SEO for 2014: Easy on-page optimization tips

Search engine optimization is a never-ending headache for many ecommerce entrepreneurs. Regular algorithmic changes with Google, Bing, and Yahoo can mean that the efforts you make today could be undone tomorrow, particularly if your SEO strategy is gimmicky and based on trying to “trick” the engines to liking you. Plus it seems that no matter what you do to improve your content and design, there is always something left that could still be done to make things more effective.
With the start of a new year right around the corner, though, it is a good time to sit down once again and take a look at your SEO strategy, particularly if you’re a solo entrepreneur that manages his or her own SEO efforts in-house.
The Holy Grail of SEO is high PageRank backlinks (i.e. inbound links from other websites to yours), but they are hard to get, are driven by quality content, and take months or years to culture. Creating quality, user-valued, brand-centered content should always be the cornerstone of your SEO efforts, but there are simple, easy on-page things that you can do to make your website’s pages more attractive to search engines.

Revisit Keyword Research

You’re likely already well aware of the important search keywords on which you would really like to rank strongly. Still, it never hurts to do a bit of fresh keyword research to insure that your list of target keywords is up to date.
It’s unrealistic to think that the vast majority of relatively small websites are going to rank well on thousands of keywords. It isn’t unrealistic, however, to rank well on several dozen keywords, particularly if many of them are not too competitive to start with. And just because a particular keyword isn’t all that competitive doesn’t mean that it isn’t lucrative.
For the longest time, Google offered a great, free keyword research tool – called (unsurprisingly) the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You could use this tool even if you didn’t use AdWords. The replacement for this tool is the Google Keyword Planner, which is available under “Tools and Analysis” in your Google AdWords account.
Even a few minutes with a keyword research tool might be of value in focusing your attention on new opportunities for keyword “strategy,” whatever that might be.
The goal is to get together a list of anywhere from 100 to 300 keywords and key phrases that you believe are directly related to the products that you sell and that are descriptive of the sorts of things in your web store. Some of these will no doubt be “short tail” and generic (e.g. you sell garden hoses but want to rank on “gardening”) but most will be “longer tail” and more specific and oriented to particular products and categories (e.g. “expandable lightweight garden hoses”).

Formulate a Landing Page Strategy

From there, the next step is to build a simple spreadsheet with your targeted keywords in the first column, one keyword per row of the spreadsheet.
In the next column of the spreadsheet, go ahead and list the page on your website that should be the preferred landing page for someone who searches on that term.
Imagine that you sell birdhouses, for example. An important keyword for you might be “brass birdhouses,” in which the landing page for that term might be your category page for brass birdhouses. The term “cedar birdhouses,” by contrast, would be targeted to your category page for cedar birdhouses.
A more particular search like “small barn wood birdhouse” might target a particular product page that closely fits that description. Likewise, a branded search for a particular product (“Dunwood Classic Redwood Birdhouse”) should target that particular product page.
One implication of this exercise might be the discovery that a term that you think is important doesn’t have an appropriate landing page on your site. For example, imagine that your birdhouse web store currently only categorizes products by the materials from which they are made.
Nonetheless, imagine that you’re interested in targeting visitors who search according to the size of birdhouses (e.g. “large birdhouse,” or “small birdhouse”). In that case, you should consider creating a new set of product categories that correspond to the keywords that you care about. In addition to the value in terms of SEO, presenting your products in terms of the categories that consumers are considering can really influence conversion rates and time-on-site.
Another possible outcome of building this spreadsheet that might surprise you is that you find that you’re almost always targeting the home page of the site. Although it is tempting to want visitors to always come through the front door, the truth is that landing on a relevant interior page on the site is going to be more effective as a selling tool for many, many searches.
It’s also easier to optimize an interior page for a particular longer-tail search term compared to trying to optimize the home page for every term you care about. And optimizing interior pages on various related long-term search terms will have the added benefit of potentially raising the overall visibility of higher-level pages on broader term searches.

Optimizing Page Titles

Now it’s time to add a third column to your spreadsheet. Go ahead and type out the current page title for each website page that you have listed in your spreadsheet.
Page titles are important to search engines, and they are relatively easy to optimize. The question at this point is simple: Is the current page title adequate to your SEO goals, given that you’re trying to rank for that particular keyword?
Minimally the page title should be descriptive of the content of the page, and include usage of the exact keyword you’re targeting. For example, if you’re trying to get a category page to rank on the term “brass birdhouses” then the title of that page should include the term “brass birdhouses.”
Ideally, the term should also appear early in the title. “Brass Birdhouses for Your Feathered Friends” is going to be more effective than “Birds Love Brass Birdhouses” – though I doubt either of those page titles are all that great.
Lastly, take a look at the length of the page title. It’s tempting to use lots of words in the page title, but hold the length to 70 characters. Search engines will use your page titles in the search engine results page when they serve your page up as a result. But the engines will truncate the result if it goes more than 70 characters.
Good titles will be keyword-rich, but not keyword-stuffed, descriptive of the content on that page, under 70 characters, and encourage a user to click on that result, if it showed up on a search engine results page. Do yours?

Optimizing URLs

What goes for the page title often goes equally for the page’s URL. Although there is a debate about what impact dynamic URLs have on search engine results, the fact is that most web stores can control their URLs, and product and category pages that have simple static URLs are easier to optimize.
As with page titles, use of your critical keywords in the URL can have benefits. In fact, you can make a good case for using your page titles as, essentially, your URLs. For example, if your category page title is “Brass Birdhouses” because you’re targeting that keyword, you can make a case for the URL being www.thebirdhousestore.com/brass-birdhouses.html.
But don’t just go changing all your URLs on a whim. Unless you are developing a brand new website, those pages are likely already indexed by Google, Bing, and other search engines, and just changing the URL will be disastrous for your existing search engine rank on those pages (searchers clicking on search results will get “Error 404″ page not found errors).
You can change your URLs, but for every change you’re going to have to create a 301 redirect. Almost all web store builders have an easy built-in menu for doing this. This is a time-consuming process, but vital.
Furthermore, consider the fact that the value that a well-written URL brings is actually rather marginal, overall. If a page is ranking poorly and you’re trying to make it better, then this is a trick worth trying. But if a page already ranks well with the existing URL, it might be best to just leave it alone.

Optimizing Meta Data

Next comes the page meta data. From an SEO standpoint, the “easy fix” meta tag to be concerned about is the “description” tag.
In the next column on your spreadsheet, paste your existing description meta tags for each page on your website that you’re targeting.
You might be surprised to discover that pages that are critical to your SEO strategy are actually missing this meta tag completely. It’s easy to overlook adding that bit of meta data when you’re building out a site.
There isn’t a “trick” to writing good description tags that isn’t part of writing good page titles. Look at the descriptions as they are today. Do they use the keywords that you’re targeting for that page? Are those keywords used early in the description itself? Are the page descriptions actually descriptive of the content of the pages to which they are attached?
As with page titles, there are limits to what the search engines will display in terms of the search results snippets. Hold the complete meta description to no more than 156 characters, ideally, and get those keywords featured early in the description, as this can enhance click-through rate as well.
Lastly, just as page titles should be unique, so should page descriptions. Don’t use the same page descriptions for more than one page on the site. That should actually follow naturally from your overall strategy, as the keywords you’re targeting should also be different for different pages.

Optimizing Page Content

What goes for the other elements in your on-page SEO strategy, go equally for the actual page content on your site.
This likely will not end up as a column on your spreadsheet, but look at the pages that you’re targeting and ask yourself the same old question: Do your targeted keywords for each page actually show up on the pages themselves?
There are useful easy-to-implement strategies for calling a search engine’s attention to particular keywords on a given landing page. Simply using a keyword more than once is a strategy, though you should avoid “keyword stuffing” — the practice of using a particular keyword too much or in awkward ways that are clearly designed to “trick” a search engine but provide no user value.
Another strategy is to use the keyword on the page within the context of your H1 (header) tags, in essence, noting to the search engine that the keyword is in the page headline. As with page titles, use the keyword early in the headline, and don’t use more than one set of H1 tags on the page (that’s what H2 through H6 are for).
Beyond that, keep in mind that retail websites often suffer from the problem that category pages and product pages are image-heavy and text-light. This is good for the user, actually, but the search engines can’t do anything with a picture directly. The best that they can do is to rely on the images ALT tag, which should go with every picture.
Because you want your use of keywords to be proportional to the rest of the text on the page, this probably means that you’re going to want to do some writing. Try to craft at least 50 to 100 words worth of good, descriptive written content on every page of your site, including category pages. By doing this, you’re adding enough content overall that the keyword usage will be statistically proportional.
As an aside, but an important one, it’s tempting to rely on manufacturer’s product copy when considering what to put on a product page. From an SEO standpoint, however, this is almost always a mistake as that same copy will be used often across the web, leading Google and other search engines to regard your store as offering nothing particularly novel to the user in terms of content.
Beyond that, another strategy is to add some highlighting — such as bold or italics — to keywords. Don’t expect this to have much of a dramatic impact, but every little bit helps.

Google Launches Hashtag Search, Shows Google+ Posts On Search Results Page

Google announced that Google search will now support #Hashtags which would fetch Google+ posts on search results pages. When comparing the recent Google updates, you will know that it is an uncluttered fact that Google is synchronizing Google+ with all its assets. After the Authorship markup, there came a new era and now Google+ posts on results pages will get Google+ a massive hike.

The integration of Google+ across Google properties continues in a big way today with the launch of hashtag search. Simply put, if you search Google for a hashtag, you might see Google+ posts using that hashtag to the right of the regular search results. Google’s Zaheed Sabur announced the new feature this morning on Google+, saying that it’s available initially for English language searches on both Google.com and Google.ca. The only posts that will show up on Google searches are those that were shared publicly, or shared with you (if you’re a Google+ user). Clicking on one of the Google+ posts leads you to Google+ where the search is reproduced. By pure coincidence, a Google.com search just now for the #googleglass hashtag showed a Google+ post last night from our founding editor, Danny Sullivan, in the right column. (You can click for a larger version.) The Google+ posts...

Upcoming SEO Trends in 2013 & 2014 – Predictions & Strategies

All of you have already known about latest Google penguin 2.0 (released on May 22, 2013) and Panda 26(confirmed on July 18, 2013) updates which already adversely affected many search queries in search results. Do you know only penguin 2.0 update has already noticeably affected 2.3% English search queries in SERP? Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Web Spam, already confirmed that Google will be more strict and rolling out more updates for preventing spamming on web and for enhancing user experiences.

So it’s high time, you decided what SEO strategies you will follow to keep improving your search engine ranking or at least get rid of de-ranking in search results before rolling out next algorithm updates.

What We Have Learned from Penguin 2.0 Update:

After rolling out penguin 2.0 update, it’s now clear that:

• Google is discouraging buying and selling links (paid links) and also paying lesser weight on paid links than before.
• Google is not going to tolerate spam anymore and that’s why will deal with more harshly with spam link building
• More weight is being given on compelling contents.

Predictions about SEO Trends in 2013-2014:

SEO trends in 2013-2014 would be mostly influenced by what will be the next Panda & Penguin updates.  But it’s not possible to exactly forecast what will be the SEO trends in 2013-2014.

Though it’s quite difficult to anticipate what Google will announce in their next updates, but it’s sure that those updates will be more comprehensive and deeper targeting than the previous iteration of algorithm. Although the upcoming SEO trends can’t be exactly estimated, but here I am going to share some most probable estimates that will always be pretty effective for getting your desired outcomes, whatever the algorithm updates would be.

“Complete Content” Continues to Play an Important Role:

Unique and valuable content is a must for better ranking and this would be the same for 2013-2014 season. If you really want to attain authority value for your website and wish to rank in the 1^st position of SERP, you have to ensure that you have not only unique, but also detailed contents in your website. Your contents must be able to answer all the WH questions (what, when. Where, how, etc.) that might arise in your visitors’ mind. Otherwise visitors will go to other websites to know more about the topic. You may add expert’s opinion, testimonials, related videos and whatever else in your website to make the contents ‘complete articles’ to your audience. In a word, your contents should reflect your expertise on the topic.

Backlinks are Still Important, Though Quality Parameters are Getting More Strict:

Google has clearly mentioned that it dislikes unnatural and massive link building. This search engine giant has also confirmed that they are working on creating more effective tools for analyzing link quality. Google likes to see websites having natural backlinks from related sites. Analyzing algorithm updates of last couple of years, it seems like natural links would get more weight than paid and irrelevant links in 2013-2014.

More Focus on Diversified Contents:

Contents can be of texts, images or videos. You might already have seen that Google has different search parameters for displaying text, video and image contents. So don’t focus only on articles, but also try to use high quality videos, images and infographics (high quality in terms of usefulness, not high resolution) to get better ranking of your site.

Social Media Popularity Continue to Be Important:

Social engagement and popularity is one of the crucial ranking factors in these days and hope it would be the same in the year 2013-2014. Social media make Google believe that the contents of your website are really useful and that’s why they are being shared over social sites which help obtain better ranking in SERP. So you should concentrate on branding your site’s social media pages and groups for improving your websites social ranking in the upcoming days. Adding social media buttons in your website will make it very much easier for people to share your contents in various social media.

Diversify Keywords Used For Anchor Text:

You shouldn’t use a single keyword again and again as your anchor text while linking to your contents. The same is applicable to both internal as well as external linking. For example: if your website gets 100 backlinks using the same anchor text whether they are from different domains, Google would consider it as spamming or unnatural linking. If you are working on single keyword ‘hair oil’, for instance, you may use diversified keywords like ‘best hair oil’, ‘hair oil for men’, ‘hair oil for all’, etc. This practice will definitely work in this 2013-2014 season.

Presentation and Design to Support Your Contents:

User experience (UX) plays a vital role in better ranking of websites in these days. If your website contains unique and detailed contents but with unprofessional or bad presentation, this is not going to work anymore in these upcoming days. If you have useful informative contents, you should concentrate on having professional design and presentations too to enrich your website users’ experiences. If you do so, this will automatically work for enhancing the users’ experience of Google, you know what I mean.

Mobile Compatibility of Your Site is A Must:

Do you know that approximately 45 million people are using mobile internet in these days? According to some web researchers, more than 1.9 billion people will be accessing websites using mobile internet within next couple of years. That’s the reason why having responsive web design is a must for your website. You have to ensure that your website is accessible and perfectly viewable from various devices, whether it is tablet, smart phone or any other devices. Otherwise, your website users won’t be able to access or satisfy with your site and may leave the site which ultimately negatively affect your ranking in the upcoming days.
Yap, there are some other methods that I should discuss apart from what I already have discussed in the above section. I would like to hear from you about any other SEO strategies or techniques that you have already applied or you think should be considered. Thank you.

SEO Industry Trends: A Look at What’s Ahead for SEO in 2014

Now that most of us have our footing back after Penguin 2.0, what’s ahead for SEO and social media marketing in the year to come? It’s clear that Google’s focus is on eliminating spam and enhancing the user experience through better content. Evidence has shown that both site quality and link relevancy are going to be big players in the next twelve months. But comments from Google and forecasting from a number of different SEO experts suggest that other changes are on the horizon.
Here’s my best guess of where we can expect SEO to go for the rest of 2013 and throughout 2014 – and my top tips on how to prepare. Just to add a standard disclaimer: prediction posts are at best guesses. I’ll be updating this post periodically as more information becomes available, and look forward to your thoughts and insights as well.

1. Content continues to be important, but requires more depth and detail
The days when you could publish 500-word pieces on your blog a couple times a week and achieve authority status are fading away. While high quality, shorter pieces still have value, I predict we’ll see a migration toward “super articles.” Longer pieces that are a minimum of 1,000 words and more likely upwards of 2,000 will become increasingly valuable.
It’s what Neil Patel has called “epic content.” There’s several ways to approach this. If the best articles in your niche offer 50 ideas, your round-ups could offer 100. You could get access to experts, develop detailed tutorials, or supplement your content with high quality videos or images. The key is going to be to follow an approach that sets you apart from the most basic content in your space, and grabs people’s interest for the long-term. The focus is on depth, quality, and ultimate value to the reader.

2. Different kinds of content help you get traction
Whether you’re looking at creating video, developing infographics, or launching interactive quizzes, thinking beyond blog posts and free reports will give you a distinct advantage. As buzzwords like guest posting and content strategy become more and more ubiquitous, it’s important that you do whatever you can to rise above the noise. In addition to committing to do what it takes to write sticky, authoritative content, another strategy will be diversifying the type of content that you publish.
Of course, this connects to your ability to disseminate content in creative ways. There’s only so many ways to share a blog post. But a video can be syndicated to dozens of different sites, added to a branded channel on YouTube, embedded on Pinterest, and more.
Another important factor is your ability to appear in different verticals of search — for example, videos or images — as overall search architecture moves in that direction. A more diverse content base will help you rank more effectively for your target terms.

3. Author authority matters
It’s not just the quality of a single piece of content that matters, but rather your entire body of work. By using Google Authorship and other behind-the-scenes techniques, Google is developing better mechanisms for learning about everything you write. This develops an overall picture of what you’ve accomplished, and what subjects you’re qualified to speak on.
The overall number of social signals your content is generating, how frequently you’re posting, and the quality of sites you’re connected to, this will impact the rankings of the content that you post going forward. To establish your authority, make sure you’re leveraging Google Authorship not only with your regular core content, but also with guest posts that you contribute to other sites in your industry.

4. Links remain critical, but the bar for quality keeps going up
In a video in May, Matt Cutts suggested that Google’s continuing to develop more sophisticated adjustments to the algorithm to measure link quality and thwart link spammers. This evokes the idea of link wheels – creating networks of hub and spoke sites, along with many levels of intermediary sites, in order to build links. The idea is that if they’re dispersed and deep enough, that the connections between them will be masked. It a nutshell, these approaches aren’t effective anymore and will become less so moving forward.
While Google’s already focused on this, ever more sophisticated versions of this approach – from paid advertorials to private blog networks – will continue to be important targets in the war of spam. Not only will we all be taking a retrospective look at our link profiles, but strategizing how to build links in the future will require more ingenuity and planning. Link building is moving in the direction of a relationship-based process.

5. Diversifying link text is ongoing
One of the areas t hit by Penguin 2.0 was sites where anchor text was too optimized. Experts estimated that if more than 30% of your anchor text was identical, it was easy to see that you were actively building links in a way that might be manipulative. Instead, now and going forward, it’s more important to think about linking from an organic perspective.
For example, say your site is currently focused on the topic of Twitter marketing. People discussing your site and linking to it are likely to use a variety of terms: Twitter marketing, marketing on Twitter, Twitter for business, social media marketing on Twitter, and more. There are a number of terms that are all within the realm of a reasonable anchor text choice.
It’s important to develop campaigns that help you post links with a range of different anchor text. Diversifying your link text takes time, especially if you have a significant body of links to your site. I anticipate that we’ll see many website owners working on this in the year ahead.  For an overview on proper anchor text strategy in a post-Penguin 2.0 environment,

6. Great design matters
Great design is a key piece of the user experience. Top-quality design helps overcome the trust barrier that comes up when people first visit your site. If your site looks professional, they’re more likely to believe that your business is legitimate and give you the time and money you’re working hard to earn. Another key factor is driving conversions. Good design helps drive users in whatever direction you want them to go – signing up for your email list, buying your products, or reading and sharing your content.
Design is also a very effective tool for helping build both your authority and your epic content backlog. Is your picture on your website? Do people associate your name and face with high quality content? If so, you’re on the right track. Is design supporting the quality of your tutorials? You can instantly upgrade people’s perceptions of your work by integrating screen shots, videos, and more. It’s a simple way to increase the value of your content.

7. Guest posting comes under increasing scrutiny
One of the most popular means of building links right now is guest posting. It’s a great way to build links, cultivate relationships with other thinkers in your field, and get your material in front of new audiences. The challenge with guest posting is when it’s treated as the “new method of article marketing.” I think we can expect increasing scrutiny from Google on guest posts.
What this means for writers and website owners is that it’s important to pay attention to the quality of the sites where you post. PageRank and Domain authority are two metrics to measure quality. Another is to look and see if these sites have the kind of human signals that make a reputable site – an engaged audience, social shares, and links from other high quality sites. When you do guest post, it’ll be important to put an extra emphasis on developing valuable contributions that really resonate with the target audience.

8. Social continues to exert a powerful influence
Social media isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s gaining a great deal of traction. With the introduction of Google Plus two years ago, it was easy to see that social signals were becoming more important to search. As one expert said, “human rank is hard to game.” By increasing the influence of social media signals, the search engines are essentially outsourcing the manual evaluation process of content to a large extent.
For companies working to rank their content, it’ll be important to ensure they have branded accounts for their sites. Plugins or other mechanisms need to be used in order to make content easily sharable, and to measure social shares. Social media promotion needs to be a front-line priority in your individual content promotion plans, and overall innovative approaches (for example, experimenting with exclusive social content or competitions) used to increase your social reach and influence.

9. Mobile performance and compatibility matter
During an interview with Search Engine Journal, Matt Cutts noted the importance of having a lean mobile site that loaded quickly. Building on that, mobile is no longer optional. Half of all people in the U.S. own a smartphone; one third of internet users own a tablet. Soon, more people will routinely access the Internet via a mobile device than the number of people who do so via a desktop computer.
Having a mobile compatible site is the new minimum threshold. Important aspects include cross-device compatibility and optimizing your designs for mobile conversions. Thinking about mobile productively requires a mindset shift. Mobile isn’t just about making sales. Instead, it’s about a broader set of potential conversions – visits, gathering information for in-store visits, signing up for more information – that require you to focus on the mobile channel.
Besides mobile-ready design, website speed is becoming more important. As the average internet user expects faster speeds, they have less patience. Frustration over slow-loading websites leads to a poorer user experience, which is why website load speed is one of the growing factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. Cloud CDN (content delivery network) hosting solutions are seeing a rise in popularity due to this trend, and for good reason.

10. SEO is less tactics, more strategy
It’s fair to say that this has been the direction of SEO for a long time now, but it’s becoming increasingly true. Tactics – specific ways to build links or to write code – are becoming less and less valuable. Instead, the focus is shifting to your long-term strategy. What’s your content strategy? What’s your link building strategy? What’s your authority strategy? What’s your social strategy? These individual pieces all link together to create the foundation a successful site presence is built on.
It doesn’t mean that tactics don’t matter. After all, tactical moves are how you implement a strategy. Your choices between different kinds of tactics, such as white hat link building or black hat link building, can make all the difference. But if tactics aren’t driven by an overall strategy that’s implementing multiple approaches at the same time, they’re less likely to work. Approaches to SEO need to be cohesive.

Conclusion
I’m sure that there are critical trends that I’ve missed. I’d love to hear from you. What’s working for you right now, and where are you focusing your efforts in the next year? Let me know in the comments below!

Top 21 SEO Tips and Tricks to Follow in 2014

Google says on the record, “Don’t write for Search Engines, Write for your readers/audience/users.” While this may sound ridiculous, there are plenty of reasons to follow the advice. More often, newbie falls in the trap and often gets confused where to start from. Don’t sound to be too harsh, but do not always listen to almighty Google.
We (bloggers & web entrepreneurs) are mere small creatures and we must write for our readers/users while keeping search engine behavior at the corner of our brain! Producing great content that reader’s love is something not everyone’s cup of team. So how would you start your venture in 2013? What are the best SEO practices that you should follow? Without further ado, let me present you top 20 SEO Tips for 2013.
Excellent SEO Tips To Follow in 2013
I have used an adjective here – Special. These tips are special not because they are something that you have never heard of, but they are special as you have not understood these basic ones quite effectively!

Keyword Analysis inclusive of Competition Analysis

1. Determine Strategy for Keywords

This must be your first and foremost step. You should be clear with your goals that what keywords you want to play around with. This depends on what you want to gain by your online presence and venture. The question in the previous sentence can be answered with information regarding your target audience.
It may look like a flow chart or catch 22 for you, don’t worry, you are right and it is so. We have solutions for it. You can use certain keyword tools like www.keywordspy.com, www.spyfu.com, www.ispionage.com and www.compete.com. In order to get complete market scenario you must look at your competitor’s website. You can enter that website’s URL to any of the mentioned tools and get an estimation of competition.

2. List The Potential Keywords

You have now, different results from different tools as all of them use different methodology. You can collaborate all the results depending on your common analytical sense and list out 50-100 potential keywords. Create an MS Excel sheet for these Keywords.

3. Check Competition of Keywords

Keyword competition is something most newbies/expert ignores. While sorting out bunch of keywords from Google adword keywords tool is the first step to follow, people often forget that the checking Keyword competition is equally important. There are plenty of tools available out there, but we recommend to try out tools like Traffictravis first.
Later, you can go for the premium tools like SEOMoz keyword difficulty and SERPIQ keyword competition analysis tool. Both the tools delivers the great result and cut down considerable work required in doing competition analysis as well as keyword competition analysis.

On Page SEO Tips

4. HTML

Use a content management service such as WordPress, Blogger or Drupal and optimize your HTML tags with the keywords. Make sure you also maintain text to HTML ratio. Always try to keep the ratio high so that Google can understand your content better.

5. Title

Keep the character count under 70 and preferably under 66. Use various plugins available for various content management platforms for SEO. The WordPress beginners should start with WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to make on page SEO as much better as they can. There are also many third-party paid options available in the market, but we do not recommend using them.

6. Meta Tags & Description

Your keyword must be there in your Meta tag and description. Your meta description must be in the vicinity of 157 characters. This is most important as Search Engines read meta description for understanding the post content.

7. URL and/or Permalinks

Your page URL must contain your key word or keyword phrase. If it is a phrase, words must be separated by hyphens. Use some plugins to remove stop words from the URL/permalinks. It’s always good to minimize the use of STOP word in the permalink

8. First Paragraph

While this is not necessary a big factor in ranking, try to include important keyword in first paragraph, so Google can clearly understand what the topic is about. While there is no hard and fast rule, make sure you include primary keyword within first few words of the article.

9. Content Length

As per Guidelines provide by Google, the length of your content must be more than 300 words. We advise you to write content with word count above 500 words. (It will help to protect you from “Animal Hit”). However, we recommend to go over 600-700 mark whenever possible. Instead of writing a simple post without proper information, you should focus your energy to provide quality content with necessary bullet point and images to back-up what you say.

10. Content Quality

Your content must be unique. Thinly copied contents are also getting Panda Hit nowadays so stay away from copy and plagiarism. Make sure you follow proper internal linking strategy without over optimizing anchor text.

11. Keyword Density

Keyword density must be between 2-4%. It means your keyword must not be repeated more than twice or thrice in each 100 words block so if your are writing a 500 words post your keyword count must not exceed 10-15 repetitions. If it does, then Google will count it as over optimization.

12. Image Optimization

Optimize Image ALT tag with your keyword. It is always a good idea to save the image name with the keyword and upload them on the server with the same name. Also attach necessary ALT tag to the image, so Google can understand what the image depicts. Remember, Google is blind, and you need to supply information to Google to understand the image. Moreover, try to provide a wrap up text to explain what the image is all about. This will increase the relevancy as well.

Sitemap

13. Sitemap Submission

Submit your site to the major search engines. Create an XML site map and make sure the search engines can find your site map. Use Google’s webmaster’s tools to verify your sitemap is being read correctly: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

14. HTML Sitemap

Creating an HTML sitemap is an essential part of your SEO endeavors. This confirms you that search engine crawlers are crawling the site properly.

Back-End

15. Avoid DHTML and Excessive HTML

Search Engines can’t read DHTML menus quite easily, so avoid them in your menu. Also, try to maintain HTML to text ratio. Having too many HTML makes the ratio high which is often undesired. Make sure you provided meaningful insight in each and every paragraph and/or article by providing more text.

16. Avoid Major Content in PDF or Flash

Publish your content in HTML format instead of Adobe PDF and Flash. Valuable content that is locked in these formats cannot be easily crawled and indexed.

17. Robots.txt

Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly to include and exclude the appropriate directories and files on your website. This file instructs search engines that which portion of your site is not accessible to search engines. Often people misunderstands this concepts which results in duplicate content or the description is unavailable due to robots.txt configuration.

Off Page Optimization

18. Use Social Media Effectively

Market your content on various social networks and media. Try various titles and descriptions that can engage users with your online venture. Initially, target twitter, Facebook, Google+, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn and Reddit. Google is now giving more importance to social media signals to rank website. Now is the time to utilize social media platform and turn the tale in your favor.

19. Generate Quality Backlinks

There are various techniques to generate backlinks. Guest post on other high authority site from same niche, Commenting on the posts related to your site content, Forum Posting and many more techniques are there which should be used moderetly to gain more trust. Well, backlink is itself a big chapter and can cover tons of pages, but we do not want to go that route for the moment.
Please note that Google introduced an update called Penguin to penalize the overly optimized sites, which means that those sites which are having spam backlinks and using black hat backlink techniques.  I will explain you in detail  how it will identify the spammers, see if there is a site on Diabetes (Health Niche) and the site site owner purchased a bulk of backlinks for the anchor text “diabetes symptoms in children” to rank for that keyword.
This can get a red flag and can get  penalty because if that is a genuine quality site/article then there should be lot of variations in the anchor test linking to that particular page, because it is a common sense that not everybody in the world will link to the exact anchor text right ?  … Yes, that is not at all possible because they may link to that via various anchor texts like

• diabetes signs and symptoms in children
• diabetes in children
• children and diabetes : signs and symptoms
• what are the symptoms in children with type 2 diabetes
• type 1 diabetes symptoms in children and adults

People (SEOs) even identified alternatives for this as well to spam Google which I am not interested in discussing publicly and if you are interested in knowing them then you can contact me

Analysis

20. Use Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website.( http://www.google.com/analytics/ )If you’ve already done this, use the data from: Traffic Sources > Keywords to find additional keywords you may want to optimize.

21. Keyword tracking

Tracking your major campaign and keywords in the Google will give you a clear information about your efforts. It’s therefore very necessary to keep track of all your keyword ranking. For this purpose, you can use free and paid tools available online. Even, you can manually track the keyword in the Google. We recommend to use “whatsmyserp.com” or similar service to check your keyword ranking.
Hopefully, the above SEO tips will help you to start your venture in 2013. Make sure you follow each and every one of them closely.

Off-Page SEO Techniques

Off-page SEO is a set of techniques that drives traffic to your site and increase your Page Rank (PR). The purpose of off page SEO is to supplement your pages SEO efforts with Google juice. Links, likes, shares, pins, wins, bows, cufflinks, blings and all that is out there, all play a role in your off-page SEO efforts. Here are the techniques that can help your off-page SEO begin refining your current efforts, or just give you some ideas. I will vote these techniques using something that just happened: the GJS (Scale Google Juice). Scale classifies these techniques Google juice off page SEO of 1-10 (1 = OK 10 = Super).

Off-Page SEO Techniques (by my scale of Google Juice)

Blogging

Blogging is the best way to build brand awareness and to attract visitors to your site. Not all blogs are created equal and you may have to spend some time to make sure your content is of quality. Quality takes readers back. "Write what you read and I will!" Having a blog is great because you can get your ideas 'out there' and at the same time, make a name for your brand! The best friend of the blog, as well as readers, is Social Media.

Social networks

Some of the most popular are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, MySpace (just kidding), you can also look not well known, as CafeMom (which receives visitors from ~ 1 m / month). There is a flavor for everyone and not a target for each brand. Any page that has some kind of network capabilities is a page that can increase brand awareness and potentially increase your PR.

Marketing Blog and Forum

Read other blogs of interest and participation in forums is a great practice. Find something in line with your industry and start reading and commenting. Bloggers heartening when other industry experts who drop a note in their posts. So how is that you can benefit from this? In each blog and a forum where you can register, you get a profile. In most cases, this profile will have a place to add a website. In the forums, you can add a web site and brand to another forum signature. Potentially, each and every comment response can become a link!

Directory Submission

Online directories have been around since the availability of the Internet. They are a bit dated (as my wife would say), but I think they still have real value. To maximize exposure and effectiveness of your ad, try a niche directory related to your industry.

Photo Sharing

Share photos can be a fun way to build brand awareness. If you are in another industry or visually demanding design, you know what I mean. Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, Pitch-a-Pic, Snap-Shot, etc, are great places to share their photos and get links up. Do not check the last two, I did the above.

Article Submission

As mentioned earlier, blogging is one of the best ways to generate off-page SEO, but it takes time to build a following. Suppose you need to get some traction immediately. Fortunately, there are some nice places out there that already have a good score PR, (about 6 onwards) that allow you to submit your own editorial content. Ezine is a website that will give you a good start, and you may want to stick with it as long-term off-page SEO technique. These techniques will keep you busy for a while and give positive results, although some faster than others. Note that an effective off-page SEO strategy contains a combination of techniques.

SEO Tips For a Stream of Constant and Free Traffic

There are tons of free SEO tips present in various sources online. Freelance article writers and SEO specialists have taken these tips in consideration when they create web content, articles, blogs and other associated materials. For many Online marketers, these free SEO tips will help them achieve the rank that is sought in popular search engines.

To begin, SEO keeps growing in the web and rules do change often. Many companies used SEO as a medium to attract potential customers as well as create awareness to the business. Realistically, there is no definite response to what are the strategies of SEO algorithm. However, you will find free SEO tips that are able to provide answers to this question.

When creating a do-it-yourself SEO contents for your website, it is important to keep your readers in mind. At the end of the day, they are still the one that will browse the content not the various search engines. A fresh and informative content always sell. Within the freelancing world, the phrase "content is king" is exemplified. Think about Internet as real estate, how far will you go to sell a house? If you don't know much about SEO writing, then you can read free SEO tips found all around the web.

Content is fantastic way to build content for the website. Important valuable is the fact that fact that they can be listed in article directory sites which supplies links back to your website. The hyperlinks may last for years. Hiring freelance article writers to make articles and publish them on article directory sites is a great proceed to generate traffic for the website.

You may even participate to article exchanges. This is another free SEO tip that builds quality content to your site. These are effective for firms that sells specialized product. The operation is relatively simple; another writer will publish articles inside your site having a link to their website, and you will publish an article for their site together with links together with your site. This can be a win-win situation for parties. Lots of freelancers do this method due to the high-traffic created.

Free SEO tips can also be found in freelancers sites or online discussion boards. These pointers are given by SEO experts to new writers. Learning the fundamentals of seo is one thing. If you are using these tips to your advantage, you are able to lead those in SEO marketing. SEO is not just about optimizing keywords, its also about beating your competitors. Impressing the future prospect with engaging contents will make them conscious of the website even more.

For some niches, SEO can be quite easy but for popular and specific topics it can be very difficult. Requesting assistance from SEO experts is an excellent choice. It may cost you additional but at least you achieve your marketing goals. Nevertheless, if you want to create your own SEO contents, then you woll not have difficulty searching for free SEO tips in the Internet.