SEO Guide and Tips for Beginners

SEO Tips for Beginners - Optimizing Images

2011-12-02T01:21:00.001-08:00

Search engines are advanced enough to find and index images but they still need help determining what the image is. Eventually search engines will be able to scan an image and determine what it is but we aren't there quite yet. As of right now they need us to tell them what our images are so they can index them into image search for related keywords.

There are a few reasons search engines give boosts to websites that user proper image names and alt tags. The first is that it helps them understand what the image is so they can put it into their image index and other searchers can find it. The other reason search engines reward websites that optimize images is accessibility. Search engines want your content to be accessible to as many people as possible and will reward those who help them with that goal. If you optimize your images correctly it helps the blind and users with text‐only browsers understand what the image so they can get a more complete idea of the page.

Let's say you wrote an article called "Dog Training Techniques" and you have images of all the types of dogs that the particular methods work for. If your images are automatically named something like image1.jpg or postimage2123.jpg it doesn't tell us what the image is about at all. A better and more user‐friendly alternative for a picture of a golden retriever would be golden‐retriever.jpg or goldenretriever‐puppy.jpg. That way both search engines and visually impaired people know what the image is supposed to be even if they can't see it. It might sound like common sense, but give your images accurate names and search engines will reward you.

Note: Use hyphens in your image names to separate words instead of underscores, they're easier for search engines to understand.

The other major image attribute search engines use as a ranking factor is the alt tag. The alt tag is meant to be the “alternate” text if an image is unable to load or can’t be displayed on the page. When you have alt tags it creates stand‐in text if there is a problem with an image loading. Anyone accessing the page can at least see what the image was supposed to be if the image fails to load.

You can use the image name for the alt text unless it doesn't make sense to. A good alt tag for the image golden‐retriever‐puppy.jpg would be "Golden Retriever Puppy." The key with alt tags is to use a short description of what the image is or what it's supposed to represent.

You can pick up a lot of free traffic easily by just naming your images correctly. So few website owners name images what they are you can sometimes rank highly on image search without doing anything else. Easy traffic coupled with a higher search engine score makes image optimization a necessity when it comes to SEO.

SEO Tips for Beginners - Content Formatting

2011-11-29T01:14:00.001-08:00

There are a few things you can do to place special emphasis on certain words and parts of your content. When search engines crawl and index that content they’ll see that you wanted those specific areas to stand out because they’re important ideas and concepts.

Don’t forget that search engines are smart and can pick up easily on manipulative behavior on your website. Don’t overuse these to try and improve rankings, use them when it makes sense and helps highlight important parts of your content for users.

There are two easy ways to tip off search engines about important parts of your content: bolding/italicizing and heading tags.

Bolding and Italicizing

When you bold or italicize a word search engines recognize that you want it to stand out. The most important thing is to not bold or italicize every single keyword because the effectiveness becomes diluted and ruins the benefit.

Golden rule for bold and italics: When you introduce a new concept or idea in your content bold it so that it stands out. When you want to make a keyword or phrase stand out throughout your content use italics. (you should be using italics more than bold overall).

The built in WordPress editor lets you bold and italicize words by either pressing CTRL + B and CTRL + I or clicking the Bold (B) and Italicize (I) buttons in the post editor.

Heading Tags

H tags are the best way to break up and format lengthy amounts of content in a neat and easy to navigate way. There are 6 heading tags you can use on your website that search engines look at to find themes and the overall meaning of the content. The heading tags are H1 – H6, H1 being the most important overall idea and H6 being a more specific part of the main idea. If you’re writing a really long piece of content – like a guide or report ‐ you can use the heading tags to break up your content and create an overall picture.

Here’s an example of how you can organize a guide using H tags:

Body Building: The Ultimate Guide (H1)

Body Building Tips (H2)

How To Get Six Pack Abs (H3)
How To Get A Ripped Body (H3)

Body Building Exercises (H2)

Warm-Up (H3)
Stretching (H3)

Assuming it’s descriptive and accurate the page title is usually best for the H1 tag. When you use a numbered H tag between H2 and H6 it’s supposed to indicate a sub‐headline of the heading number before it. If you have an H2 tag called “Body Building Tips” a good H3 tag would be “How To Get Six Pack Abs” because it’s one part of the “Body Building Tips” section. If you use H tags like this search engines can pull out the topics and sub‐topics of your content and award your page higher relevancy for both the broad and long tail keywords.

When making new content the H1 tag should only be used once per page but you can have as many H2-H6 tags as you want. The H1 tag is supposed to indicate the overall subject of the content, so having more than one doesn’t work. In the example above the H1 tag is implying that the content is about a body building guide, and all of the H tags underneath it are sub-topics of a body building guide.

If you think about your keywords like an upside down pyramid you can use the heading tags to really break down topics. The higher on the pyramid the more broad, higher search volume, and competitive the keyword is. The lower you get on the pyramid the more long, lower search volume, and less competitive it is.

It’s not necessary to use this many H tags on every page, in fact most probably won’t use more than the H1 tag. Remember what I said about not trying to force things strictly for an SEO benefit: use the H tags when it helps organize the content.

SEO Tips for Beginners - On Page SEO Checklist

2011-11-28T18:41:00.001-08:00

Title Tag - Use accurate title tags with your target keyword for that page (this is what shows ups as the blue hyperlink on Google research results) 60 characters or less.
Description Tag - Use accurate and helpful description tags to explain what the page is about (this is what shows up under the blue hyperlink on Google search results) 160 characters or less.
H Tags - Use keyword rich H1, H2, and H3 tags to break down sections and subsections about your page content.
Image Alt Tags - Use keywords relevant to your images in your alt tags.
Keyword in URL - Whenever possible pick a domain name with your keyword in it and also make sure that your page URLs have your keywords in them. Example: http://www.yourdomain.com/keywords
LSI Keywords - Try not to overuse one keyword and instead find variations of it that can help expand the visibility of your pages to more searchers.
Bold and Italicize - Bold and italicize your keywords in your content, just don't overdo it!

SEO Tips - Understanding Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

2011-11-27T22:02:00.001-08:00

There's another reason the writer of your content needs knows what they're talking about: latent semantic indexing (LSI). Without being too nerdy or technical latent semantic indexing is a way to "identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in a collection of text."

So, what that means is that search engines can now find patterns and keywords related to your content that you might not have even mentioned. If you're writing an article that mentions apples, peaches, oranges, grapes, and melons you can potentially rank for keywords like fruit that you might not have even mentioned on the page. The LSI algorithm can find common themes and relationships between the words on your page and rank you for all kinds of semantically equivalent keywords.

This technology completely squashes the need to repeat keywords over and over again to get more attention for them. It actually finds MORE keywords that your page is related to without you doing any extra work. Someone that is writing about a topic they are comfortable with uses all kinds of LSI keywords naturally when they write. They use acronyms, jargon, phrases and keywords related to the niche naturally without trying to hit some made up percentage of keyword usage. All of these great words and phrases that someone wouldn't know if they weren't truly passionate about the topic would be left out, so do this part the right way the first time.

By using LSI keywords you're creating a wide net of keyword possibilities instead of trying to rank for solely one or two keywords. Search engines are getting very good at rewarding well planned, quality content over spammy over optimized articles. Most people don’t know that 20‐25% of all searches on Google have never been searched before. By picking up traffic for a spread of keyword variations you’re qualifying yourself for all that long tail and new search term traffic.

SEO Tips for Beginners - Pages and Keywords

2011-11-24T22:04:00.001-08:00

Most people take the wrong approach to ranking for multiple keywords when they start with SEO. They try to rank their home page for every single keyword they find instead of spreading the rankings around your entire website. I know I’ve been drilling it into your head but the fact remains that search engines are all about relevancy. If you create a page that focuses around a specific keyword and create content around that keyword it’s going to look a lot more relevant than a broader page trying to rank for 100 separate and potentially non‐relevant keywords.

The fastest way to get ranked for a keyword or keyword group is to create a page that focuses on specifically that keyword or keyword group. You might have some similar and LSI keywords that fit under the same page and keyword group. In those cases you can use the group of keywords for that page and use the variations, plurals, etc throughout the page.

To visualize this idea lets say that I’m trying to optimize a dog training blog and these are my keywords:

Body building resources
Body building guides
How to have a ripped body
Body building tips

I can break these into 3 different pages and each page then has its own keyword theme. Assuming my website is BodyBuilding.com my URL's could be something like this:

http://bodybuilding.com/body-building-resources (body building resources)
http://bodybuilding.com/body-building-guides (body building guides)
http://bodybuilding.com/how-to-have-a-ripped-body (how to have a ripped body)

Then each respective page would have it’s own content, article, infographic, etc related to the keyword/group. This is the easiest way to find content ideas when you’re doing keyword research. You can make a page for every relevant keyword you find and dominate the entire market by making hypertargeted pages like this.

The point is, don’t try to rank your home page for everything. If you’re getting more backlinks and mentions to your home page than all the inner pages combined it can look manipulative to the search engines and hurt your rankings. Think about the way that you link to OTHER websites naturally, how often do you link to the home page of a website? If it’s a website that has real content you usually link to a specific video or page that you want to share, not the home page. That’s how content is naturally shared and linked to on the web, so you need to keep that in mind when it comes to your SEO. You should always be link building, promoting, and marketing all of your content and not just your home page. Reserve the home page for the very best keywords in your niche and make the laser‐targeted keyword rich pages for all the others.

SEO Tips for Beginners - Writing Content for SEO

2011-11-23T01:31:00.001-08:00

It used to be possible to trick search engines into believing that your page is more relevant just by repeating your keywords over and over to the point where it wouldn't even pass as English. The good news for us is that search engines have evolved quite a bit from that way of evaluating websites. Search engine algorithms are so complex and intuitive now they can tell the difference between high quality and over optimized garbage content.

You might have heard some sort of myth or golden rule of creating "SEO optimized" content like "use exactly a 3% keyword density on all your articles" or "repeat your keyword at least 3 times in the first paragraph!" If you have heard something like this, please do whatever it takes to erase it from your mind.

The secret is that there are no secrets. The absolute best way to get the most traffic possible out of every piece of content you create is to create your content and design your website for HUMANS. There, that's the big secret everybody needed to hear ‐ make quality content, get quality traffic. You actually end up getting more traffic when you write naturally instead of trying to use certain keywords in every other sentence or overusing phrases you want to rank for.

SEO Guide for Beginners - One of the most important aspects of "SEO optimized" content is that you actually know and care about your niche. If you aren't knowledgeable or passionate about the topic of your website then creating content is going to be a nightmare for you. You will get 100 times further with content that is written by a real expert than by someone that was paid to research the topic and write on it. If you don't know anything about your niche find someone who does and hire them to do your content, that way it's naturally written and can actually benefit people that find it.

SEO Tips for Beginners - Website Content

2011-11-21T22:30:00.001-08:00

The content of the website is one of the most debated in the search engine optimization, especially since many users unethically use black hat SEO techniques addressed like keywords keyword stuffing in an attempt to artificially improve the ranking of search engines. Despite of these dishonest approaches to SEO, website content remains an important part of any strategy to optimize the website. The content of your site is the main attraction for visitors. If your site sells products or simply provides information about services, leading visitors to your site are the words on the page. Product descriptions, articles, blog entries, and even advertisements are all scanned by spiders and crawlers as they work to index the Web.

The strategy of these spiders are to examine how the content of the page works with all other elements (such as links and meta tags) that are reviewed. For a high rank in a selection of search results, your content should be relevant to these other elements. Some search engines remove your site or reduce your page rank if its content is not unique. Especially since the advent of blogs, search engines consider how often the page content is updated and search only the content that appears on its website. This does not mean you cannot have static content on your page. For e-commerce sites, product descriptions rarely be changed.

Including other elements on the page, however, such as product updates will satisfy the requirement for a robot that changes the contents regularly. The content is an important part of your site and the positioning of your site in search engines. To achieve organic SEO, take time to develop a content plan that not only describes what should be included on each page of your site, but also how often the content will be updated.

Another element you might want to consider when looking at the content of your page, are the keywords that you want to use. Ideally, the choice of words on the page should appear several times, but as mentioned earlier, this is a balancing act that could take some time to perform.

Why Site Structure Is Important?

2011-11-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

Time and time again over the years, I have seen students take their established sites to entirely new levels of traffic, simply by making the right kind of adjustments to the way their sites were structured.

These days, everyone seems to think that SEO is all about getting links. Now I’m not saying that links aren’t important, but in most of these cases, they hadn’t even begun to work on link building.

Most of these increases in traffic have come from improvements we made in the structure of the web site itself - and this kind of result isn’t all that unusual. In fact, site structure is probably the most overlooked and misunderstood aspect of SEO.

While most of your competitors are still trying to use a “sledgehammer” approach, and overwhelming the search engines with massive quantities of inbound text links, you can gain a tremendous advantage by paying attention to how your site is linked together.

Link building certainly magnifies the benefit of a good site structure, but the reverse is also true: good site structure greatly amplifies the benefit of your investment in link building.

There are four primary goals in structuring, or restructuring, a web site:

Improving the user experience is your first goal, because this leads to higher conversion rates, happy customers, etc. If I ever have to choose between creating a good user experience and an SEO objective, I will choose my site’s visitors every time.
Improving the “crawlability” of the site and channeling “link juice” (PageRank at Google, other search engines have their own formulas) into the most important pages – the ones that you’re trying to get ranked in search results. One method we use for this is called dynamic linking.
Increasing the ranking of individual web pages within the site, and “broadening the profile” of our most important pages. By using the “anchor text” of our own internal links, and adding the right links in strategic places, we can boost our own search engine rankings.
Getting more pages into the search engines’ index, also known as “index penetration.” Every additional page that gets indexed adds to our ability to improve our rankings, and in fact makes it easier to increase index penetration.

It shouldn’t be terribly shocking that the four stages of the “site structure” step are mapped against these four goals.

Uses of Social Media

2011-10-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

We use Social Media to share in all sorts of ways but for SEO, the uses of Social Media is for Communication and for Bookmarking. We use it for communication just like on Facebook or Twitter, we update our statuses or posts updates in our network where everyone can read it. And for bookmarking, this the way of saving links to our favorite content, sites or blogs and sharing those links with everyone.

Here are some list of popular social media sites.

For Communication - Twitter, Plurk, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, LivingMemory, Squidoo, Bebo, Jaiku, Brightkite.

For Bookmarking - StumbleUpon, Sphinn, Reddit, Del.icio.us, SlideShare, Digg.

What is social media?

2011-09-07T00:33:00.001-07:00

Social media is the umbrella term given to ‘places’ on the Internet where most – if not all – of the content is created by users, not webmasters. Social media services include the likes of:

Blogs Message boards Forums

Social networks

Video sharing

Picture sharing

Podcasts

Vidcasts

Wikis

User Groups

Virtual Worlds

WorldsBecause of the un-owned, unfettered nature of social media services, millions of people worldwide use them to express themselves, connect, communicate and share. To have conversations. And because those conversations occur on what is intrinsically a broadcast platform (the World Wide Web), they are, by definition, one-to-many conversations. This is the real power of social media. It combines the power of conversation between connected individuals with the power of broadcast.

SEO Copywriting Tips

2011-08-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

Don’t get hung up on keyword density

In reality, search engines don’t measure keyword density the way I’ve described above. They’re not actually looking for a density of 5% or 3% or 10%. So don’t get hung up on it. Instead, use density calculations only as a yardstick. A density of 3% will give you a page with plenty of instances of your keyword. If you can’t get a density that high without impacting readability, settle for a lower density. You can have some pages with a high density, and some with a low density, and still attain a high search ranking. The important thing is that you use your keywords more often than any other single word or phrase.

Exact string or just all words in the phrase?

If you’re targeting very specific keyword phrases in your copy, you’ll soon discover that it’s quite difficult to do. If you repeat your keyword again and again, your copy can become very unfriendly to readers.

For example, targeting “shoes” is easy; but targeting “blue tennis shoes California” is a lot more difficult. If your web page has 200 words, your keyword phrase has to appear six times for a keyword density of 3%. That’s fine if it’s a single word, because there’ll still be 194 words of normal copy left. The keyword won’t be so noticeable to readers. But if there are four words in the keyword phrase (as in “blue tennis shoes California”), there’ll only be 176 words left. That would make the keyword phrase a lot more noticeable. What’s more, exact keyword phrases can be difficult to incorporate into your copy in a natural way. Try writing a sentence that includes “blue tennis shoes California”, in this exact order…

Fortunately, however, you don’t have to actually target the exact phrase. (It’s better if you do, but you don’t have to.) You can simply target all of the individual words. So instead of repeating the exact phrase “blue tennis shoes California” six times, you’d simply repeat “blue” six times, “tennis” six times, “shoes” six times, and “California” six times. These individual repetitions could appear anywhere on the page. The important thing is that they don’t have to appear next to each other in the exact string “blue tennis shoes California”. Using this approach, you can more easily achieve the density you’re after without sacrificing readability. I will qualify this: when someone searches for “blue tennis shoes California”, all things being equal, a website that targets the exact string “blue tennis shoes California” will rank higher than a website that targets just the individual words. But when are all things ever equal? As always, the important thing to remember is that human visitors are more important than search engines, and that keyword density is not the be-all-and-end-all of SEO.

What if I want to target more than one keyword phrase?

If you’re targeting quite specific keyword phrases in your copy, you’ll find it difficult to aggressively target more than two keyword phrases per page. You can target a few extras (maybe related words), but only incidentally.

For example, let’s say you want your tennis clothing page to rank well when a customer searches for the following phrases.

“blue tennis shoes California”
“green tennis skirts West Coast”
“purple tennis hats”
“fastest tennis shoes world”

Let’s also assume 400 words per page. Now, if you try to optimize your web copy for all of these phrases, you’ll find that it becomes very difficult to read. Assuming you’re aiming for a keyword density of 3%, you’d need to include all of the words from each of the above phrases more than 10 times. That would mean approx half of the copy on your page would be keywords! The best way around this is to create additional pages. Have a cluster of pages for “blue tennis shoes California”, another cluster of pages for “green tennis skirts West Coast”, another for “purple tennis hats”, etc. This way, only around 10% of your copy will be dedicated to keywords. This results in much more readable, natural-looking pages. And in the above example, it would also result in a much more logically structured site; a well structured site typically wouldn’t discuss all of the above items on the same page.

Where should I use my keywords?

When identifying your site’s subject matter, search engines try to act human. If humans tend to pay close attention to particular parts of a page (e.g. headings), the search engines will do the same. The logic is that they assume your keywords are more likely to appear in those places. So try to include your keywords in:

text links
headings (using <h1>, <h2> and <h3> heading tags in your HTML)
bold tags
bulleted and numbered lists
domain names & URLs

Using keywords in headings

Like human visitors, search engines rely on headings to ‘scan’ your site. This means headings play a big part in how the search engines will index your site, and you should try to make them keyword rich. In fact, think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of your site because it will help customers scan read. For example, if you have a page detailing the benefits of purple tennis hats, you could break it up into logical sections with the following headings.

Stylish purple tennis hats
Tennis hats - purple and practical
Comfort comes first with purple tennis hats

However, when writing your headings, try to make them a little different from your Title tag, as there is speculation that this may cause penalties. Also, it’s important that you instruct your web developer to tag these headings with the appropriate level heading style (i.e. <h1>, <h2>, <h3>). And finally, try to include your keywords close to the start of each heading. But don’t do this if it stops your headlines from being engaging and compelling.

Using keywords at the start of the page

Many SEO experts believe that the search engines see words at the start of a page as more representative of what your site is about than words at the end (i.e. prominence). So it’s a good idea to make sure you use your keywords toward the start of each page.

Bolding keywords

The jury’s out on whether bolding your keywords is worthwhile for SEO. My personal opinion is that bolding should be used to help visitors scan your page. If keywords aid this cause, use them; if they hinder it, don’t. In practice you’ll probably find that your keywords will make it into those bold sections quite a bit. After all, they’re key to your subject matter, so it’s logical that they’ll occasionally help readers who scan.

Using keywords in bulleted and numbered lists

Although it’s logical, there’s no hard evidence (that I know of) supporting the claim that search engines pay particular attention to the words you use in bulleted and numbered lists. Once again, my recommendation is to use lists for scannability. If your keywords happen to end up there, all the better. If not, no big deal.

Using keywords in domain names and URLs

Once again, the jury’s out. Some people argue that having a domain name that includes your keyword is useful, while others argue that it’s only useful if it’s an exact match. Some say it’s a good idea to separate keywords with hyphens, others say hyphens raise trust issues. And some say it’s completely irrelevant! In any case, most of the time, you won’t have much say in domain names and URLs.

Writing an SEO Copy

2011-08-23T04:00:00.000-07:00

The trick to optimizing your copy is using the most important keywords frequently and in the right places, without compromising readability. But how do you define “frequently?” And what are the right places? What if you want to target a few different keywords?And for that matter, what should the wordcount of your pages be? Below are a few tips that will help you out.

What should be the word-count of a page?

You’ll hear a lot about the importance of a lot of content. While I definitely agree that ‘content is king’, there’s no need to write volumes for every page. I recommend approx:

100-150 words for your homepage - usability studies show that you should never make your reader scroll down on the Homepage.
250-400 words for pages lower in your hierarchy - increase word count as you increase your level of detail.
300-1000 words for blog posts

Search engines don’t count your number of words and strike you off the list if you’re too high or too low. They’re only interested in your word count insofar as it’s an indication of the helpfulness of your website. Typically a helpful website will have a lot of words. Note that they consider a lot of other factors as well, not just word count.

How many times should I use a keyword?

You don’t want to fill every page up with your keyword.That’s called ‘keyword stuffing’ – a form of search engine spam. More importantly, it reduces readability, so your visitors won’t stay for long. A good rule of thumb is to try to use your keyword phrase once in every 30 words. This measure is referred to as ‘keyword density’, and it’s expressed as a percentage. A keyword density of around 3% is what you should be aiming for. I’m talking just the copy here. This doesn’t include your menus, footers, sidebars, image captions, etc. e.g. If your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 6 times, its density is 3% (6/200 x 100). Some SEO practitioners recommend a higher density than this some as high as 10%, but in my experience, this usually results in trashy copy.

Increasing keyword density without undermining readability

When you actually sit down and try to write some SEO copy, you’ll see that a keyword density of 3% isn’t easy to achieve. At least to begin with. The easiest way to do it is to be specific. As you write every sentence, ask yourself, “Could I be more specific?” For example, if you sell cheap second hand computers, don’t just say “our computers” or “our products”; ask yourself if you can get away with saying “our cheap second hand computers”.

Similarly, don’t say things like “with our help” instead, say “with the help of our cheap second hand computers”. Once you get the hang of it,you’ll find there are many opportunities to replace generic wording with your keyword phrase. Obviously, there’s a bit of an art to it; sometimes it ends up sounding like you’re repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens, you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph. Always remember: your site reflects the quality of your product or service. If your site is hard to read, people will infer a lot about your offering. Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it’s the visitors who buy your product or service, not the search engines.

Optimize Your Web Content

2011-08-19T06:07:00.000-07:00

Search engines don’t read like humans. We actually make sense of the individual words and their combinations (phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages, page hierarchies, etc). We even read between the lines and take all visual design and aural elements into account.Search Engines aren’t that sophisticated even Google. In fact, they don’t really process meaning at all, they categorize a site’s subject matter based on the words that are used most often in the body copy, headings, links, etc. So content optimization is simply the act of using your target keyword phrases frequently on your site and in the places that matter. ‘Target keyword phrases’ being the words your target customers are searching for when they’re looking for your product or service.

When you optimize your website for a particular word, you’re essentially telling the search engines to include you in the results when people search for that word.As a rule of thumb, the more frequently you use your keywords, the more relevant you’ll be considered by the search engines, and the more likely you are to appear in searches for those words.

What is Link Baiting?

2011-08-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

This process of creating great content to attract links is known as ‘link baiting’. The two key components in link baiting are:

lots of great content - something people will want to link to (‘Bait the hook’).
social media - your avenue for letting people know about your great content (‘Cast the line’). Of course, your content also needs to be optimized for your target keyword phrases so that the search engines know how to index it.

Creating great content & lots of it

Great content can mean virtually anything.Anything that you think your readers would absolutely love to link to. They’ll do this because they want to be useful to their own readers and they’ll gain credibility through their association with your site and its content. It might be any of the following:

Useful, unique, intriguing, exciting, humorous, controversial or subversive blog posts or videos
A useful tool that’s only available at your site (e.g. a theme, plugin or web application)
Industry/niche news (e.g An announcement about a newsworthy event or tool)
Research results
Free stuff
Something entirely different - it all depends on your subject matter and audience,and you’re only limited by your imagination, business intuition and industry awareness

Writing useful, unique blog posts

The key to a useful and unique blog is writing about what you know and what you think. No one else in the world knows exactly what you know, so leverage that uniqueness and expertise. So write stuff that you think your readers won’t already know, and will want to know. Or stuff that they may already know, but would be interested in hearing your take on. Things like trade secrets, handy hints, news, products, white papers, instruction manuals, and so on… And do it often. Partly because this keeps readers engaged, and partly because it keeps the search engine bots coming back more often. Also, as a general rule, search engines equate lots of content with usefulness.

Write in a style that suits your audience

Whatever your subject matter, write in a style that your audience will be comfortable with. If they’re from the old school, don’t write like I am. Don’t use contractions, don’t end sentences with prepositions, and don’t start sentences with “and” or “but”. But if they’re not old school,just use conversational English. In fact, the more of yourself you include in the post, the more engaging it will be. The key is to make it readable.

Remeber to link

Internal links help the search engines figure out what pages you consider important.And external links (links to other sites) can show Google that you’re intent on directing visitors to helpful,relevant content. So do both where relevant. And make your link anchor text keyword rich. Also, when you link to someone else’s blog post, quite often, a snippet of your post and a (nofollow) link to your post will be automatically added to their comments. This is known as a ‘pingback’. The pingback link doesn’t pass on any PageRank, so it’s of no direct SEO benefit to you, but it’s certainly beneficial in terms of building your social media presence. It lets the original blogger know you linked to him or her, and it puts your name and link in front of that blogger’s audience.

Why Create A Great Web Content?

2011-08-16T05:41:00.000-07:00

Why is content so important? Well, firstly,your visitors want great content. Without it, they won’t stay long, they won’t come back, and you’re unlikely to convert much of your traffic into revenue. And secondly, great content attracts backlinks. Webmasters will want to link to it.And as you now know, backlinks are the single biggest factor you can manipulate to generate a high ranking.

What’s more, when webmasters voluntarily link to your content because of its quality, those links tend to:

Come from related sites
Come from quite a few trusted, important sites
Point at the page containing your content which may be quite deep in your page hierarchy, not just your Home page
Be keyword rich, because webmasters naturally use the anchor text to describe the content of the target page
Have varying anchor test, because each webmaster will describe your content differently

And what would you know? These are exactly the sorts of links that the search engines like to see, because they prove you're part of a credible network of related sites. When a search engine sees a link that satisfies most or all of these conditions, it gives a lot of weight. A handful of links like this is worth hundreds of links from low-ranking/spammy sites, all with the same anchor text.

Do Not Spam!

2011-08-14T23:06:00.000-07:00

It’s almost impossible to spam unintentionally. Search engine spamming usually involves quite a bit of work and knowledge. But just to be sure, here’s a quick look at what you shouldn’t be doing.

What is search engine spam?

- A website is considered search engine spam if it violates a specific set of rules in an attempt to seem like a better or more relevant website. In other words,if it tries to trick the search engines into thinking that it’s something it’s not.

What is On-page spam?

- it is a deceptive stuff that appears on your website. Here are some examples of an On-page spamming.

Cloaking - Showing one thing to search engines and something completely different to visitors.
JavaScript Redirects - Because search engines don’t usually execute complex JavaScript, some spammers will create a page that looks innocent and genuine to search engines, but when a visitor arrives, they’re automatically redirected to a page selling Viagra, Health Products, etc.
Hidden Content - Some webmasters just repeat their keywords again and again and again, on every page, then hide it from visitors. These keywords aren’t in sentences, they’re just words, and they provide no value. That’s why they’re hidden, and that’s why it’s considered spam.The intent is to trick the search engines into thinking that the site contains lots of keyword rich, helpful content, when, in fact, the keyword rich content is just keywords; nothing more.These spammers hide their keywords by using very, very, very small writing (1pt font), or by using a font color that’s the same as the background color.
Keyword Stuffing - Severely overdoing your keyword density. Try to stick to around 3% keyword density. This is the most reader-friendly density. Usually anything over 5% starts to seem very contrived.
Doorway Pages - Page after of almost identical pages intended to simply provide lots and lots of keyword-rich content and links, without providing any genuine value to readers.
Scraping - Spammers who are lazy or incapable of creating their own content will steal it from other sites, blogs, articles and forums, then re-use it on their own site without permission, and without attributing it to its original author. The intent is to create lots of keyword rich content on their website, and trick the search engines into thinking their site is valuable, without actually doing any of the work themselves.

How To Resolve Duplicate Content Problems

2011-08-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

You have more than one version of any page - Multiple versions of the same page is clearly duplicate content. Ex. A print-friendly version and the regular display version.) The risk is that Google may choose the wrong one to display in the SERPs.

Solution: Use a no_follow link to the print-friendly version. This will ensure that Google’s bots don’t crawl it, and that it won’t be indexed. The HTML of a nofollow link looks like this: <a href="page.htm" rel="nofollow">go to page</a>
Or use your robots.txt file to tell the search bots not to crawl the print friendly version.

You reference any page with more than one URL - Even though there’s really only one page, the search engines interpret each discrete URL as a different page. The reason for this problem is No canonical URL specified. A canonical URL is the master URL of your home page. The one that displays whenever your home page displays. For most sites, it would be http://www.yourdomain.com. Test if your site has a canonical URL specified. Open your browser and visit each of the following URLs:

http://www.yourdomain.com/
http://yourdomain.com/
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html/
http://yourdomain.com/index.html/

If your homepage displays, but the URL stays exactly as you typed it, you have not specified a canonical URL, and you have duplicate content.

Solution: Choose one of the above as your canonical URL. It doesn’t really matter which one. Then redirect the others to it with 301 redirects. Read more here 301 Redirects.
Specify your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools (you have to register first). To do this, at the Dashboard, click your site, then click Settings and choose an option under Preferred domain. This is the equivalent of a 301 redirect for Google. But it has no impact on the other search engines, so you should still set up proper 301 redirects.

Someone has plagiarize your content - If someone has plagiarized your content, Google may mistakenly identify their plagiarized version as the original. This is unlikely,however, because most webmasters who plagiarize content are unlikely to have a very credible, authoritative site.

Solution: You can contact the offender and ask that they remove the content, and you can also report the plagiarism to Google (http://www.google.com/dmca.html). You can also proactively monitor who’s plagiarizing your content using Copyscape.

You syndicate content - If you publish content on your site and also syndicate it,your site’s version may not appear in the SERPs. If one of the sites that has reprinted your article has more domain authority than yours, their syndicated version may appear in the SERPs instead of yours.Also, other webmasters may link to the syndicated version instead of yours.

Solution: One way to try and avoid this situation is to always publish the article on your site a day or two before you syndicate it. Another is to always link back to the original from the syndicated. Whatever the case, the backlink from the syndicated article still contributes to your ranking. You just may not get as much direct search-driven traffic to the article which really isn’t the point of content syndication, anyway.

Avoid Duplicate Content In Your Website/Blog

2011-08-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

You have duplicate content when:

You have more than one version of any page
You reference any page with more than one URL
Someone plagiarizes your content
You syndicate content

And it’s a problem for two reasons:

Duplicate content filter - Let’s say there are two pages of identical content out there on the Web. Google doesn’t want to list both in the SERPs, because it’s after variety for searchers. The duplicate content filter identifies the pages, then Google applies intelligence to decide which is the original. It then lists only that one in the SERPs. The other one misses out. Problem is, Google may choose the wrong version to display in the SERPs. There’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.
PageRank dilution – Some webmasters will link to one page/URL and some will link to another, so your PageRank is spread across multiple pages, instead of being focused on one. Note, however, that Google claims that they handle this pretty well, by consolidating the PageRank of all the links.

Truth About Making Dynamic URLs to Static URLs

2011-08-04T23:23:00.000-07:00

When a site’s content is called from a database, its URLs are normally generated. You can tell if a URL is dynamic because it’ll have characters like “?”, “=” and “&” in it. This is typical of sites that utilize a Content Management System (CMS) - including blogs. Example:

http://www.website.com/main.php?category=books&subject=biography

Static URLs, on the other hand, are tied to their content, and are generally a combination of the page’s filename and directory location. Example:

http://www.website.com/projects.htm

The 3 main problems with dynamic URLs are:

They can lead to duplicate content issues.
Search engines can have trouble reading them properly
They reduce click-thrus from search engine results, they’re harder to remember, share and write down, they’re easily clipped, they’re often not keyword rich, and they often don’t give readers any clue about what to expect at the destination site.

These issues can be overcome by rewriting your dynamic URLs in such a way that they become static. For example, the following dynamic URL:

http://www.website.com/main.php?category=books&subject=biography

Could be rewritten to become the following static URL:

http://www.website.com/pagebooks-biography.htm

Unfortunately, static URL rewriting is not without risks of its own. If done incorrectly, it can cause Google problems crawling and indexing your pages. Google now outrightly advocates dynamic URLs:

Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.Of course, it’s important to remember that Google’s a public company, answerable to shareholders. It’s ability to crawl and index dynamic URLs better than its competitors is a significant competitive advantage, if leveraged. My advice is, if you’re using a CMS that doesn’t offer trustworthy dynamic URL rewriting, stick with dynamic URLs. If, however, your CMS rewrites dynamic URLs very well (e.g. WordPress or any CMS using mod_rewrite), then consider rewriting to static URLs - if it will help your customers and aid your promotions significantly. Rewriting dynamic URLs isn’t likely to have a huge impact on your rankings, so I would avoid it unless I was sure it wasn’t going to cause problems.

Check For Broken Links

2011-08-03T00:32:00.000-07:00

Broken links are bad for visitors because they convey the impression that your site is not well maintained, and they‘re bad for SEO because they can stop the search engine bots from crawling all your pages.Note that Google specifically advises webmasters to check for broken links. It’s entirely possible that Google views broken links as a sign that your site is in poor repair, just as human visitors do,and that the existence of broken links may impact your ranking simply because Google wants well maintained sites at the top of its SERPs. You can use a tool called Xenu to find broken links. It’s simple to use and the reports are self-explanatory.

Add Titles To Internal Links

2011-08-03T00:17:00.000-07:00

HTML links can include a Title which becomes a tool tip when a visitor hovers their mouse over the link.They’re also read out by screen readers for the vision-impaired people. Because this aids accessibility and helps reduce visitor disorientation, and because it’s indicative of the content of the destination page, search engines crawl it and it plays a part in how they index the page. Link titles look like this:
<a href="http://www.example.com/products.htm" title="Cheap Products">Products</a>

Optimize Your Internal Links

2011-07-25T23:19:00.000-07:00

For search engine bots, text links are like doorways from page to page and site to site. This means websites are generally better indexed by search engines if their bots can traverse the entire site using text links. But there’s more to it than that. Links from top level pages like the ‘Home’ and ‘Products’pages carry more weight than links from lower level pages (e.g. the ‘5 tips to stay older’ page).The logic here is that if you link to a page from a top level page, you obviously want a lot of your visitors to see that link, so it must be key to your subject matter and business model.

Internal links also tell the search engines what pages are important. In other words, if you link to a page again and again and again, and you use meaningful anchor text, Google will assume that page is a core part of your subject matter, and index you accordingly. What’s more,every time you link to a page, it’s passed a bit of PageRank. Link to it enough, and it will become one of your higher ranking pages, as it develops ‘link equity’.

Limit links to fewer than 100 per page. Jakob Nielsen’s advice is ''include links to other resources that are directly relevant to the current location. Don't bury the user in links to all site areas or to pages that are unrelated to their current location.” Place your links prominently on each page. The search engines pay more attention to links toward the top of the page, and visitors are OK with prominent links too.Consider adding a nofollow to links that point to less important pages, so that the search engines don’t visit those pages. This increases the relative link equity of all your other pages.

A nofollow looks like this: <a href="page1.htm" rel="nofollow">Go To Page 1</a>

Optimizing HTML Meta Tags

2011-07-21T23:39:00.000-07:00

Within the HTML code behind your page, there are things called ‘meta tags’. These are short notes within the header of the code that describe some aspects of your page to the search engines.Although there is some debate over how important meta tags are to SEO, it’s generally agreed that they shouldn’t be ignored.

Title Tag

Because of its function as the headline of your SERPs listing, the search engines figure it’s likely you’ll make it something fairly relevant to the content of the target page, in order to get people to click through. As a result, they pay more attention to it than the other tags when indexing your site.Try to use your keyword at least once in the Title, as close to the beginning of the tag as possible. But don’t use it again and again and again. That’s keyword stuffing, and you could be penalize. You have 66 characters including spaces in which to write a compelling, keyword rich headline for your listing. The better your title, the more people will click on it. Be descriptive and accurate.

Also it can be a good idea to include your company name in the Title. Above all else, this helps develop brand recognition especially when you rank on page 1,and lends credibility to your listing. E.g: Effective Weight Loss and Control Tips - Domain.com And finally, it’s best not to use the same Title tag on every page. It’s supposed to be a headline, compelling searchers to click through to your page. If it’s generic enough to be suitable for every page, it’s not going to be particularly compelling. What’s more, if Google sees duplicate Title tags, it may choose to display DMOZ data instead of your actual tag data.

The Title Tag looks like this:

<title> Effective Weight Loss and Control Tips- Domain.com </title>

Description Tag

Think of your description tag as the copy for an ad. You have 155 characters (including spaces) in which to craft an informative, compelling description. Try to use your keyword at least once in the Description, as close to the start as possible. For a product website, you might consider including the vital statistics about each product in the Description tag. E.g. Brand names, model numbers, colors, etc.

Note, however, that you don’t actually have to define a Description tag. Most search engines are capable of extracting what they need for the description from your site copy. Danny Dover, of SEOmoz, recommends defining a Description tag for the Home page, and leaving the rest blank and letting the search engines decide what to display (they’ll choose what content to pull from your page based on the search query).

I’m not convinced. If you leave the search engines to their own devices, there’s no guarantee they’ll choose a section that’s well written or even intended to be the “copy for an ad” as I’ve suggested the Description should be. I recommend defining the Description on all pages. It’s not a good idea to use the same Description on every page. It’s supposed to be helpful and persuade searchers to click through to your page. If it’s generic enough to be suitable for every page, it’s not going to be particularly engaging, compelling or helpful. What’s more, if Google sees duplicate Description tags, it may choose to display DMOZ data instead of your actual tag data.

The Description Tag looks like this:
<meta name="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="From healthy diet plans to helpful weight loss tools, here you'll find the latest diet news and information." />

Keywords Tag

A comma-separated list of keywords that are most relevant to the subject matter of the page. Stick to about 300 characters and don’t repeat your keywords over and over. You can, however, include variations of your keyword, such as “weight loss”, “weight loss tips”, “weight loss guide” and “weight loss strategies.” You can also re-use a keyword so long as it’s part of a different phrase. The Keywords tag isn’t visible to visitors of your website unless they view the source. It’s really just a legacy from a time when the search engines used it as their sole means of identifying a site’s subject matter.

These days, most search engines pay it little or no mind. The key exception is Yahoo. Yahoo likes your Keywords tag to be ‘aligned’ with your web copy. So don’t include keywords in your tag that don’t appear in your copy if you want to rank in Yahoo.

Keywords Tag looks like this:
<meta name="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="weight loss, weight loss tips, weight loss guide, weight loss strategies" />

Create Lots Of Content And Update Your Site/Blog Regularly

2011-07-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

In Google’s eyes,it is unlikely that a rarely updated site with minimal content is going to be helpful to visitors. The other search engines like to see lots of content, and they like to see it updated regularly.Fortunately, that approach goes hand-in-hand with the most effective link building method, ‘link baiting’. Content is one of link baiting’s two core components (the other being social media). Of course, I’m not talking any old rubbish, here. I’m talking useful, unique, high quality content. That’s the only sort that works.

Position Your Content Toward The Top of HTML Code

2011-07-19T05:26:00.000-07:00

When the search engines look at your page, they don’t actually see the display version that you and I read. They read only the HTML behind the page. But they’re like us one key respect; they pay more attention to words at the top. They figure that is where the most important words will be.

What’s more, if there are two links on a page to the same target page,Google appears to only take the anchor text of the first into consideration when indexing.So by placing your content toward the top of the page of code, you ensure that the keywords and links within are properly taken into account when your pages are indexed.

It’s quite common for web developers to code pages such that elements like images, sidebars, JavaScript (including Google Analytics code) and even footers appear above content in the code.The page still displays correctly to visitors - just not to the search engines. This can bury your content 1000 words or more down the page of code. There’s absolutely no reason for this to happen. All of these elements can be coded after your content, especially if your developers are using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), as they should. Note that by placing your JavaScript toward the bottom of the page of code (e.g. before the </body> tag), you’ll make your page load faster for visitors and they won’t have to sit and wait for the code to run before the page displays. But there’s a trade-off. With your Google Analytics code loading late, it may not register all visits because people may leave quickly, closing the page before the Analytics code has finished running.