SEO Information

This site has lots of information about SEO and Search Engine optimisation in general

SEO Information

This site has lots of information about SEO and Search Engine optimisation in general

The world is always changing

You can think of importance as a way to determine which page, from a group of equally relevant pages, shows up first in the search results, which is second, and so forth. The relative authority of the site, and the trust the search engine has in it, are significant parts of this determination. The bestkeywords are ones that don’t have much competition. Try long-tail keywords — these are three- to six-word keywords that are extremely specific and tend to have less competition for them. Real SEO is all about helping Google understand the content of your website. It’s about steering, guiding and assisting Google. Not manipulating it. Google and other search engines also use the text of the URL of the page to determine the content of the web page. You should use your keyword or phrase in the URL of the web page - either the folder/directory structure or the HTML file/page name itself. SEO isn’t a quick tactic that will suddenly boost traffic to your website; it’s a long-term commitment,

Businesses are born out of ideas

There is no optimal number of words on a page for placement in Google. If you’re a business, it may be a good idea to start a blog on your website. Not only will this keep your site up-to-date with fresh content and encourage repeat visits (and increase the frequency of search engine crawlers), but also show that you’re a relevant, trustworthy business. SEO changes quickly. Information that was true six months ago, may not be true today. Keep in mind that you must write for your readers, and not for Google’s spiders. Don’t do keyword stuffing. If you have different sections of your site, or domains for each country, enter each one in the relevant directories: Google Places, Bing Business Portal, or any other directory that’s relevant to your region.

Which SEO tactics pay the greatest dividends?

Use search engine friendly permalinks. Try not to have too many ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters in the URL. Sometimes it is unavoidable but try to keep it to a minimum. A popular practice, and thought to be best for SEO, is to include your target keyword as close to the start of the page title as reasonably possible (so that it still makes sense). Panda and Penguin are algorithm updates by Google, focused on serving more quality websites in their search result pages. Panda focuses on thin content and banners, among other things, where Penguin checks if the links to your website are natural links that make sense. Optimization is the key to ensuring that search engines rank your website favorably in their results. But in order for optimization to work, the content on your site needs to be awesome! Always Add Value. Add value in every blog post, blog comment, social media update and web page. Don’t worry about backlinks or keyword rank. People will read and share your valuable content, and the rest will take care of itself.

Tailor to shoppers, not search engines

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "Most of the “solid information” and “powerful strategies” on internal linking are little more than sophisticated-sounding prognostication. Still, there’s some merit to theorizing about how Google ranks and values the internal network of linking." An effective link building strategy that simply makes a lot of sense is fixing broken links on your site and on sites that you’d like a link from. Your first step is to look for broken links on pages that interest you. After finding the links that go to pages that no longer exist, you reach out to the website owner and point out the link and suggest a new page that could provide value to their audience. Quite simply, the better your SEO, the higher the chance your article will appear in a relevant search. This means people will find what they’re looking for more easily, and you’ll get more readers. Keywords are still a factor in content, but with the Hummingbird update in 2013, the way they are used, viewed, and searched has changed dramatically. Keyword research is the root of every optimization project. Keywords are like an elevator pitch for your site: they summarize what you do in a few words or phrases.

Figure out your audience and message

When building your content, you’ll want to include localized keywords so that the search engines know you have offices and operate in certain locations. An authority website doesn’t necessarily have to be one of the usual big publishers. If you’re a niche website or blog with high quality, relevant content, you can be as highly regarded as any other source. Having a mobile friendly website is an absolute must the last couple of years. Google introduced mobile friendliness as a ranking signal in April 2015 and since then everything on the Web is about mobile. I’d rather have a more relevant link with low authority. I’d hope that was better for traffic, but I’d not really expect it to have the same effect on rankings as a higher authority link with lower relevance. Canonicalizing URLs is a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing.

Developing an SEO Plan Prior to Site Development

The world is always changing, and you have to keep up. If you do, the rewards can be great. Webpages on HTTPS had positive correlation with higher rankings. Don't use any shady tactics that will get you into hot water like sneaky redirects, content cloaking, and so on. Good SEO means forgetting SEO and concentrating on your user then. And it also means forgetting SEO in that you are going to be trying to merge your different marketing strategies in order to create one bigger approach. It means trying to write amazing posts and share them on SEO so that you get more links and it means writing great content that keeps people on your page longer. We all know that when it comes to link building, we aim for the authority links in the first place. But they’re also the hardest to land.

SEO advice was to get as many links as possible

Creating an SEO strategy can give your company and brand a boost in the search engines. Why not improve your ROI today? If you sign up to become a member for a site, you'll get a link in your profile. Well, not every site. Some sites will allow quality links in your profile, while others won't. Some are in the middle, such as Twitter, which gives nofollow links (links that don't pass link juice). It's no surprise that the Internet contains massive amounts of spam. Some estimate as much as 60% of the web's pages are spam. Giving readers relevant information and links to interesting third party websites is definitely the easier of the two methods for creating quality links. Link Building is about more than just giving people the information they asked for though; if they never see those links, then those links aren’t really any good.

Create Silos For Your Website

A great and fast way to convey your goal is by using headlines and taglines. For some reason, everyone thinks posting a blog on your own website will magically increase your SEO presence and make your website stronger. Meta descriptions are technically HTML attributes that offer concise explanations of what a webpage is about. They can be used on search engine result pages to show a preview for a webpage. They are far less of a direct ranking signal as they once were (almost not at all these days) BUT they remain important because – when Google chose to use the suggested meta description – they are the effective ‘sales pitch’ to users to click on your webpage. Keyword research is something that needs focus and attention. It’s something you should take seriously. Without proper keyword research, you could well be optimizing your texts for the wrong search terms.

Longer content ranks better

Social media platforms have all but taken over, and when it comes to SEO, they are a huge part of the strategy for any campaign. If you don’t knowwhere to submit a guest blog post or what forums would be good to participate on, research where your competitors are going to get links and follow suit. Test your site’s link and fix the broken links to minimise the error pages or the duplicate content. Your content should be appealing both for users and search engines and thus, both readability and crawlability should be taken into consideration. Google cares deeply about the indexed age of both your site and its content. A brand new site that's a newcomer to Google is going to have a far harder time ranking on its SERPs than a site that has indexed age.

Keep Your Content Simple

Whenever a high authority blog links to your website, Google considers it as a positive signal toward your blog. Your blog becomes more important and it gives your site a boost in search rankings. The more backlinks you have, the higher you rank on Google Search. Back in 2011, you could use blog commenting to get 200 backlinks and quickly skyrocket your rankings on search engines. But, in today’s algorithm for search engines, the focus is on quality over quantity. Google doesn ’t want a website owner to be able to artificially climb its SERPs. Rather, Google wants websites to climb the ranks only when they are genuinely valuable and popular with the audience. It wants to see natural, organic links that you haven’t paid for and it wants to see deep, relevant and interesting content. Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "A web page can be given an immediate freshness score based on its publication date, which decays over time as the content becomes older."

Figure out your audience and message

In the past, standard SEO advice was to get as many links as possible to your site, regardless of the source, and use the same anchor text each time. These days, doing that will get you knocked out of Google in no time. What Google wants to see is authoritative and relatable links talking about your site. You can hire good writers, but that is often an expensive proposition. You may be under the impression that it will take an extensive amount of time to create enough content to make a difference or to start appearing in the search results. Just breathe. Even the creation of one blog post a week will reap you 52 posts over the period of a year. Canonicalizing URLs is a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing.

Domain Age Is Most Important

Find out who your customers are and what words they use to describe your product, because people will use the same terms to find your website. Using these terms, often made into long-tail keywords, can really help you optimize your local business SEO. So what it does it take to achieve a high ranking on Google? When choosing anchor text, select phrases that make sense to the reader within the context of the content. These phrases may even contain exact match words. Always Add Value. Add value in every blog post, blog comment, social media update and web page. Don’t worry about backlinks or keyword rank. People will read and share your valuable content, and the rest will take care of itself. “Dwell time” is the amount of time visitors spend on your website and it can affect SEO ranking. When you provide useful content, visitors tend to stay longer on your website to consume the information and therefore increase the dwell time.

Community Hijacking

Backlinks from older websites may be worth more than links from newer sites. Researching, tracking, and competitive reviews all of these are part of Search engine optimization package. SEO is not just limited to advertising tools, although it includes all elements of advertising. You shoulddefinitely be using canonical URLs with keywords and a relevant directory structure that also includes keywords. You should also avoid using too many page variables after the URL. The truth is that links are still the most important component of the search algorithm. No matter how useful its content may be, a site without links is far less likely to rank highly in organic search results. Instead of focusing on what you do or what you sell or why you’re awesome, instead focus on why your customers should care.

Answer the questions of your potential customers

The search engines analyze the reading level of the web page. One popular formula for doing this is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Formula, which considers things like the average word length and the number of words in a sentence to determine the level of education needed to be able to understand the sentence. On regular pages and posts, Google will most probably grab a piece of related content, including the keyword used in the search query. That makes a lot of sense for news sites, for example. Still, I recommend adding a meta description to all your important pages. Optimizing performance, however, is a continuous process. Your site will never be fast enough because there’s always more to improve. But all too often, when we want to improve our site SEO, we fall prey to “quick-fixes”, just as we do when we’re enticed by fad diets. Title tags and meta descriptions are on-site HTML elements which reflect the content of your page, and are shown in SERPs and browser tabs as text.

Provide value information rooted in your initial strategy

Gaz Hall, an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "The correct order of keywords will generally rank better as compared to the same keyword phrase in a different order." Use your website to communicate your value proposition and your general marketing messages (known as “high-level messages”). If there is one page which should be optimized for generic keywords, it is your homepage. In today’s rapidly shifting world, SEO techniques can change on a dime—and the worst part is that you might not even know it. Hacks that could have won you a front-page result last year are not only obsolete now, but they may even hurt your website’s rankings. Make sure that your site’s structure and hierarchy are as clear and logical as possible, with your homepage as the “root” page (the starting point). When the damage is done, it can be very hard to get back onto Google’s good side. In fact, that's often impossible.

Write a 1000+ words article, forget 500

Your target keywords should also be in the H1 tag, but your H1 can differ from your title tag Cloaking is when you present different content or URLs to your visitors than you do to the search engines. Along those lines, a “sneaky” redirect is when site owners “embed a link in JavaScript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees… There are many different waysof creating new content. In addition to text, web content also includes images, videos, graphics, and audio files. Play around with different content styles in a variety of formats -- blog posts, site pages, webinars, videos, etc. Make the most of the diversity of options out there! Users appreciate variety. Make sure your backlinks appear to be natural. Don’t ask webmasters to link back to your pages with a specific anchor text since this can haphazardly result in a pattern that may get noticed by search engines and cause you to get a linking penalty. Adding links and information to a forum signature, for example, is a good way to quickly spread awareness about your website, especially if you post often on a specific forum.

Domain Age Is More Important For Backlinks

In a link building campaign, you have to find target Web sites in the first place, review them to decide if asking for a link is worthwhile, identify the contact person and send them a customized link request. Google and other search engines keep the inner workings of their algorithms a secret. All we can do is speculate and test. The problem with speculation is that if an idea seems believable, it becomes eagerly accepted as truth without the data to back up the speculation. Link building is still an effective way to up your website’s SEO and improve is search ranking. As opposed to the unethical link building efforts that could get you into trouble, effective link building tactics can help improve your brand’s online presence, get more website visitors, and start increasing sales. If you tried to optimize an article for a certain keyword, but it’s getting more traffic for a different variation of that keyword, then go back in and re-optimize it for the new keyword. If you optimize your meta descriptions with clear and attractive extracts on what potential visitors can find on your site, it becomes easier for them to see if the information they’re looking for is on that page.

Local businesses can not be fully evaluated on the basis of links

SEO is the process of driving traffic from the ‘organic’, and ‘paid’ sources to win the rat race of ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). Stop buying links in an attempt to fool Google and get more low-quality traffic. Write quality content instead, trust humans to find it and have them link to your pages because you are worth it. When you're wrting your fabulous website copy. remember that your keywords should be completely relevant to the subject you are writing about on the page. If you want to rank for ‘seo consultant’ and you stuff every webpage with these keywords even if they have nothing to do with these keywords then you will be found out. To a search engine, relevance means more than finding a page with the right words.

Track it!

You don't need to write at a doctorate level to rank at the top of Google. You simply need to write at a higher reading level than normal. Keywords are still an important part of SEO, but relevance can often be figured in more abstract ways. On-page optimization is one part of search engine optimization and, as the name suggests, it covers all the measures and modifications that are made on your own website. There are several elements on your website which you can influence and which enable search engines to index your content and understand what it is about. Understanding SEO is crucial to significantly increasing your traffic and brand awareness.

What is real SEO?

People won't link to your content unless they see it. At the same time, you need the right people in front of your content; not everyone is a potential linker. Even after all of the changes with the search engine algorithms, inbound SEO links are still the biggest influence for search engines. Guest posting as a tactic has a dual benefit. First, it helps you reach the target audience of blogs who have similar audiences as yours. Second, it helps you get backlinks to your site so you can drive up your search engine rankings. Do you publish new content exclusively for the enjoyment of your existing audience? Or do you want it to rank high in Google and bring new visitors to your site month after month?

Link building, of course, is a science in itself

Improving visibility and driving traffic are nice, but the most important goal is to achieve your organization's goals. For most organizations, that means generating sales, leads, or advertising revenue. If you want to get loads of quality traffic to your website, you have to work a lot or invest a lot. When it comes to out-compete competitor pages, you're going to have to look at what the top competing page does when it comes to main content text. According to  SEO Consultant , Gaz Hall: "I do not think that the Google title and H1 tags should be exactly the same. They need to serve the same objective not to confuse audience of that website, but they need not be identical. "

How to optimize your website for mobile?

Local businesses can not be fully evaluated on the basis of links. Community hijacking involves  finding online communities that are made up of your target market, or people who can reach your target market so you can build relationships with them and get them to promote your content / brand / product (s). Before designing a website, or even if your site is already designed, you should analyze the site's structure. Each topic or area should have its own distinct section and flow logically so that users do not get lost, disoriented and frustrated. You need to analyze how your website is being viewed. White hat, gray hat, and black hat are the terms used to describe the type of SEO tactics used. White hat SEOs follow the guidelines of Google and other search engines. Gray hat SEOs are not afraid to bend the rules a bit, while black hat SEOs blatantly break the rules.

Google Algorithms Target Low-Quality Content

Just typing in an incomplete search term will result in a whole lot of unnecessary results which might not be what you are looking for. You want a user to click your result in Google, and not need to go back to Google to do the same search that ends with the user pogo-sticking to another result, apparently unsatisfied with your page. Links found within the main body text of a webpage is more valuable than links found in separate plugins or widgets found elsewhere on the page. Many SEO experts agree that a website's inbound links will be crucial this year, with many contending that there importance will increase as search engine algorithms increase their attention on penalizing poor links.

Expand as necessary.

If everybody is linking people from their sites to yours, your site must thus offer top quality information worthy of a link. Therefore, Google and search engines alike bump these backlink-wealthy sites nearer the top of their pages in order to ensure people are finding the best sites for the information they require. In short, Google is looking for signs of quality, relevance and great design. At the end of the day, Google does not care about you as a content creator. You are not Google’s customer! Google’s customer is the end user who searches for a keyphrase because they want to get relevant information or find the answer to a question. The bottom line is that if you’re focusing on a small group of generic keywords, you’re probably not being found by most of the people who are searching for you. Coming up with great content is important to the longevity of any website, but finding the right “hot” keywords to use and implementing them in ways which look natural and read in a fluid fashion is just as important as coming up with a good article, blog post, recipe or other bit of information.

Make Your Website More Friendly to Search Engines

Don’t try and stuff keywords where they don’t belong. Yes, still focus on keywords, but your north star for everything you write should be the user. The search engines will act rapidly to penalize sites that contain viruses or trojans. If possible, secure your site’s connections with HTTPS. Encrypting interactions between the user and your website is a good practice for communication on the web. SEO takes promotion. Backlinks are a huge part of ranking in Google and in order to attract backlinks (and even social shares) your content needs to be seen . Without shares, backlinks, authority, Google won’t notice your page and you won’t rank.

Site Architecture

Write great title tags. Good title tags should be like an interesting newspaper headline but with relevant keywords included. Some SEO professionals have been predicting the demise of links for a few years. But there's little evidence to support this trend so far. The reality is that for many businesses, 10-20 high-quality links will lead to top rankings in short order - sustainable rankings will last for years.  Gaz Hall , an SEO Expert from the UK, said: "Get people talking about your brand, and mentioning it on their website, or any website for that matte"

Google Algorithms Target Low-Quality Content

Poor spelling has always had the potential to be a negative ranking factor in Google if the word that is incorrect on the page is unique on the page and is critical to the search query. Quality content rules  the  digital landscape, yes - but what is often forgotten is that even the best and most authoritative content needs to be built with the modern Internet. As you may see, there is more to writing SEO-friendly content than ensuring you get a healthy ratio of keywords. Create profiles for your business (and include a link to your website) on major directory sites such as Google My Business, Yelp, Angie's List, Yellow Pages, and other listing resources associated with your industry.