Every business needs to invest in search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website to maximize organic traffic from search engines. The leading search engines are Google, YouTube, Bing, and Yahoo.

This blog is a warning to everyone that does not have an effective SEO strategy. You are making a huge mistake by not leveraging all of the below SEO benefits.

You are losing money every day your website is not optimized in the search engines.

Here’s why.

1. There are people searching for your products or services on search engines

There are over 2 billion people online. 93% of online activities start on a search engine. There are 40,000 searches every second, and 3.5 billion searches per day. There are millions of opportunities for your business to become found on search engines. One of the most important benefits of SEO is that your customers are using search engines daily.

2. SEO pulls-in quality traffic 
Traffic on search engines is the best traffic. Why? Because people are actually searching for the problem you solve. You can “pull” traffic to your business. You do not have to “push” out advertisements to persuade people to buy. Search traffic is already interested in your products and services. This is why the SEO industry is worth $65 billion.

3. SEO traffic is more likely to convert

SEO traffic is more likely to convert than other sources of traffic. In fact, search traffic has the best conversion rates for most websites. By positioning yourself on search engines, you are positioning your business to win more conversions.

4. SEO increases sales and leads

SEO is not a myth. You will increase your leads and sales if you offer a viable product or service. One small business generated over $103,510.98 worth of SEO results in just 5 months.

However, you must invest in the best SEO strategy. With a winning SEO campaign, your business will be on it’s way to higher conversions.

 5. SEO can decrease your cost per acquisition

Another benefit of SEO is that it is “free”. It is far less expensive than advertising to acquire customers. The only costs in SEO are the costs to hire the best SEO company. Unless you have experience in website coding and Google algorithms, you will need an SEO firm or agency to grow your rankings.

6. SEO does not involve any paid advertising

You do not have to advertise if you have strong SEO standings. You can increase your website traffic without having to pay per click. An effective SEO strategy can help you scale back your advertising dollars, and invest it in more efficient areas.

7. Top SEO rankings provides 24/7 promotion

SEO is 24/7. It does not sleep. Your rankings do not disappear overnight. You can increase your website traffic all day, every day. Once you rank high in search engines, they will promote your business while you are sleeping.

8. SEO builds trust and credibility

People trust Google. They use it every day to find what they are looking for. By ranking high on search engines, your business will build trust and credibility with your audience. In fact, 37% of search engine clicks are on the first organic listing. Major SEO Benefit is that if your websites ranks first people will trust and in a way your business will get a boost.

9. SEO is a long-term strategy

SEO is a long-term strategy. It can take 6-12 months to see optimal rankings. However, just as it takes time to move up the rankings, it takes time to move down the rankings. Once you are placed in top positions, you rarely move down. The only reason this would change is due to rising SEO competition or changes in Google algorithm.

10. SEO makes your customers more informed

Your customers are using search engines to research. They use their findings to help them make informed decisions on available options. High SEO rankings allows you to educate potential customers. This indirectly builds trust, but most importantly helps them make an informed decision.

11. SEO influences purchasing decisions

SEO significantly influences purchasing decisions. This is because of the developed trust and credibility mentioned in our prior points. Use SEO to improve your conversions by significantly influencing the purchasing decisions of those on the web.

12. SEO increases your brand awareness and equity

Conversions aside, SEO will also build your brand equity. In other words, SEO will help people become aware of your brand. Awareness is important because your website visitors may not always be ready to purchase. However, by being aware of your offerings, they may purchase in the near future.Increasing your brand awareness and equity is one of the major SEO benefit.

13. SEO increases customer attribution or “touches”

While your awareness is increasing, SEO will simultaneously increase your customer attribution points. Attribution is the amount of times your audience sees your brand. The more times they see your business, the more likely they are to purchase from your business. Strong SEO rankings will help you dramatically increase your touch points with potential buyers.

14. SEO receives 90% more clicks than PPC

SEO trumps paid advertising. This is because organic SEO listings receive 90% of clicks. Many users of search engines tend to skip paid advertisements. This is most likely due to their trust in Google’s algorithm. By investing in SEO, you will likely gain more traffic than the advertisers on the same keywords.

15. SEO can increase your website referrals

SEO will increase your website referrals. You will gain more website referrals from search engines. In addition, your website visitors are likely to refer your website to their friends. A strong SEO presence will you grow referrals, literally and figuratively!

16. SEO is measurable

One of the most effective SEO benefit is that SEO is measurable. You can measure your conversions and the source of conversions. You can also measure the progression of your website rankings and organic traffic. With the right tools (or SEO company), you will be able to measure which search keywords are the most valuable to your business.

17. SEO drives offline sales

Do your customers do research online before visiting your store? Of course they do! Because most people do their research online, SEO also drives offline sales. This is because they are using search engines to do their research, but may visit your store or make a phone call to actually buy your products. Therefore, SEO is a major contributor to driving offline sales.

18. SEO is more cost-effective than paid advertising

This is a no-brainer. SEO is more cost-effective than paid advertising. Once you rank high on search engines, you do not have to pay for clicks from search engines. Pause your PPC advertising campaigns and let #1 SEO rankings drive more results.

19.Your competitors are using SEO to grow

Kill or be killed. Your customers start their internet journey with a search. Your competitors are using search to grow their business. Sooner or later, if you are not using search to grow your business, you will not have a business!

20. SEO can give smaller businesses an edge on larger companies

If you operate a small business, you may find that it is tough to outspend larger competitors in AdWords. However, an effective SEO strategy may be your way to gain higher rankings. While larger companies rely on advertising, you can rely on a savvy SEO strategy to go in the back door to acquire customers. SEO benefits can be seen by the small business as well as large business.

Today, the ‘secret’ to SEO is no secret at all. It’s common sense. Brands that rank high on search engines have great content, address their target audience’s search intent, and take the time to optimize their sites from a technology standpoint. Here are SEO tips or you can say ‘secrets’ that will lead your brand to awesome.

1 – Stop overthinking it

The biggest challenge with SEO is that it’s ambiguous territory—but you shouldn’t let the uncertainty get the best of you. Understand that almost every marketer is exactly where you are now. Everyone’s trying to figure out SEO’s ‘hidden secrets’ with little direction. The best thing to do  is to keep your mind off the complexities and instead, focus on delivering the best possible user experience.

2 – Keep content fresh

When people conduct research, they want up-to-date, accurate information. That’s why it’s important to keep content updated. Recency is becoming an increasingly important ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm and for good reason—your audiences don’t want to waste time reading dated content.

3 – Prioritize usability

Technology is an important part of the user experience equation. In addition to providing audiences with helpful and informative content, you’ll want to make sure that your website is easy and enjoyable to browse. Make sure to optimize your website to be mobile friendly and to ensure that it has a quick load time.

Just recently, Google announced that more than half of its US searches are now coming from mobile devices. This stat, coupled with the recent ‘Mobilegeddon’ algorithm update provide strong signals that even greater emphasis is going to be placed on businesses mobile websites in the coming years.

You can use WebSite Auditor to identify potential technical flaws and to crawl your site on a consistent basis.

4 – Build relationships, not links

“Link building” is a term that SEO practitioners use to describe the process of building credibility. The idea is simple: people link to your website when they perceive your brand as a source of authority. Often, however, SEO specialists take the expression ‘link building’ too literally. By asking for links, they end up with the extreme opposite—absolutely nothing.

Links are the key to ranking well in Google, but what marketers often forget is that links are built upon relationships with people. The best way to ‘build links’ is to forge connections and offer value to bloggers and other influencers in your niche.

Try using SEO SpyGlass to see who’s linking to your website—and to identify potential patterns.

5 – Prioritize the long-tail

Search engine experiences are becoming increasingly personalized. That’s why it’s important for businesses to focus on long-tail and location-based keywords—so that audiences can find your company based on the exact value and service that you provide.

Ranking highly for a vague search term like ‘San Francisco Doctor’ might be an ego booster, but it puts you in direct competition with all the doctors in San Francisco, regardless of their practice area. A top rank for a more specific term, such as ‘San Francisco orthopedic surgeon’ will generate a lot more qualified leads.

6 – Use the right keywords in the right places

Get specific by taking a structured approach. It’s not enough to focus on the right keyword—you need to make sure that you’re communicating the ‘right’ information to Google in a structured way.

In order to improve rankings for long-tail keywords, make sure that they’re present in your main body copy and page titles. If your website structure doesn’t allow for this, attach a blog or news feed to your site and create content around these topics, with the long-tail keywords in the titles and copy.

A good place to start would be Rank Tracker, which can ensure your content is fully optimized for specific keywords.

7 – Replace keyword research with customer research

People turn to search engines when they have questions. When they’ve arrived at your website, they’re likely looking for immediate answers.

Think of your brand as a publisher and source of high-quality information. When you produce helpful, informative content like blog posts, how-to articles, and research, you’ll get in front of searchers and earn their trust.

8 – Don’t ignore the small details

Often, marketers will focus on optimizing elements that are direct SEO ranking factors. In doing so, however, they’ll overlook a very important detail—meta descriptions.

Your meta descriptions, for instance, provide previews of your website. It’s your brand’s chance to stand apart from competitors on search engine results pages and encourage click-throughs to your website. A well-developed meta description, in a few short lines of text, will drive more traffic to your website.

9 – Be a go-to resource by creating a dictionary

One of the most efficient ways to rank for a term is to create a ‘dictionary’ page with objective and thorough definitions. Rather than ‘keyword stuffing,’ however, it’s important that marketers take the time to create content that helps their target audiences learn.

These pages often rank highly in search engines all on their own, as they are naturally somewhat keyword dense and are usually very helpful to people who searched for those terms. They tend to position brands as authoritative sources of information and generate backlinks.

The Top 10 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation and practical application with hundreds of client websites, mostly with final results of achieving higher ranking within the first page of search engine results. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable. For an in-depth study of everything we know about search engine optimization, please visit our new SEO Roadmap website, download our free eBook, or give us a call.

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Even if you do get top placement for a broad keyword that isn’t what most users are looking for, Google will calculate the number of times users did not select your listing, and the number of times they returned to the search results to choose a different website. Trying to beat this calculation is futile and more often then not, just a huge waste of time and energy.

Therefore you should invest some resources into finding the best keywords; those that turn searches into purchases or leads. Buying Sponsored Ads and paying for high end design and usuability is best place to start. However, there are several SEO tools and SEO software available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords; most of which are offered by the search engines themselves and are completely free.

Here is a core principle of the Top 10 SEO Tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous, creating categories, and drilling down to create small clusters (or silos) of keywords. The results will always return new suggestions and ideas, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of. In the Sponsored Ads, these clusters become your ad groups. With your SEO, they become the directories (or taxonomy) of the content you’ll want to have on your website.

Behavioral-targeting and using Long Tail Keywords are an excellent way to get higher ranking quickly for keywords that generate sales, and will have longevity to them in the search results. Poor keyword examples would be: kindle, nike shoes, roommate new york. Here are some examples of keywords that are ideal for SEO:

• Buy Used Amazon Kindle Online
• Nike Shoes Kobe Mens Size 10
• Find a Roommate in NYC

SEO Tip #2: Discover What Your Competitors are Doing

It’s a fact and one of my Top 10 SEO Tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have, will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

Your analysis of competitors should include these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the search engines
• Quantity AND quality of incoming links (prioritized)
• What keywords are in the title of linking page?
• % of links containing specific keywords in the link text
• The Google PageRank or MozRank of linking pages
• The popularity of the linking domain and the linking page (measured by links & mentions)

Aside from using some of the awesome SEO software mentioned on this website, here are some things I personally do when researching a competitor:

• Click the link to their Site Map page and see what keyword you find in the links
• Get a savvy web person to find and parse their XML Site Map to find keywords in page names
• View the HTML title and meta tags of your top competitors to compile a list of needed content

SEO Tip #3: Write Very Linkable & Sharable Content

An article is not a sexy thing to look at here in today’s online marketing world. Generic content can’t be slapped together and thrown online with the hope that it will get high ranking for the life of that page of content. Think about the book the Long Tail that I linked to above. I do because the content was meanful and useful to me in my career as an SEO Expert. The content could have these attributes if it has any hope of earning and sustaining higher ranking in the search engine results (many of these came directly from Google):

• The content is useful
• The content is original
• You can’t help but link to it
• There are supportive facts and references
• There’s enough detail that nobody can memorize it
• Something fun or interesting is included (like video)
• It’s not just blah, blah, blah, content
• There’s enough call to action to invoke engagement
• There are visual examples, charts, and references
• You had multiple contributors who all link to the content
• You thank or compliment someone who shares it with others
• You have an offer, discount, or promotion included
• How To’s and tutorials are a great way to get people to link
• Create a controversy
• Answer questions
• Conduct research & discuss the results
• Get involved with social media
• Create lists (Top 50 Link Building Techniques, etc)
• Get a blog and establish yourself as an authority
• Run a service or create a product (ie: Firefox extension)

SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your Title and Meta Tags

HTML titles and meta tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert’s have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them and what happens when you optimize them.

The meta “keywords” tag won’t be discussed in to much detail here, since Google has announced that they do not use the meta keywords tag in their ranking criteria. Because Google has 64 percent market share in search, that should be enough to convince you to not spend a lot of time on this attribute.

Optimizing Your Homepage Title

There are different theories about how long your homepage title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO tips for the title on anything other than the homepage would be to keep the title under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some (including myself) argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion. Let’s take a look at Amazon and Ebay homepage titles:

• eBay – New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices
• Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more
• Local SEO Services, Local Search Engine Optimization, Mobile Search, Online Advertising for Local Businesses | LocalSplash.com
• Buy.com – Computers, Electronics, Digital Cameras, Books, DVDs, Music, Games, Software, Toys, Sports

Optimizing Your Homepage Meta Description

Same best practice applies here. Get those top terms into a description that isn’t spammy and is a clear indicator of what your website is about. Below are the meta descriptions from eBay and Amazon.

• Buy and sell electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, digital cameras, and everything else on eBay, the world’s online marketplace. Sign up and begin to buy and sell – auction or buy it now – almost anything on eBay.com.
• Online shopping from the earth’s biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, jewelry, tools & hardware, housewares, furniture, sporting goods, beauty & personal care, broadband & dsl, gourmet food & just about anything else.

The rule of thumb here is to get your most important keywords into your homepage title and meta description.

Optimizing Subpage Titles and Meta Tags

Let’s take a break for a moment and discuss Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Bounce Rate. When you perform a search in a search engine, what shows up in your web browser is called an impression. When you make a selection, that selection is called a click. Google and other search engines record each impression and each click to help them understand which listings are being clicked on the most. They also record patterns (so stop thinking about getting all your friends to search for and click your listing). If the majority of normal search volume selects your listing, you’ll have a higher CTR and higher ranking; same applies for Sponsored Ads by the way.

That being said, if a healthy percentage of searchers return to Google’s search results (called a Bounce) and select a different listing, your CTR value will be reduced and ultimately so will your ranking.

To get and stay at the top of the search results, you need to be the most attractive listing in the search result, and you need to provide enough content to prevent the searcher from leaving your website to find a different listing.

This one SEO tip could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don’t forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.

If you ever forget this SEO tip, just perform a search in Google for “title tag principles”, where you’ll find my listing invoking these principles. Another great resource for learning more about writing effective meta tags can be found on the Splash Copywriter blog, entitled Meta description masterclass: a data-driven guide to the little search snippets that win you big business

Here’s some sample syntax:

<title>Call to Action, Keywords, & Value Proposition (under 66 characters)</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”Differently worded call to action, keywords, & value proposition (under 160 characters)” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”one to five keywords separated by commas” />

SEO Tip #5: Optimizing Your Headings and Subheadings

In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C’s guidelines as well as commonly accepted “best practices” for organizing a web page (page structure).

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include ONLY ONE H1 tag when assembling your page, and optionally using one or more subheading (H2-H6). Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here’s a piece of code you can pop into your heading:

<style type=”text/css”>

      h1 font-size: 18px;

h2 font-size: 16px;

h3 font-size: 14px;

</style>

Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.

SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes

Using the title attribute is a direct method of telling the search engines and the user more information about where a link will take them if they click through it. It’s also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to those who are visually impared. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads title and ALT attributes. Sample syntax might be:

<a href=”http://www.top10seotips.com/seo_software.htm” title=”SEO Software to Help You Get Higher Search Engine Ranking”>SEO Software</a>

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the title attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually impared. Here’s how you might use ALT attribute in an image tag:

<img src=”http://www.top10seotips.com/images/logo-top10seotips.jpg” alt=”Top 10 SEO Tips – Search Engine Marketing Tips and SEO Software Featured by SEO Expert Steve Wiideman”>

SEO Tip #7: Optimizing File Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is “golf putters” you’ll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It’s not confirmed, but many SEO’s have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media. You also may receive visits from Google Images and other media search queries.

More important is your web page’s filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using “inurl:” searches. For fun, try this query in Google (copy/paste): “ebook site:.com filetype:pdf”. You’ll find all you can eat eBooks (you’re welcome).

Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).

You may need to contact your IT department or webmaster to rewrite your page URLs if your website platform is non-accommodating to custom URL nomenclature.

SEO Tip #8: Tell the Search Engines What to Index

I may take a lot of heat from the other SEO’s out there for this one, especially because Google and other search engines have already helped reduce the amount of duplicate content indexed. However, I do enough search queries that begin with “site:” to know that duplicate content is still a major issue. Worse, I see a lot of files showing up in the indexes that should be hidden from the world (case in study: all the free PDF’s you’re probably still downloading from SEO Tip #7).

Optimizing Your robots.txt File

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type “User-agent: *”. Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to “please feel free to crawl every page of my website”.

Hopefully, you’ve already moved all the excessive JavaScripts and CSS styles into their own folders on your website to reduce the filesize and load time of the pages on your website.

Matt Cutts made a “public service announcement” on August 18, 2011 asking Webmasters to not disallow JavaScript and style sheets. The video is below and I recommend giving it some thought before disallowing script folders.

Redirecting Duplicate Content

For consistency, it’s better to have one version of each page to get all the inbound links and earn all of the points with the search engines. This means telling Google and Bing (in their respective Webmaster Tools) to only index the www.-version of your website (or the non-www version if you’re “one of those types of people”). You can also use your Windows Server or a file called the .htaccess file on your Apache server to permanently redirect one version to the other.

Next, add a new tag to every page of your website to prevent other versions of the page from appearing in the search results. Just think about all the different ways we display content. There are often “Print View”, “Flash Version”, and pages with reviews, ratings and comments that append page URLs with strings such as &rating=5, &view=print, etc. To correct this issue, we add a Canonical Tag to every page of the website. Here’s the syntax:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.top10seotips.com/seo_tips.htm” />

Finally, you should round up all those domains you bought and make sure they are pointing to your one main website with a 301 Permanent Redirect. Bruce Clay created a way to this efficiently which he called an IP Funnel. I’ve been the victim of this so many times being an SEO Expert. More than once, I’ve found myself scratching my head trying to figure out why a website would not get Google PageRank, only to find out later than an older domain held by the client had been displaying the same content and had been the one Google gave the credit to.

SEO Tip #9: Feed Search Engines Static and XML Site Maps

Optimizing Your Static Site Map

PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That’s where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the site map, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite top 10 SEO tips.

It used to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.

Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a static site map can truly be.

Using XML Site Maps

Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google’s search engine result page, believe it or not that isn’t Google’s intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they’ve even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you’ll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own.

Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing will be using one standard for site maps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

SEO Tip #10: Use Checklists and Validators

There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website’s source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.

Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C’s Top 10 SEO Tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile, so I recommend trying Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C’s HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool. A new, unbelievable tool just came out that does much better than some of these older ones, and that is the Qualidator Site Analyzer tool, which you can also find listed in our SEO Software page.

The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I know of for this (now) is my own SEO Roadmap, which contains website-level SEO validation, webpage-level SEO structure and keyword optimization, and off-page SEO strategies you should have in your arsenal. You can also use WebsiteGrader.com and other online tools. However, they aren’t as inclusive (yet) as my Audit Checklist.

There are many people who are just starting to blog and many more that have run their own site for a while, that don’t know what SEO is and how to implement it! Here ISDMMT tells you about SEO and about great Off page SEO techniques.

SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is where you construct your web pages and implement certain techniques to help you rank as high as possible on search engine result pages (SERPs). The higher your pages can rank on Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. results pages, the more traffic your site is likely to get.

Now, SEO can be split up into two separate categories; On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do ON your website to help you rank higher, such as page titles, internal linking, meta tags & descriptions, etc.

Off-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do directly OFF your website to help you rank higher, such as social networking, article submission, forum & blog marketing, etc.

In today’s post we will be looking specifically at Off-Page SEO and some of the most effective ways to increase your page rankings on search engines.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimisation

1. Social Networking Sites

Social Networking is bigger than ever these days! Sometimes known as “Online Reputation Management”, getting involved with social media sites is the fundamental step with which you begin to advertise, market and build your online reputation within your niche.

You need to sign up to the most popular social networking sites, such as; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, etc., and create yourself a profile of your own. This allows you to extend your online network of contacts, to connect and interact with your friends, to share things with each other, and most importantly promote your website/blog and help build your online reputation.

2. Blogging

Blogging is one of the best ways to promote your website online! By writing a blog for your website, you give a reason for visitors to keep returning to your site and keep up to date with your latest posts. It also helps search engines to crawl your site more frequently, as they have to update your latest blog post entries, which ultimately helps you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

You need to produce and include lots of unique content for your blog, such as; Infographics, Top Lists, How To…Tutorials, Viral Videos, etc. Try to remember to be clear and concise in what you are trying to convey to your readers within your blog posts, don’t waffle.

To help you promote your blog, submit it to niche blog directories and blog search engines. (See below)

If you’re not very good at writing content for your blog, then you could always hire a guest blogger for your blog and ask him/her to write precise and unique content so that your blog can gain more credit from a search engine point of view.

3. Blog Marketing

Post comments on other blogs within the same niche as yours, which allow you to add a link in the comments section. These links can then be crawled by search engines, helping to point them towards your site. These blogs are commonly referred to as “Do-Follow” Blogs (Just like ours, where you can comment below!).

4. Forum Marketing

Find forums online that are related to your sites niche and get involved within that community. Reply to threads, answer peoples questions, offer advice, etc. This all helps to build up your reputation as someone who is an expert within that niche. Try to use “Do-Follow” Forums so that you can include a link to your site within your signature, which helps search engines crawl your site.

5. Search Engine Submission

Search engines will eventually find your site online, but that can take a while. To speed everything up, you should submit your website to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

6. Directory Submission

Many people may say that directory submission is dead! I believe that it isn’t as you are increasing the likely hood of people seeing your website. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. You could submit to general directories, but for maximum effect, you are better off submitting to niche directories. Of course, I agree that it gives quite delayed results, but it is worth doing it.

7. Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is another great way of promoting your website. Submit your latest blog posts and pages to the most popular bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. Search engines really like these types of sites because the content on these sites is updated very frequently.

You should be very careful while doing this and you must properly handle the tags which are very essential to broadcast your news on a wide area network. This may increase your website traffic based on how effectively you have participated.

8. Link Baiting

Link baiting is another popular way of promoting your site. If you produce a really popular unique post for your site, then other people may want to link to it. Perhaps you have copied/published another website’s content on your site, don’t forget to place their website link as a reference. Do it for others and, if your content is trustworthy, let others do it for you. This is another way to increase your link popularity.

9. Photo Sharing

If you have used any of your own photos or images on your site, then you can share then on many of the major photo sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, etc. Other people will be able to see them and comment on them, hopefully following a link to your site.

10. Video Marketing

Just like photo sharing, if you have any videos that you have used on your site, then you can submit them to sites like; YouTube, Vimeo, etc. allowing people to find your content in other ways.

11. Business Reviews

Write reviews about others businesses or ask your friends/clients to write a review of your business in major business review sites like RateitAll, Shvoong, Kaboodle, Stylefeeder, etc.

12. Local Listings

Depending on your site’s niche, you might find that listing in local directories may be useful. You may have a website promoting your local business, therefore instead of going global and facing huge competition, listing your website locally, so that search engines can easily view your website and fetch the content, will be much better. This will help you to reach a targeted audience. Submit your website to sites like; Google Local, Maps, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, etc.

13. Article Submission

If you write your articles yourself, then you can submit them to popular article directory sites like; Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, etc. This can help drive traffic to your site, whilst you can also gain some links to your site from other people (though it’s usually a slower process).

14. Social Shopping Network

If you run an e-commerce website, then a good strategy for advertising and branding your products for free is to submit then to online shopping networks. By submitting your products to sites like; Google Product Search, Yahoo Online Shopping, MSN Online Shopping, and other major social shopping network sites like Kaboodle, Style Feeder, etc. then you increase the likelihood of people finding the products that you are selling.

15. Answer Questions

You can actively participate in answering questions on sites like Yahoo Answers. By answering and asking relevant questions on your site niche, you help to build up your reputation as someone that is an expert in your chosen field. You can place a link to your website in the source section if necessary so that people can easily find your site. If you don’t spam, this is another great way to increase your link popularity. Useful Off-Page SEO techniques to improve your search engine optimisation. Browse the SEO Channel for the most recent SEO news stories and expert columns, or sign up to receive all of our SEO related content via email.

To many on the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, ‘SEO‘ is still a geeky term whose effects are considered to be marginal, rather than central to the company’s marketing efforts. ISDMMT explains why this view needs to change.

From its inception as a marketing discipline nearly a decade ago, SEO has generally had a tactical focus. And that’s fine. After all, the specific tactics used to gain links, mentions, rankings, traffic and other KPIs are amazingly interesting subjects in their own right. (I’ve long been fascinated by the exact position of the demarcation line between White Hat and Black Hat SEO).

But SEO is much more than tactics, hacks and tools. Today, in many organizations, SEO’s role as a strategic business driver is becoming more deeply felt.

Let’s itemize five ways that SEO has strategic impact.

1. Lowering digital media costs. In many verticals, PPC costs range well beyond $10 a click. (In the legal field, paid clicks can exceed $200.) Favorable organic positions materially reduce these costs, freeing up digital ad dollars to deploy against segments that would otherwise be unaffordable. That’s an important, material and strategic impact of SEO that’s often discounted in the C-suite.
2. Market share defense. Organic listings in the SERP don’t only increase your traffic and revenue; they take revenue from the competition. In B2B, where customer lifetime value is high, investing in high-quality content optimized for search should be a strategic goal. Any time you miss an acquisition opportunity in search (paid or organic), chances are that opportunity is going to the competition. SEO, in other words, is a strategic asset — with offensive and defensive value — in the battle for market share.
3. Branding impact. SEO and public relations aren’t the same thing, but they share a convergent goal: to increase the general visibility and favorable public impression of clients (which is why so many SEO agencies have added “PR” to their service offerings, while PR agencies have added “SEO” to theirs). Increasing awareness is a high-level strategic marketing goal. Today, online reputation management (ORM) always includes a tangible SEO component. SEO isn’t the only piece of the influence puzzle (paid media is especially vital when dealing with reputation management crises), but it represents a key component of any influence-building campaign.
4. More efficient (non-search) media campaigns. Searchers often are compelled to begin query sessions because of exposure to some other marketing touch point (for example, a mention in a news story, in a TV drama, a remark of a friend or other offline event). Search traffic can therefore be used as a barometer of other media’s effectiveness. Search behavior can also reveal patterns in one’s targeted audience that provide unique, unexpected and strategic marketing insights.
5. New product/service development. Search (both paid and organic) is a real-time, massively scaled focus group in which one can (with enough data) perform an accurate predictive analysis of what customers are looking for — and, in some cases, invent products for which there’s search demand (but no product yet). There’s huge potential upside in this kind of “virtual focus group” research, which in some cases has the potential to be more valuable to the organization than old-style qualitative consumer research studies.

How strategic is SEO in your organization?

Ask yourself this: Who does your SEO team leader report to?

• The digital marketing director?
• VP of Content/SEO?
• The tech team (CIO)?
• SEM Manager?
• VP of Acquisition Marketing?
• Director of Marketing (or CMO)?
• The CEO?

Obviously, the higher the report, the more likely that SEO insights will be heard, appreciated and shared across the organization.

But the org structure rarely tells the complete tale. So ask yourself this:

Are SEO concepts and insights brought in at the conceptual stage of any new project or at the implementation stage? The earlier these concerns can be introduced, the greater the likelihood that web projects will not have to be re-engineered post-launch. SEO, as has often been said, is not a condiment to be sprinkled on a dish after it’s been cooked; it needs to be baked in from get-go.

How does one bring this about? In a Search Engine Land column posted back in 2012, Eric Enge quotes Adobe’s Warren Lee, who recommends a systematic, multi-step approach for kick-starting strategic SEO in the organization, including:

1. enterprise-wide training on the importance of SEO, with specific training on a departmental basis.
2. institution of integrated processes with cross-functional workflows.
3. consistent meetings that ensure that search visibility is always top of mind in any marketing decisions made.

There’s much work to be done. To many on the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, “SEO” is still a geeky term whose effects are considered to be marginal/ignorable, not central/essential. SEO knowledge is often confined to impenetrable marketing silos.

Even the language often used in meetings — especially the not-so-innocent term, “from an SEO perspective” — puts SEO in a conceptual cage it doesn’t deserve to be in. The result is that the contributions by SEO teams are systematically undervalued, specific recommendations are often ignored and opportunities are lost.

The good news is that organizations able to build SEO into their marketing projects and processes — as an integral part, not an add-on — can do very well in the future.

Marketers should demand that their agencies and SEO consultants include training and SEO best practices integration into the organization’s workflows as part of their services. The better agencies are already recommending it, and many others will do it if asked, even though it sometimes means more SEO is done in-house.

]]> https://indianacademyofdigitalmarketing.com/9-seo-tips-are-all-youll-ever-need-to-rank-in-google/ Mon, 12 Dec 2016 04:20:05 +0000 http://www.isdmmt.com/?p=2712 9 SEO Tips Are All You’ll Ever Need to Rank in Google

To optimize your whole site for search engines, you’ll need to follow these basic SEO tips:

1. Pick a good keyword to focus on.

The first step is to simply pick the search term or phrase you want the post to show up for. If I am writing about the best dog toys for small dogs, I’ll want to find out what people are actually searching for.

The easiest way to do this is use Google Keyword Planner, a free tool that will show you an estimate for any search phrase. (Although Keyword Planner is free, you may need to set up an AdWords account to gain access.)

For example, I noticed that “small dog toys” receives 590 monthly searches — higher than any other related combination of words. However, I’m still not totally ready to start writing about this topic. First, I need to do some research.

2. Research the competition.

Now that I have a term I want to try to rank for, I’m going to go undercover and do some recon!

Jump over to your “private browsing” mode on your web browser (“Incognito” in Chrome, “Private” in Safari and Firefox, “InPrivate” on Internet Explorer) and head to Google.com. (At my company, we do “private mode” because we don’t want Google to use our past search history to influence what we see on the search results page.)

Take a look at all the content on page one of Google, ignoring any ad results at the top. The 10 (or so) results are your competition! What are they missing? Can you do better?

3. Write the best content.

Now that you know what your competition looks like, it’s time to create the content that is going to blow those folks out of the water. This is perhaps the most difficult part, but it’s the most important. It needs to be amazing.

I don’t care if you are creating a blog post, ecommerce store page or sales-landing page. It needs to be better than the rest, or else neither Google nor your audience will ever take note.

For an example of an article I recently wrote — with just this goal in mind — check out “How to Become a Millionaire: The Ultimate Guide.”. My goal with that post was to write superb content about that topic. How did I do?

4. Put the keyword in your page title.

This should be a no-brainer, but I’ll say it anyway: Your page title should contain your keyword, but that doesn’t mean it has to be exact (though it can be). This is the main SEO tip to rank your site higher in search engine.

Additionally, the title must also be interesting enough that people will actually want to click on it! A good example of this would be PT from PTMoney.com, who wrote a great post about “making extra money.” However, rather than a boring title, like “Make Extra Money,” he titled it “52 Ways to Make Extra Money.” Now that is something I would want to read.

5. Put the keyword in your header.

You can organize most webpages by having a large title at the top, followed by several sub-headers throughout the page (like the sub-headers in this post).

This organization is helpful not only for people in skimming blog-post articles, it’s helpful in showing Google exactly what your blog post is about. Therefore, be sure to use your exact keyword phrase at least once in your sub-headers.

6. Put the keyword in the name and alt-tag of your image.

Next, if your blog post contains images, you can use those images to cement the idea to Google about your post’s topic. There are two ways to do this:

1. The image name
2. The image alt tag

To change the image name, simply change the name of the image on your computer before uploading. Instead of a file called “2831274.jpg,” you can re-name it something like “small dog toys 1.jpg.”

The “alt tag” is something you designate after you upload the photo to your website. Without getting too technical, the alt tag is simply the text that the web browser will show if the photo can’t load for some reason. As search engine also crawl the images to understand how this picture is related to it, these seo tips are very important to work on it.

7. Use the keyword in the URL and in the post.

Another way Google is able to determine what your blog post is about is the URL. In other words, we’re talking about what comes after the “.com” in your url (or .net, .org, or whatever you use). For example, which of the following URLs do you think Google will like better when deciding whether or not to show a certain page?

• www.ExampleDogToyWebsite.com/9124824834-1
• www.ExampleDogToyWebsite.com/small-dog-toys

You’re right if you guessed the second one. While the former might not completely kill your SEO efforts, the latter definitely helps show Google exactly what the post is about.

8. Insert internal links.

If you aren’t talking about your best content, why should anyone else care? For this reason, it’s important that your best SEO content be linked to internally by other pages on your website.

Yes, this means you may need to go back and edit some older posts to include links to the new, incredible content.

9. The most-important SEO tip: Get external links.

Okay, finally we’re finally at the big one: external links.

External links are links from websites other than your own. Google relies heavily on external links to determine how good a post is. And this makes sense, doesn’t it? You can talk about yourself and your own skills all day long, but no one will believe you. But as soon as other people begin bragging about you, others take notice.

While producing incredible content may get you some links, the truth is, you are going to have to do some “link building.” This means reaching out to other website owners in the space to ask for links. For some great SEO tips , i’d like to go on isdmmt.com.

The above nine-point checklist may not include everything a person could know about SEO, but by simply following this checklist, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition and will likely see your posts get significant SEO traffic.

To optimize your whole site for search engines, you’ll need to follow these basic SEO tips:

1. Make the website about one thing.

It can be about other stuff, too, but choose one primary topic that is most essential to your message.

This step is important, so you may want to do a little keyword research before choosing a topic.

2. Mention keywords where they matter most.

Include your “one thing” in the site title, domain name, description, tagline, keywords, blog categories, page titles, and page content.

If you’re on WordPress, you can change a lot of this in the General Settings or through a plugin like

All in One SEO Pack.

3. Link to internal pages on your site.

A lot of content management systems automatically do this, but if yours doesn’t, you’ll want to be intentional about linking to your most important pages directly from your homepage and cross-linking them with each other.

4. Use a permalink structure that includes keywords.

Some sites have “ugly” permalink structures that use numbers to identify pages.

Don’t do this. It’s bad for SEO and just doesn’t look good. Follow SEO tips and rules for serch engine ranking.

Use a URL structure that includes text, and make sure you include keywords in your URLs.

So instead of having a page’s URL be this:

http://yoursite.com/?p=12

It should look more like this:

http://yoursite.com/coolpage/

5. Remove anything that slows down your website.

Page load times are important, so get rid of any non-essentials that bog down your website.

These may including music players, large images, flash graphics, and unnecessary plugins.

6. Use keywords in your images.

Include words that reflect your site topic in the image title, description, and alt attributes.

Also, re-title the file name if it doesn’t reflect your main keywords (e.g. writing-tips.jpg instead of d1234.jpg).

7. Link to other websites with relevant content.

You can do this by including a blogroll, link list, or resources page on your website.

Of course, do it sparingly, as each outbound link is a “vote” for another site. However, if you do it well and people click your links, this tells search engines you are a trusted authority on your particular topic.

8. Update your website frequently.

Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than those with static content. That’s why blogs and directories (like Wikipedia) do so well on search engines. They are constantly being updated with new content.

9. Make sure your website is indexed in search engines.

A lot of search engines will automatically find and index your content, but don’t count on it.

You want to be sure engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are crawling your site, so that people are finding you online. (You can add them directly, if they’re not.)

10. Have other websites link to you.

This is really, really important, when it comes to SEO. The bummer is that it’s not something you can necessarily control. Other than creating excellent content, the only thing you can do is ask (which occasionally works).

My counsel is to spend the time you would trying to convince somebody to link to you on just writing great content. And, start guest posting on other blogs.

Regardless of what you do, know that inbound links are essential to SEO. SEO tips are here to help you about your website position in search engines.

11. Stop changing your domain name.

The age of your URL is a factor in your site’s search ranking, so be patient.

If you’re launching a new blog every six months, you’ll never see your site get the value it deserves.

12. Write like a human.

None of the above matters if you create content that sounds like a robot wrote it. These seo tips help you to rank higher position in search engines.

Write great stuff, follow the steps above, have patience, and you’ll see results.