Thursday 29 November 2012

7 Considerations Of An SEO Website Audit In 2013

Within the living medium as dynamic and ever-changing as the ‘net — nothing needs more attention today than your website.  For example, many business owners don’t know that the search engines look at freshness and recency of data as one of the important indicators for online success. But, there are over 200 factors that count into the search algorithm for Google.

While many of these are not known, we’ve learned about some of them over time. A user-and-search friendly site with tons of quality content (value) is a good place to begin. And, if you start with the  7 core components of Google’s Ranking Algorithm, all search engines will reward you with a higher position in the natural search results. The art and science of SEO (search engine optimization) is what you must consider.

Here are 7 insights for a better search experience.

SEO is more than just creating a page or website and deploying. You must think strategically about keywords, content and links. It’s also important to address all the technical issues – from the server side issues to the HTML code and more.

Begin with these 7 elements – the order is important:
  • Keywords – do you have keywords and phrases that people search for on your pages? Did you analyze your market and perform keyword research? Are they included naturally throughout your page(s)?
  • Linking – are you creating enough quality content to attract links from others? Link quality matters more than link quantity.
  • Anchor text links – are you receiving links with “keyword phrases” in your inbound link profiles? For example, “Bankruptcy Attorney New York” is better than “Click Here”
  • Popularity – how “popular” is the page that is linking back to you? How relevant is the exterior page and link? If your theme is about topic “X”, get more relevant links from within that community
  • How do the visitors see your site? Favorably? Make sure your traffic and click-through-data matches the search query, and that you don’t have a high bounce-rate.
  • Are you including social media? Search engines use signals from activity on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others.
  • Speed and website up-time. Make sure you are hosting with a professional grade hosting partner, and that you have fast load times of pages and all online assets (code, images, documents, etc)
Make sure you have keywords that match your pages. You can use the Free Google Keyword Tool. (Search for that in Google)
When we look at doing an SEO audit for your website – we look at all these factors + indexation issues, crawling issues and lots more. It will allow your “house” to be erected and stand on solid ground for a long time.

Wednesday 28 November 2012

SEO Tips for Site Competitor Analysis

In today’s highly competitive market, it is extremely recommended that every business should analyze their competitors every now and then. This is also true with SEO.
With thousands of SEO companies having set their strong foothold as well as with many others burgeoning up, it would be a grave oversight to underestimate your competitors.
In order to remain on top of competition and even make through in this cut-throat business rivalry, it is really crucial to learn what your competitors are doing online. Therefore, it is highly necessary to undertake an In-Depth Competitor Analysis not only regularly but even at the start of your search engine optimization campaign of your business.

What is Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis is a crucial part of an SEO campaign in which one study assesses and analyzes in detail all aspects of each current and potential competitor’s online marketing strategy.
Why do a Competitor Analysis?
Many SEO services provide SEO packages that include competitor analysis though many still believe in the high ranking of their keywords as a tangible proof of a properly managed SEO campaign. However, a high PageRank wouldn’t generate traffic; much less generate leads and sales to the website, especially if a site ranks well for keywords that aren’t often searched.
So, it is actually much better, though Pagerank still matters, to focus on doing a competitor analysis because it will:
  • help you determine the factors why they are ranking much better than your site
  • provide an informed basis to think and plan well for some SEO Techniques and strategies on how to outrank your competitors
  • help your business understand their competitive advantages/disadvantages relative to competitors
  • generate understanding of competitors’ past, present and most importantly future online marketing strategies
  • help predict the returns that may be made from future investments

Search Engine Optimisation Tips

In order to outrank and out-sale your competitors, do these SEO tips:

1.   Discover who are your real and main competitors

Search Google for five of your keywords. The websites that have high rankings or rank best for your keywords are your main competitors.

2.   Analyze the Backlinks of your Competitors

Find out how many of the links to your competitors contain your target keywords then try to have more inbound links that contain your target keywords than your competitors’ in order to beat your competitor.

3.   Check the PageRank spread of the linking pages

Find the Google PageRank of each page that links to your competitors, for it can also help you in finding out why some websites rank higher than others. Then if you want to outperform them, try to get more high PR links.

4.   Check the top level domains of the linking pages

Try to have more backlinks from websites that use the corresponding top level domain than your competitors

5.   Check the content of the linking pages

Google prefers websites that get links from related websites. Try to acquire more inbound links from related websites than the websites of your competitors.

6.   Used these specific key metrics in analysis
  • Page Authority (PA) gives a good picture of the relevancy and quantity of high quality sites and domains that link to the page.
  • Domain Authority (DA) gives a good picture of the relevancy and quantity of high quality sites and domains that link to the entire domain
  • Unique Domains – Page reflects the quality of inbound links that point to a specific URL or page  as Google looks at specific linking domains and the quantity of unique domains tends to be better
  • Unique URLs – Page reflects the true quantity of inbound links as Google looks at the specific linking URLs and domains.
  • Unique Domains – Domain reflects the true quantity of inbound links that point to the entire domain as Google looks at the specific linking URLs and domains.
  • Unique URLs – Domain reflects the true quantity of inbound links that point to the entire domain as Google looks at the specific linking URLs and domains.
  • KW Relevance – Page indicate how relevant a specific URL or page is for a specific keyword or phrase
  • KW in URL reflects how many of the target keywords are present in the ranking URL
7.   Compile & Review Search Engine Result Page (SERP) Data

Find out your three primary target keywords used by your competitors then gather and review the Domain Authority, Page Authority, Keyword Relevance and Keyword in URL Data of these targeted keywords.

Tuesday 27 November 2012

seo tips for social bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites have been some of the largest traffic makers in the past 3 years.  Major players like Reddit, Digg, and the new Chime.in offer instant access to hundreds of new stories, multimedia, and news updates every second for an online browser.  This style of “instant information” has become very popular with high speed and fast paced internet users throughout the world.  Reddit is showing their popularity by being currently ranked #47th for traffic on Alexa’s top United States websites.

So what does social bookmarking offer to your blog?

Web presence, brand awareness, social networking, and search engine optimization all come to mind when thinking of the benefits from a smart social media campaign.  All of these sites have millions of users and are an easy outlet for your blog, small business, or corporation to reach out and engage with your niche, market, and peers.  Unless your selling pet rocks or blogging about Alpacas, you’ll find hundreds of topics and posts going on that are relevant to your website in some way. Start engaging with your peers and the current top posters of the site, this helps establish your profile as authentic and you don’t just want to spam or post links constantly.  Reputation management needs to be your guide as you interact online and represent your website by submitting posts and adding comments.
When you first create a profile and get online, look at the conversations that are going on in the top posts, main pages, and popular browsing areas.  Notice how the leading topics contain a “hook” or catchy phrase/tagline that immediately brings a reader in.  You want your title to announce to your readers a few things: the theme, an emotional grab, and hopefully some imagery or video.  Youtube has proven how important media is to improve the user quality of a post or page on the web..  If you can get original images and videos make sure to use them, you’ll have a lot more chance at getting your bookmarks to go viral and become incredible link bait for you.

What are social bookmarks?

  • 150 or less character title
  • 200-750 word descriptions
  • Image and Video uploads
  • Add URL for source of content
How do they help your SEO campaign?
  • Gain strong backlinks to deep pages on your domain
  • Keywords in titles, descriptions, URL
  • Submit bookmarks to relevant categories and keywords, improving your authority and association with specific niche(s)
  • Top sites have 10,000′s of browsers per category which can be converted into traffic for your website
  • Diversify your campaign with at least 10 social bookmarking sites
  • Don’t just rely on search engine traffic, get additional traffic from all the sources you can
What NOT to do!
  •  Don’t spam!
  • Never post your main domain more than once per site, link to inner pages/posts
  • Always fill in all title, description, and text fields completely
  • Keep it unique, mix it up
  • Don’t ONLY post your domain, link to other interests and sites around the web so you don’t look like some automated spammer

What are some social bookmarking sites?

  • Reddit
  • Scrolldit
  • Chime.in
  • Digg
  • Diigo
  • Brightkite
  • Folkd
  • Fark
  • Newsvine
  • Faves
  • Tumblr
  • StumbleUpon
  • Delicious
It is vital to any search engine optimization campaign that you include social media networking.  Bookmarking is an easy way to get started into new conversations and engage with online users immediately.  You don’t need 15 likes, you don’t need to write a few essays worth of content to get any views, all you need to do is to comment on others work and submit your own.  Honestly it can be very entertaining to browse these sites as well, get involved and have conversations that have worth about your market, industry, products, etc.  You can establish some solid reputation on the top sites by doing this and gain a lot of bonus traffic from comment readers. Just remember to take the time and effort to add worthwhile substance when submitting your own content, think about what the end-user appreciates and is looking for.
This is only one part of a diverse internet marketing campaign that you should be trying to update and optimize every week for your sites.  Google expects to see consistency in your blog releases, social media connections, and distribution of original content.  Keep writing new pages and posts, design and create custom video and images, then be sure to integrate all of your unique and original work online.  Regular social bookmarking can do just that, improving your social signals for Google and eventually increasing your rankings.  Also, do not forget to do some serious keyword research on your niche, market, or industry, before writing content and submitting to social bookmarking sites around the web.