your website to improve its ranking in organic search results on search engine results pages (SERPs). And by optimizing for terms that your target audience will use to search, you will drive relevant traffic to your site that has a better conversion rate.

The key concepts in SEO (credit to Search Engine Land Features Editor Vanessa Fox for the inspiration on this) are straightforward: relevance, discoverability, and crawlability. Relevance means keeping to a topic and helping the search engine understand what your site is about (ideally it’s about one thing in particular). Discoverability means telling the world about your site. The technical details and environment may have changed, but search marketing is still just marketing. Get your website out there, communicate with the online world and your users. And finally, crawlability means making the site accessible. Search engines regularly send out automated programs called web crawlers, and it’s these crawlers that will visit your site and try to understand your content. Help the search engine crawlers find every page on your site and make sure they can understand what they’re seeing.

And now for the Top 10 SEO Tips:

1. Keyword research is the first step in SEO. Take the time to figure out what words are used by the people you want to visit your site, and then use these words on the relevant page. In particular, make sure you use these keywords in the first few words of your page title because this is the most important bit of the page from a search engine’s perspective.

2. Get trustworthy advice from SEO sources on the web. Unfortunately, not everyone knows as much as they say they do online and far too often SEO forums are full of bad advice; choose your sources well. A few we recommend: Google engineer Matt Cutts’ blog, Search Engine Journal, SEOmoz, and of course, Search Engine Land.

3. Look after your code. This means building a website thatis easy for the search engines to understand. Your website should make use of up-to-date technologies like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to minimize the amount of formatting in the HTML page code.

4. Make navigation easy. You can do this by building cleartext links to all parts of your site. Search engines can’t follow image links or clever animated links like Flash; they like their navigation plain and simple—and so do many users.

5. Get links from trusted, relevant sources. Links are like a vote for your site and you can’t rank well without them. Unfortunately, buying links or being indiscriminate in the places you link to and places you request links from is no longer a good way to raise the importance of your site; think quality, not quantity. Links must be relevant to the content of your site and they must be from reputable websites.

6. Build a sitemap page. Building a sitemap helps search engines discover every page in your website. The best sitemaps list the pages in your site along with brief keyword-rich descriptions of the page. If you have too many pages on your site, create as many sitemaps as you need and make sure they’re linked together.

7. Don’t forget the technical stuff. There is a lot happening technically in the background that can cause problems with the way the search engines see your site. For example, if you use a cheap web hosting company, you might be bundled on to the same web server as a pornographic site that Google really doesn’t like—guilt by association. Also, does your website use techniques that search engines don’t like, like certain types of redirection? If in doubt, ask your web design company.

8. Track your progress with a web analytics program. There are lots of options to use; Google Analytics in particular is easy to use, versatile, and it’s free. Web analytics can tell you a great deal about how people interact with your site and how much traffic the search engines aresending you.

9. Tell search engines where you are. You can do this by submitting your site details to search engines. This doesn’t guarantee a better position in the results, but it certainly helps. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all have a facility to submit a list of all the pages in your site.

10. Remember that content is king. Building great content and keeping it up to date is the key to SEO. Search engines love sites like blogs, which are highly topical and regularly refreshed. But always remember to put your visitors first—at the end of the day, even a site that ranks well and gets lots of traffic is no good if the visitors don’t like what they see.

As I said, these my top ten SEO tips. There are many others, but these are tried and true methods to get your company moving in the right direction… up to the top of search engine results pages.

Written by Jim Newsome 

What Does SEO Mean?

What Does SEO Mean?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), considered by many to be a subset of Search Engine marketing, is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a web site from Search Engines, usually in “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. 

Those efforts may also be seen in more narrow vertical Search Engines involving areas such as local search. Many site owners and consultants engaging in SEO attempt to pursue qualified visitors to a site, and the quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword phrase leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase, viewing or downloading a certain page, requesting further information, signing up for a newsletter, or taking some other specific action.

What Does SEO Mean In A Broad Sense?

In a broad sense, SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Creating web pages with SEO in mind does not necessarily mean creating content more favorable to to algorithms than human visitors. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search Engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by Search Engines while also appealing to human visitors.

What Else Does SEO Mean?

The term SEO can also refer to “Search Engine Optimization”, a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out Optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees of site owners who may perform SEO services in-house.

Search Engine Optimization often offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because effective SEO can require making changes to the source code of a site, it is often very helpful when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term “Search Engine” Friendly” to describe designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.

Imagine an orchestra at a concert with the guitarist strumming a guitar with broken strings and the drummer drumming with broken drumsticks. Imagine the face of the conductor with a broken baton and all the worst fears and dreams in world coming true accompanied with a cacophony in the name of symphony. Music? Precisely the reason why your website on the Internet should be optimized.

What Does SEO Mean To Us?

Aditya infotech believes the term Search Engine Optimization means a continuous and ongoing process where the architecture of the website and the website itself remains updated with the objective to return a particular search term on a particular search engine with the correct search result. Here the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the meta-tags, and the submission process make sure the required takes place. No horror stories of searching a mole and finding a mouse.

What does SEO mean to you?

Copied with permission from: http://plrplr.com/29661/search-engine-optimization-seo/

Is Twitter good for SEO?

Twitter might not be as powerful as Google when it comes to improving your SEO, however, it's still worth looking into because if done well it can positively affect your rankings. Here are a few reasons why...

While some claim that Google works much better when it comes to influencing your SEO rankings' when it comes to social signals Twitter should not be overlooked. One of the claims often quoted by opponents of Twitter's impact on SEO is that +1's and other Google+ recommendations influence how much of a trusted source you become as your website is more likely to show up in the search results of people who have interacted with you on Google+.

Nevertheless, there are a few smart tricks when it comes to using Twitter to improve your SEO. First, you want to make sure that you schedule your tweets during peak times to ensure you get the most from online exposure.

Twitter does not just help SEO...

1. Choosing a good username helps with search indexing and improves usability for other cross-channel promotions

2. When choosing an account name consider which variation of your name has the best search frequency

3. Include your main keywords in your bio taking advantage of all 160 characters

4. Integrate your Twitter into your website by placing a call to action on the site for others to follow you on Twitter or integrate a Twitter URL within your site's Global Footer. 

5. Add your website's URL in the account settings

6. Choose the first few characters of each tweet wisely as they determine what appears in the tweet's tag on Google (approx. 42 characters)

7. Write keyword-rich tweets if possible by tweeting with a primary keyword phrase to theme each message

8. Keep retweetability in mind by making sure your tweet's character limits allows for retweets
9. Insert backlinks to redirect users back to your content. 

10. Make sure the redirection leads to pages which provide a rich content experience.

Twitter can be a great source of traffic from social media, however, don't expect to see much change when it comes to your SEO performance just because you're on Twitter.

Watch the video below for the latest Twitter SEO tips and find out for yourself whether Twitter is good for SEO or not.

The 5 Essentials for Improving Your Website’s SEO

Before you shell out the cash to hire an expert, try these quick (and free!) fixes for your website's SEO.

If a quick Google search of your business’s name isn’t yielding much of anything about your company, you’ve got some catching up to do on your search engine optimization, or SEO.

Adding search-friendly elements and keywords to your site can improve your company website’s rankings in sites like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing - and be a huge asset to your online marketing strategy, not to mention your business and profits.

Try these quick, free tactics to improve your website's SEO, before you shell out cash to bring in an expert.

Find your business’ common search terms

The most basic, yet crucial step is to familiarize yourself with the search terms your customers are commonly using to find your business and other businesses in your industry.

Danny Dover, author of the bestseller SEO Secrets, recommends first going straight to the source—your customers. Listen to the kinds of things they’re asking for or ask what they’re searching for to get an idea of the terms you should include.

Furthermore, Google AdWords offers a few tools that can be a useful starting point for brainstorming terms to optimize a site, such as its Keyword Finder, which allows users to find the most searched keywords by industry.

Put those terms to good use

What search engines see on a website and what humans see are more often than not two very different things–especially if a website is designed poorly and without search in mind.

Try checking your website through a search engine’s lens by loading your URL into a tool like SEO-browser.com or the W3C Markup Validation Service, which can give you some hints as to where you might be going wrong

One of the most common places businesses fail to put keywords that could improve their rankings is in their webpage’s title, which appears at the top of the web browser. Search engines use titles to categorize your website, so it's important to have a descriptive one that people would search for, not just your company's name.

“If the Acme Corporation sells blue widgets, they should use the title tag “Blue Widgets” or “Blue Widgets - Acme Corporation” instead of just “Acme Corporation,” says SEO consultant Ross Malaga.

It’s important to be concise however, because search engines will only display up to 70 characters in their results. Anything over that maximum will be cut off with ellipses.

Improving your homepage tag won’t be enough, Malaga says. Make sure each page of your website has its own unique tag, which can only help improve your website’s ranking. The same goes for the URLs for your pages, which can be changed to include more SEO-friendly terms. But be mindful of length here too—users want to get an idea of what’s on the page fast and don’t want to copy and paste long links.

Claim your Google listing

“What most business owners don't know is that they can claim their Google Places listing and edit it,” Malaga says. “By doing that they improve their businesses' chances of appearing on the first page of Google for relevant searches.

If your business is focused on a particular local customer base, this can be a very easy way to improve your rankings and exposure. When a user searches for a general business in a particular city, such as “pizza” or “doctor,” Google will list the top seven places on its first page. Unless the listing is claimed by the business, the information given comes from public business databases.

But, if you claim your business’ listing, you control the information that appears—likely improving your rank in the search results. Add important information, photos and contact information for the best results.

Keep your content fresh

To stay relevant and keep up to date, you must constantly add new content and generate new links, says small business SEO consultant Michael Munter.

“Every time you add fresh, unique content to your site, you give new ways of being found in search results,” he says. “Write compelling content that is useful to your target audience. Use pictures, video and headers to make your content enjoyable and easy to follow.”

An easy and effective way to do this is by keeping a company blog. Post as often as possible, and at least once a week, Malaga says. Most blogging software lets you schedule posts in advance, so even if you can't write every day, you can create some short posts ahead of time that will post without you having to think about it.

According to Munter, interlinking your pages and posts is also a great way to keep readers engaged and build traffic. Try linking to a specific product page mentioned in a blog post, or to past posts that readers might also find relevant.

Hire a professional

While there are quick fixes for your website's SEO that will show some improvements, sometimes you need to leave it to an expert—especially if your website is not designed well. In that case, slight changes will make little difference.

The range in prices for consultants and experts can vary from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands. Munter says business owners should communicate with whomever they hire, and ask questions to try to learn from them for the future.

“Make sure they give you a good idea of what they are going to do to rank your site,” he says. “There are many different ways of approaching SEO and a wide range of prices, so just know what you are getting and decide if it's right for you.”

Many companies that advertise SEO services do not provide these directly; rather, they outsource work abroad at a lower cost and the quality of the work suffers, says Ryan Kent, the director of Vitopian SEO. Another common mistake to look out for is hiring a web developer who doesn't have SEO expertise. Make sure you know who is performing your SEO, what their level of experience is and how they’re changing things.

Though the goal—whether you decide to conquer SEO yourself or hire an expert—is to appear high in search results, it doesn’t mean you should build your website for search engines, Dover says. Avoid computer-generated links and other content that generally includes several iterations of the same words and phrases, and most importantly, keep your customers in mind.

SEO will only continue to gain importance, especially for small businesses, so the time is now to improve your site.

“SEO is very much like the wild, wild West,” Munter says. “What worked yesterday does not work today, and what is working now might not work tomorrow. Google is constantly changing their algorithm, so your best bet is to just dig in and start trying different things.”

Written by Elizabeth Sile

https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/the-five-essentials-for-improving-your-websites-seo/

8 Ways to Improve Your SEO in 20 Minutes or Less

Search engine optimization–it’s difficult! However, it doesn’t always have to be. There are many easy ways people can boost their SEO rankings in less than twenty minutes. Doubt it? SEO professionals get paid well because they know what they’re doing and they work quickly. For someone who wants to take things into their own hands, here are 10 easy ways to improve search engine placement nearly instantly.

1. Delete Duplicate Copy

A lot of people think micro sites with the exact same information are better than having just one site. That’s not true. Un-publish those duplicate sites–and any duplicate content–until it can be completely re-written as original content. Anything that’s copied reads as instant spam to Google Panda, so don’t even try it.

2. Run Google Analytics

If a business or site owner isn’t already depending on Google Analytics, start today. It’s very user-friendly (it can be learned in less than 20 minutes) and provides invaluable information like bouncebacks, how people are getting to the site, the most popular pages and ideas for variant key words and phrases. Consider it a free SEO expert in the office.

Recommended for YouWebcast: The Art of Growth Hacking: Gaining Early Traction by Doing Things that Don't Scale

3. Delete or Change Anchor Text

Anchor text is the description that’s attached to URLs. If a site has multiple URLs, such as a site with a lot of products, it’s tempting to slap a generic anchor text on there to sound professional. However, hundreds (or even three) anchor texts that say something like “the ultimate pest control” will quickly be flagged as spam. Either choose unique texts for each URL or skip it.

4. Send 5 Requests for Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are a great way to improve SEO, but be careful about the quality. The links need to be from reputable sources and complementary to the site. That pest control site would do well to exchange links with a doggy daycare, but not so much a cosmetics company. Exchange wisely.

5. Write One New Content Paragraph

Writing completely new content is tiring, overwhelming and simply not feasible in one sitting. Instead, focus on one paragraph or page at a time (depending on how fast the typer is). Setting aside 20 minutes a day to improve content, enhance originality and include keywords is the best way to slowly improve SEO.

6. Find the Right Pros

Oftentimes, it’s best to leave SEO and the tech side of things to professionals. Spend 20 minutes researching SEO companies and data warehousing services. Don’t get sucked into unrealistic promises–no one can guarantee a first place slot on Google search results. Instead, consider if the content they offer is written by professionals, their success rate and the fees.

7. Scan for Bad Links

Newbies have a bad habit of going link crazy. If there are a bunch of links on a site that haven’t been checked for quality ever, start ticking that off the list. Check to make sure the sites they link to are reputable and complementary. If they’re not, delete them.

8. Get Rid of Ads

Unless a site is making a bundle from ads (probably not), get rid of them. Ads read as spam and they don’t look very professional. The best ad program for rookies is AdSense, but even that doesn’t guarantee results. Instead, focus on a clean and austere site to please the Panda.

Breaking down SEO into digestible chunks is an easy–and even fun–way to improve a site’s performance. Don’t bunker down for hours of SEO; leave that kind of dedication to the pros. However, carving out a few minutes every day is a good idea and can yield great results.

Written by Anna Johansson

This article originally appeared here:
http://www.business2community.com/seo/8-ways-to-improve-your-seo-in-20-minutes-or-less-0472665

How to Score Your Website’s SEO in 10 Minutes or Less

by NEIL PATEL on APRIL 9, 2014

Many digital marketers know a lot of details about SEO, but they have trouble with the big picture.

One of the most important skills you can develop is getting a quick snapshot of a website’s SEO. All it takes is ten minutes. And you don’t need any expensive tools.

You can use this step-by-step process to determine your own website’s health, to find out how your competitors are doing, and to discover what needs to be done to improve your SEO.

What I’m going to show you here is a broad overview process. This doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of a full SEO analysis, nor does it explore offsite SEO in a detailed way. The goal is quick-and-dirty pulse-taking.Here’s the process:

• Step 1:  Find out the domain authority.
• Step 2:  Determine the site load time.
• Step 3:  Check for a sitemap.
• Step 4:  Check the robots.txt.
• Step 5:  Check for meta content.
• Step 6:  Check for H-tags.
• Step 7:  Check for onsite content.
• Step 8:  Test keywords.

Step 1: Find out the domain authority

Domain authority (DA) is a number, or score, assigned to your site. The number is on a 100-point scale. The higher the number, the more authoritative your site is. Sites with higher DA scores get better search results. A site’s DA increases with its age, SEO, and authoritative link backs. The DA is the single most important piece of information you need to score a site.

All you have to do is go to Open Site Explorer, type in your site’s URL, and click “search.”

Look at the number in the upper left corner of the screen. This is your domain authority.

I’ve put this chart together to help you understand how your site fares from a DA perspective.

DA	Rating
1-10	Poor – Your site is young and weak. You have a lot of growing to do.
11-20	Decent. Your site isn’t stellar, but you’re doing better. It would be good to grow.
21-30	Fair. Your site shows signs of SEO, but there are many things you can and should do to improve.
31-40	Competitive. A lot of startups find themselves in this DA range. It’s not bad, and you’re beginning to get close to the sweet spot.
41-50	Good. Now, you’re getting somewhere. This is a nice place to be, and many good e-commerce sites find themselves squarely in this category.
51-60	Strong. As you swing out of the lower half of the scale, you’re beginning to get much healthier. This is a good place to be.
61-70	Excellent. A DA at this level represents a great site with a lot of recognition, a lot of link backs, and a considerable authority in its niche. Many .edus are in this space.
71-80	Outstanding. You’re dominating in the SERPs and owning your niche. Quick Sprout is a 73.
81-90	Very outstanding. You’re in the upper echelons of authority. You can consider yourself to have arrived.
91-100	Rare. These sites are household names — Wikipedia, Facebook, New York Times, etc. Your site will probably never attain this level. Only a miniscule fraction of a percentage of sites on the Internet ever get this high.

Key takeaway: If the site has a low DA, it needs some SEO work.

Step 2:  Determine the site load time

Google ranks a site high only if the site has a good load time. If your site is slow, then your SEO is going to be poor. Here’s how to know:

Go to Pingdom, type in your URL, and click “test now.”

Pingdom will analyze your site’s performance and load time. You’ll get an instant report that looks like this.

These numbers may not mean much. The sentence beneath the numbers, “Your website is faster than 95% of all tested websites,” is a good indication of how competitive you are. I’ve created this chart so you can determine if your site needs work.

Site speed	Rating	What should you do?
0-1 seconds	Good	Nothing.
2-3 seconds	Fair	Site speed may not be the first priority, but you should consider making some speed improvements in the months ahead.
4 or more seconds	Poor	Consider switching to a faster host, eliminating long load time elements, optimizing image size, using a CDN (e.g., Cloudflare), or making other speed improvements.

Key takeaway: A slow site speed indicates there is room for SEO improvement.

Step 3:  Check for a sitemap

Does your site have a sitemap? Sitemaps are a sign of an organized and easily indexable site, which is good for SEO.

Since you’re merely scoring your website’s SEO, you don’t need to worry about a proper sitemap protocol at this point. You can get a detailed how-to guide on sitemaps in my university course.

• If the site is yours, you probably already know if you have a sitemap or not.
• If you’re investigating a site you don’t own, type in the URL, followed by “sitemap.xml” (in some cases, you may need to type fullsitemap.xml).
• If you still can’t find the sitemap, use this Google query: URL of the website, followed by a space, then sitemap.xml: www.example.com sitemap.xml
• If you still can’t find the sitemap, there probably isn’t one. If there isa sitemap, that’s a good sign of SEO.

Sitemaps don’t look pretty. Here’s the sitemap for CNN.com.

If you don’t have a sitemap, you can easily add one to your WordPress site using this free plugin.

Key takeaway: No sitemap means poorer SEO.

Step 4: Check the robots.txt

A site with good SEO will have a robots.txt file with no major disallows. One of my training courses discusses robots.txt in some detail. You want to make sure that the robots.txt is there and that it’s not disallowing the crawlers from indexing important areas of your site.

In your browser, type in [yourdomain]/robots.txt

For example:

Most sites have a robots.txt file. Yours should. Some webmasters even get chatty with the crawlers.

Most robots.txt files consist of simple lists of areas where crawlers aren’t allowed to index.

Make sure that the robots.txt is there and that nothing major is disallowed.

Here is Quick Sprout’s robots.txt:

Key takeaway: If a site lacks the robots.txt or disallows content crawling on major areas of the site, it indicates an SEO problem.

Step 5: Check for meta content

To make sure that you have the main meta components in place, check the following:

• Go to your homepage.
• View the source code. In Chrome for Mac, use the keyboard shortcut: Command + Option + U. Depending on your browser, you should be able to use the “tools” or “view” menu to view the source.

Search the source code for <title> tag. You can do this easily by pressing CTRL + F, then typing <title>. The page title, if you have one, will be displayed:

Search the source code for a meta description (meta name=”description” content=). To find this easily, use CTRL + F instead of wading through lines of code.

These are the two main meta tags that you want on your site. You no longer need to include meta keywords since Google does not use them as a ranking factor.

Key takeaway: Meta tags are important for SEO. A site should have them.

Step 6: Check for H-tags

In addition to having the correct meta content, you should have header tags (H-tags) as well. Good SEO means having at least one H1 tag and, ideally, an H2, H3, and H4.

Use the source code view to search for each of these elements.

I recommend using the CTRL +F feature to find each of these tags: H1, H2, H3, and H4.

Key takeaway:  Having the right H-tags is an important ingredient of good SEO.

Step 7:  Check for onsite content

A site needs continual, updated content in order to rank well. It’s very difficult to have sustained SEO without consistent content output.

• If you’re scoring your website, you probably already know whether or not you have an active blog.
• If you’re scoring a competitor’s or client’s website, it should be pretty easy to find a blog or content source. Navigate to the site’s homepage and look for a link to “Blog” or “Articles.” Content marketing is an important part of Quick Sprout, so I’ve made my blog easy to find:

If you can’t find a blog, you may want to do some more digging. Try this Google search: inurl:example.com blog

Since CrazyEgg.com is a landing page designed to drive conversions, it’s not important for it to have a blog link. However, we still want to find out if CrazyEgg.com has a content marketing strategy.

Based on this query, I see that it does have a blog:

The sign of a healthy blog is that it has articles that are recent and consistent.

Looking at Crazy Egg’s blog, I see that it has a recent article.

Looking closer, I can see that the output is consistent.

Key takeaway: Healthy content marketing is an essential ingredient of good SEO.

Step 8: Test keywords

The final way to score a site’s SEO is to find out how it is doing in queries.

• First, in order to gain the best results possible, make sure you sign out of Google.
• Perform searches on targeted long tail keywords. There are services that provide up-to-the-minute Google rank results for any site. Since I’m giving you the free method, however, we’re doing it the old-fashioned way. Just Google and count.

Here, I searched for “hashtags online presence.” It’s a specific long tail phrase that I’d like to rank for. Here are my results:

You may want to create a list of keywords that you or your competitor are targeting and work through them one by one.

Google SERP Position	SEO Strength
1	Excellent
2	Very Good
3-4	Good
5-10	Average
Page 2	Fair
Page 3	Poor

Key takeaway: To make the scoring process simple, use the chart above to help you determine the SEO strength of your site based on your position in Google’s SERPs.

Conclusion

This is a brief and simple way to get a perspective of a website’s SEO. It won’t answer all your questions, but it will give you an accurate sense of how a site is doing.

The good thing about this method is that it’s free and quick. You don’t have to learn any special tools or purchase any subscriptions. You just need to do a little digging. After you do it a few times, it becomes almost reflexive to hit the keyboard shortcuts, do the searches, and check for the proper SEO elements.

What are some other quick-and-dirty ways you know to score a website’s SEO?

Written by Neil Patel

This article originally appeared here:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/04/09/how-to-score-your-websites-seo-in-10-minutes-or-less/