5 Essential Things to Know About SEO

From the very start of the Internet era, the first and foremost challenge which we all are facing is how to attract qualified visitors to a site. The days has gone past when only populating and stuffing keywords in META tags and Title tags were enough to rank high on the search engines. Massive funding and buying links is not going to work now as well, these all seems old stories now as search engines has grown much mature now. These all practices also sound unethical in true nature of business.

As an SEO lover, with ambitions of experimenting with all possible things and knowing the results has let me to share you with something very beneficial. If you can give more time than money, believe me, you can beat much of the competition in the market and you will stand distinguishable from the others in your area. The outcome of these trial and error techniques sets the foundation of our SEO efforts and the basis for the constant growth of traffic to website.

Top 5 Website Success Metrics

What is your primary criteria in measuring website success? Does it number of visitors per day, Entrance Paths, Subscriptions ?? There are lots of metrics upon which you can test your website but the essential ones that are used to reflect true benchmarks fall into a common group. You should focus on these metrics on the day one of your optimization and keep a watch on them as they show fluctuation with the passage of time. I believe almost all popular website analytic programs have these set of metrics to measure. Below are the top 5 website success metrics that you should always monitor and control.

How to Maximize ROI with Professional Website Design

“First impression is the last impression”. This statement is very true in internet business. Your website is a door way to your visitors if you are unable to delight and attract them with a good and simple look/feel of a website, you lose them instantly. Don’t expect that the visitor will probably come again to visit your site anymore through referrals or visiting directly. So what you need to do to maximize your Return on Investment (ROI) by showing a professional website design to your visitor who is going to become your customer.

• First of all check the navigation hierarchy of your website. Put yourself into the shoe of visitor and then see which paths are difficult to reach in your website. Brainstorm to reduce the number of clicks required to reach any web page within your site. Carefully prepare a sitemap of your website and see the flaws in it, then make the hierarchy from top to down listing URLs at different levels. For example, you can list categorize your pages on the basis of number of clicks

Webpages reachable with single click

Webpages reachable with 2 clicks

Webpages reachable with 3 clicks

.

.

.

Webpages reachable with n clicks

Now set your navigation plan so that any web page within your website should be reachable with up to maximum of 3 clicks. Because visitors normally don't go beyond this level and pages under 4th level will not get visitor attention.

• The second most important thing is the use of CSS instead of embedded tags for formatting of the content on web page. Present your visitor with a clean and neat content with appropriate and prominent headings and good readable fonts. Don’t use embedded HTML tags like Font Tag etc. to apply formatting. It is a good practice to use external CSS to design your website instead of inner CSS classes.

• Make sure that your website is W3C complaint, this will give search engines a clear picture of your website and they will index and crawl easily. It will also increase your credibility in the long run.

• You can make use of Flash Content for giving your website a good look with descent animation or attractive content but don’t overuse it. As Crawlers cannot index the text within flash objects, so only make a wise percentage of content to show via Flash.

• Also make sure that your website is compatible with major browsers like IE, Firefox and Safari. Your webpages may run flawlessly on one browsers but may present your visitors with lot of bugs in User interface in another browser. So cross check your website compatibility on all major browsers.

Now you may be thinking that how these all things can contribute towards maximizing ROI. Ask yourself, would you go to a grand party with ugly cloths ?? it will definitely hurt your personality. Would you go unprepared to sell your product to a potential customer and you even don’t have answers to defend your product.

Same is the case with websites. They are opening door to your visitors who may become your returning customers. So you should welcome them in such a way that they believe in what you say and what you have to offer them. In first look, your website should look a quality product to your visitors. Remember the small things we ignore are the fundamental parts to success.

How SMART and SEO works together

Make your SEO efforts SMART [Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely]

Simple

SEO works great if you have simple goal(s) to start with. By simplicity, I mean that your SEO goal(s) should be very straight forward and specified in couple of plain sentences. Anyone reading it should be able to understand that what you are going to achieve in the future. For example, I am going to launch a brand new site for Cars (Sell and Purchase). My Goal statement can be as follows:

“To make a Car (sell and purchase) website for UK region specifically and achieving 3000 registered website users in next 6 months, and a regular traffic of 500+ visitors/day from search engines at that time.”

This statement is very simple and general in nature. I will definitely plan and devise methods to achieve those goals but technical details should not be the part of Goal statement. I will make my plan revolving around this particular goal that I have made. At this stage, I will list all possible activities that I would need to perform to obtain those figures specified in Goal statement. This is somehow called a Work breakdown structure of activities. I can make two level plans approach here. First level plan will describe only the major activities and the second specifying further details under each major activity.
My first level plan may include the following major activities just to give you an idea:

• Professional website Design
• Slicing and Publishing of Website
• Building quality Content
• Website and Search Engine Sitemaps
• Discussion Forum
• Social Media Marketing
• Directory Submissions

Measurable

This is rather a very important criterion for your Goals to be evaluated fairly. In real world, we compare things by features, aesthetics, comfort, design, reliability, durability etc. In SMART methodology, firstly you should have a set of characteristics against which to measure. Once you are clear about those parameters, measure them one by one and in-depth. You can also measure your success by building benchmarking criteria’s. You can measure your position with respect to your competitors. SEO is an activity which starts right with the creation of website. So you cannot delay your measuring process until the deadline, instead you should start measuring your results continuously and make adjustments in the plan if something is going wrong or anything unforeseen happens.
You should always take help from the tools. For example, Google Analytics is one of the tools that you can use to measure your results constantly. There are lot more in the market, but you should use one which best fulfill your needs.

Achievable

The Goal(s) you specify for your SEO campaign should be achievable. You can set the challenging goals but yet they should be achievable on ground realities. Making goals out of bound will make your plans always slip with respect to time, budget and scope. Carefully plan your resources and expenses well ahead of kick start of the SEO project. For instance, If you are an entrepreneur; evaluate your skills, abilities and knowledge from your past history and prior achievements and then estimate your efforts required for the SEO activities. After this, you will be in good position to check whether this project is achievable for you in the given timeframe. Always make adjustments to the plan as you go along with the various stages of your SEO project and put things on track.

Relevant

You should not throw the arrow in the air and then draw your target. Always keep laser focus on the Goal(s) you want to accomplish. Always make sure, all of your SEO activities are revolving around those goals. For instance, let’s consider our above example which we specified in “Simple” for Cars website, suppose we need to build inbound links to our Auto’s website. My first priority should be to get the links from existing Autos websites in the UK region. It would be difficult but it is highly relevant to my niche area and region. My priority afterwards then would be to acquire links from article submission websites with high PR and getting links with my desired relevant words in the anchor tag.

Now see this from another angle. I want to promote my website by running Ad campaign. Now there are many ways to do so. I can use Google Adwords, Linkedin, Facebook, and AdBrite etc. But choosing Adwords would be more relevant and appropriate for my Auto’s website promotion. Linkedin is a website for professionals, so it can give me best results if lets say I have a jobs website. So linkedin network for my Auto’s business will be an irrelevant selection for Ad campaign.

Timely

The “timely” factor is the most critical from SEO perspective. Once you have an online presence, you need to remain in-touch with your visitors or customers; you would never want that relationship to break. Because once your site is up, and you started receiving traffic, then you should be very efficient and effective in delivering fresh and relevant content to your visitor, which will convert them to returning visitors and then finally to customers. Even when you are performing SEO activities, you should keep in mind that search engines love fresh and updated content with uniqueness and relevancy. So if you respect time, it can give you long lasting results.

How to Build Inbound Links with Online Promotion

After your website is keyword optimized, it is now time to build your inbound links. Please see my earlier posts for "How to Create Valuable and Keyword Focused Content". It is very important to watch your niche competition before you start working on inbound links. Try to Google the website in same niche area in which you are going to hit. Watch your competitor’s site carefully and watch directories in which they have been listed, also watch other popular websites linking to them. It should be your primary concern to build more quality incoming links then your competitor has. It is the most important criteria to beat them in main keyword competition.

For this reason, try to get links from the High PR websites and directories, this will definitely give you a certain boost in the long run. Here are few more techniques you can apply to boost your inbound links

• Use XML news feeds such as RSS to routinely syndicate your content to other sites.

• News aggregators are good for your feeds, Register with them.

• Content is the king. So write quality content in the form of articles on your most important topics for other sites, and have a link back to your website.

• If you are in business where you can create useful tools for your visitors, do it. It will give you free quality inbound links.

• Get listed in the major directories and in relevant categories. Like
http://dir.yahoo.com
http://www.business.com
http://www.dmoz.org
http://botw.org

• Acquire links from discussion forums, write articles, post to forums and use your link in signature files.

With regular promotion, the majority of new sites take from 6 to 9 months to rank high on Google. They take somewhat less time on Yahoo and MSN.

The Power of High Ranking Pages for Inbound Links

Links coming from high PR sites carry more weight than low PR sites. In fact, estimates show that a PR 6 link is worth 100+ PageRank 3 links, and a link from a PageRank 7 page is worth 500+ PR 3 links. So, links from quality and trusted websites are worth more to your rankings in search engines. Think in terms of quality, not quantity, when you are going to promote your website.

How to Create Valuable and Keyword Focused Content for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Unique, keyword focused and quality content is still a king on the Web. When search engines are ranking sites, they look for a lot of themed content about particular topics. Publishing a huge amount of useful and valuable content that is keyword optimized will surely provide your site more chances to rank Higher for different keywords, and will definitely help in your overall search engine rankings.

You can also use a content management system (CMS) or a kind of Blog to make quality rich content consistently. Reflect back what your users are looking for and what terms you want to target. It is good to target one major keyphrase per article. You want to create a large amount of content about your main topic that will act as digital flypaper.

Enhance your content with targeted keywords
For on-page SEO, the most valuable website component is keyword focused content. You should be very much aware of the topic about which you are going to write, read other relevant materials from Blogs, books and tutorials. The more accurate you can get topically, the higher your conversion rates will be, and the quicker you will achieve results. Keyword oriented content is usually focused at one theme or one keyphrase per page.

Avoid combining all of your services just into one page. Split your content into multiple pages and then target each specific topic embedding main keywords. For example, if you have a website about e-books, you can follow a 3 level hierarchy for your website as follows:

1st Level Page – (Home Page)

Include your primary keywords here. Specify them in Meta tags and couple of major keywords in Title tag. Specify your main book categories here and links pointing to those categories. Present your visitor with clean and neat navigation system. Make your website’s home page graphically appealing but avoid over use of Flash content.

2nd Level Pages

Create separate web page for each of your sub-categories like:

• Adventure & Travel
• Family & Relationships
• Fantasy
• Food & Cooking
• Fiction
• Non-Fiction
• Health & Wellness
• History
• Science
• Nature
• Careers
• Communications
• Computers and the Internet
• General Business
• Management
• Poetry
• Humor
• Philosophy

3rd Level Pages

This is the most important level of your website where you can target your specific keywords and keyphrases. This is a kind of landing page for your visitors coming from search engines. You should list each individual book in a separate page at this level and you should have reasonable amount of unique content about the book here (at least couple of paragraphs). You can do this by specifying that what this book is about or write something in a form of a summary. The more relevant will you be, more chances are that you will rank higher in search engines.

Important and Helpful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

Rather than using difficult to understand terminology such as search term vectors or Google similarity, I’ll simply explain the important and helpful SEO techniques that I have found to actually work for clients. I will give you top guidelines for higher search engine visibility.

Some people really give a very high percentage for their search engine optimization success to be the PageRank (PR) factor. But this is not the only factor that Google apply to rank results in its search. In our view, Google uses almost more than 150 signals to determine the rank of a page. We will only mention the very important ones here and by using and implementing these in your website will definitely give you a boost in traffic and rankings.

• Keyword use in title tag
This is one of the most important techniques. Many website owners don’t know the importance of this single criterion. You can consider a Title tag as a topic to your essay. The title tag represents the content present on the webpage, so it should be very comprehensive and should show the theme of whole webpage.

• Anchor text of inbound link
This is another factor which Google uses to calculate the relevancy of the material to which the page is referred to in the inbound link.

• Age of site
SEO is a slow process in its nature. You cannot expect the results to come within days. Continuous effort is required for higher rankings. It is normally seen that if all factors are kept constant (just to give an example), the website with more age will get higher rankings as compared to the website with almost same content and niche but is newer.

• Keyword use in body text
Keywords used in body text contain a reasonable weight for search engine optimization. They should be in alignment with the keywords used in Title tag. And it is recommended that title keywords should be present in first or second paragraph of the body text, because search engines tend to give higher ranking to them than the ones used in the middle or at the end of content.

• Global link popularity of linking site
This factor is directly related to PageRank of your own website. If many high PR websites are pointing a link to your website, you got a very good chance to have high PR too. But remember the incoming links should be relevant; otherwise you will not get the true benefit of linking.

• Avoid duplicate content on web pages across your entire website
It is highly recommended to use unique content for your web pages. Don’t use duplicate content in any case. Google loves unique content, so as other search engines. But Google gives a very high priority and value to content which is high in quality and relevancy to the topic.

• External links to low-quality/spam sites
Never link your website to low quality websites because they will harm your Search engine optimization (SEO) standings in long run. Avoid linking to websites with no PR at all. You can see this by installing Google toolbar for firefox or IE and enabling page rank in the options. Few of the poor quality websites may be spam sites, so always make sure before pointing to such a website.

• Avoid keyword stuffing / spamming
Stuffing means that you are placing same keyword on many places and all over your webpage. Never use your main Title keyword more than 20% in your body area. If you do so, Google may consider this as keyword spamming and may penalize you for this.

• Slow server response times
This is a very common web page problem. Try to avoid heavy javascript and other snippets on your web pages that can reduce the response time of your website. Many web developers and SEO experts under estimate this factor. Always keep your website response time high.

• Low levels of regular visitors
Visitors show the overall traffic of your website. Google also consider this factor for search engine result positioning and PR. If you got low levels of visitors, try to increase it via using different techniques like social networking, RSS feeds or subscriptions to your visitors.