Beginner WordPress SEO : How to Optimize Your Blog Posts

Getting high search engine rankings for your blog takes work. A lot of work. While we all know the benefits of SEO, sometimes there just isn’t enough time to focus on both SEO and developing a quality product or business.

What can you do? You could hire a SEO consulting firm like Outspoken Media, but if you lack a budget, this article is perfect for you.

Everyone knows that creating fresh, engaging content helps build a loyal following and attract links. However, if you’re looking to improve your SEO with no budget, you can tweak your existing articles to prime it for high search engine rankings.

Now I’m not saying that your website will shoot up into Google’s top 3. I’m also not going to tell you to stuff as many keywords into your post as possible. If I did, that would be cheesy and I would be lying.

Instead, I will say this: if you focus on these 7 key areas of on-page SEO, you can improve your search engine rankings. How do I know this? Because it worked for me.

Conduct Keyword Research

You could try and guess what what people type when they use a search engine, but with free Keyword Research tools available, it’s wasted effort.

What are some of the best, free keyword tools? You could use the Google tool, or one that I like is Wordtracker. In addition, you can use this tool from Google to research trends in search phrases.

If you’re looking for a premium keyword research tool, look no further than SEObook.com, SEOmoz.org, or Raven Tools.

Focus on Low-Competition Keyphrases

Don’t waste your time going after highly competitive keywords with on-site optimization because you won’t be able to nab them.

So, how do you know if a keyword or keyphrase is competitive?

Take one of the phrases you found while conducting keyword research, type it into Google search using quotations (ex. “how to install Thesis Theme Framework”), and then look at the number that appears below the search box.

If the number is large (over 75,000), I’d avoid it because it’s highly competitive. If it’s small, I’d focus on it because it should be much easier to score a top ranking.

Note, just because a keyword or phrase isn’t competitive doesn’t mean it won’t send traffic. And if it doesn’t send much traffic, that doesn’t matter either because the traffic it does send is highly targeted. For example, I once optimized a post that landed the #1 position in Google and it helped me make a $1500 sale.

Choose One Keyword or Phrase, and then Write or Tweak Your Article

While you want a keyphrase with little competition, you’ll also want it to have some search traffic (greater than zero). Then, either write a post that targets that keyphrase or go back through some of your older articles and tweak them for a specific phrase.

I’m not saying that you should let that keyphrases dictate what you write about. Instead, find a phrase that relates to your topic, and craft a helpful article around it. Remember, quality content matters. The higher the quality, the better chance it will garner links and then rank in search engines.

For example, if you run a blog about Kangaroos, and one of your researched keyphrases is “what do kangaroos eat”, then you might want to write a blog post about that.

Use Your Keyphrase In Your Post Title and Title Tags

Yep, simple as that. Use the keyphrase in the title of your post and in your title tags.

Repeat the Keyphrase in Your Article.

You want to build a loyal following, so don’t go crazy with this. Instead, what I mean is, if you want to rank for your keyphrase, you must use it. Avoid creating nicknames or trying to be clever. In the end, clear and concise wins. As a rule of thumb, try to include your keyphrase early on in your article or in a H2 tag. While this may have little impact on your rankings, it will help show your readers that they’re reading the right piece of content.

Use the Keyphrase in your Meta Description tags

Using keywords in your meta description tags does not help you rank higher. However, when you include them, when people search on Google for a specific keyword, Google bolds the keyphrase in the search results. So, while it may not help you rank higher, it will encourage people to click on your search results.

Find Images Related to Your Keyphrase

Think about it. If you were looking for information on Kangaroos, when you visited a website, would it make sense to have a picture of a Kanagaroo on it? Absolutely.

So, when you publish your articles, ensure that you find related images and use your keyphrase in the alt description of your image. This is beneficial for two reasons: first, it helps search engines see that you’re trying to create a complete piece of content, and second, it’s great for accessibility.

Other SEO Factors

There are, of course, other factors that influence your search engine rankings that I don’t talk about here. However, if you want to focus on building your business and creating great content, these 7 areas can help kick-start your SEO without becoming a full-time job. If you have any other quick hints that you think people will find useful, feel free to leave a comment.

SEO for Flash: 5 Tips and Best Practices

SEO for Flash – is it a reality yet?

One of the most common issues for web sites with poor search visibility involves Google not being able to crawl and index a site’s content. Web sites made entirely with Flash are problematic because there are often no links for search engine crawlers to follow or HTML text to copy.

According to the Opera (browser) developer center, somewhere between 30% and 40% of all pages tested contained Flash files representing a lot of content that may not be included in search results or only partially indexed. Despite a large number of sites publishing content using this type of file format, Flash and search engines have been like oil and water. They just didn’t mix.

In the summer of 2008, Google announced it had improved the indexing of Adobe Flash files. Many Flash developers and SEOs across the globe could breathe an optimistic sigh of relief: Text in Flash files was now crawlable.

But what’s the whole story? Can a site be built entirely with Flash and expect to gain the same search benefits as an HTML site?

Consider these 5 points that Google makes in regards to SEO for Flash:

1. Google can crawl and index all of the text content users see as they interact with the Flash file. That’s a big step in the right direction, since ensuring a site is crawlable is the No. 1 SEO basic. A few points to keep in mind concerning SEO for Flash:

1) Google maintains that the text in Flash files is treated like text in HTML or PDF files.
2) If identical content is used in both Flash and HTML, Google will likely see it as duplicate content.
3) If a Flash file is embedded in HTML, you’ll be able to add meta information, but the content will be indexed as a single item.

2. Google can discover links within Flash files. In other words, if a Flash file includes links to your website pages, you can increase your odds of Google finding and crawling more of the site – just as is the case with links that appear in HTML and other files.

3. Google can index external content that a Flash file loads and associate it with that Flash file. This capability is an update from the summer 2008 revision. Previously, if a Flash file were to load an HTML or XML file, Google would not associate that external content with the Flash file. This new capability, introduced just this summer, allows external content to appear in search results.

4. Google supports common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash. Another update from the 2008 revision, this capability also applies to SWFObject and SWFObject 2. Previously, if a page loaded a Flash file using JavaScript, Google wouldn’t recognize or index it.

5. Google can index sites scripted with ActionScript. That includes AS1, AS2 and AS3 versions. Google also maintains that is does not decompile Flash files or expose ActionScript code if it’s not visible to users.

All that said, Google’s ability to crawl Flash files is still evolving, so building a site entirely in Flash isn’t best practice. To create the right balance when it comes to using Flash and implementing SEO for Flash, consider these tips:

1) Don’t use Flash as the navigation.
2) Embed Flash files into HTML pages.
3) Use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions.
4) Don’t include an entire site in one Flash file. Instead, break the content into multiple Flash files with different HTML pages.
5) Use Flash for design elements and less-important content, and use HTML for the most important page elements.
6) Enhance web fonts in Flash files by using slfr, per a suggestion by SEO Zombie Blogger Justin Briggs. Because the Flash styles enhance the HTML content rather than replace it, the engines can still read titles.

For Flash optimization from the source, be sure to check out the Adobe SEO Technology Center web site, which was set up specifically to provide webmasters with what the challenges are and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices that you can follow to overcome them.

While Flash, Ajax and JavaScript offer enticing user experience, they continue to offer a less than ideal experience for search engine crawlers. What tactics or best practices have you found in balancing rich media and SEO? Do you think it’s reasonable to for a web site to have an amazing Flash component and still be able to compete in aggressive search categories?

How to Get Links Once You Have Great Content

Any good linking strategy starts with having high quality content. Your content needs to be so good that anyone who reads it feels indebted to you for putting it out.

In order for your site to garner real backlinks and real rankings, you need to actively market your links. You need to be able to get websites who’ve never heard of you to look at your content and give you a one-way backlink.

If you can’t do this, then your content is most likely going to sit in the archives of Google, only to be found by a handful of people.

So how do you market your content so it gets more links?

Make Your Content Rank

One of the best ways to get your content new backlinks is to make it rank. That might seem counter-intuitive on the surface, but when you really look at it, it makes sense.

All you really need to do is get your page to the top 10. If you can get your piece of content to the top 10, it’ll get enough traffic that people will start to link to it. People with websites will see your content, like it and help you finish the race to the top.

So instead of trying to rank a no-link page, try to get your no-link page to #9 on Google. Treat it as if it were an SEO project. Use the best and most cutting edge backlinking techniques you can find to get your content up to the first page.

Do Some Guest Posting

Do some guest posting on other people’s websites. Create a high quality content post about something that’s relevant to both websites. Don’t write your guest post just to get a backlink. Instead, write it to attract real people to your website. Remember, the more real people you get to your website, the higher your chances of getting more backlinks.

In your author bio, link to your new content piece instead of your home page. This will give your content piece more link juice as well as more visitors. Alternatively, you can link to your home page in your bio section but link to your content page in the actual guest post itself.

Tap Your Relationships

If you’re regularly trying to rank pages in an industry, it’s a good idea to build as many relationships as possible. Talk to other webmasters and website owners. Connect with them on Twitter. Comment on their posts. Let them know that you exist. Contribute to their communities and help them succeed in whatever way possible.

Then when you have something that you want to promote, you can come to them and ask them for the favor. Because you’ve been so helpful in the past, they probably won’t hesitate to give you a hand.

Figure Out How They Did It

Another way you can bump your content to the top is to take apart the current top listing’s strategy.

Use tools like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to probe into their linking structure. Who’s linking to them? Does it look like a self-generated linking strategy, or was it done through relationships?

If their strategy was self-generated, see if you can replicate it. If it was generated through relationships, see if you can find similar relationships to promote yours. If your content is outright better than theirs, you can even try getting those sites to replace their link.

Do a Social Media Push

Go on your social media networks and do a push for your content piece. Publish it on your Twitter account as well as your Facebook account.

Message other Twitter users who you have a strong relationship with and ask them to tweet out your piece of content. If your content is catchy enough, there’s a good chance that other people will keep retweeting it. This can help drive a lot of traffic to the content and bring you a lot more backlinks.

These strategies will help you get your new content ranked higher, which will garner more links for it. Don’t assume that just because you have great content, you’ll rank. You need to put in the work to build it backlinks. Once it hits a certain threshold, like hitting the front page, then the quality of your content can indeed carry it the rest of the way.

Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers

Tips on optimizing keywords

1) Post with SEO keywords does not make it look natural.
2) The words should be the same that the user is typing in Plural forms are a better choice.

3) Use common mis-spelling of the keyword is not appropriate.
4) List of possible keywords should be used. They can be as words–the utility, Hacks, health … Apart from SEO Webmaster it encourages utilities.
5) The keywords are being used more in the article. Since users do not see them, Google does not put much importance on meta descriptions.
6) The same keywords should not be used in a line, a synonym or variant can be used.

URL or SEO Tips for Bloggers
1) Blogs should not be placed at the root of the domain. It should be placed in a subdomain or sub.
2) In the URL, use a hyphen/dash to separate the keywords. Google underscore separators as good keywords.
3) The old URL of this article should be changed to be a resident or a 301 redirect.
4) URL extensions like. Php,. Asp,. CFM. Htm,. Html, etc. can all be used but is not. Exe.
5) Question mark or highlight the dynamics of a URL to be treated as static URL by Google, but the parameters must not exceed 3, the Google bot can collect information if it is not beyond three.
6) Your own domain name to be used in FeedBurner feeds.

Tips on accessibility and usability of the blog

1) Always use ALT tags for images. A full statement can be used in the Alt tag, but it should not exceed three to five words. Keywords relating not to be avoided.
2) It is better to do a podcast or a video, Matt cutt that bloggers can submit their pictures to hotornot.com and if the assessment is above 7, then a video can be a good idea better.
3) WordPress to be used for the blog to ensure that the site is crawling. Today, many people from accessing the site on your mobile phone, it better not to use frames or any weird stuff, they do not work well with mobile phones.
4) Enter the dates of the post must be shown.
5) The use of the Akismet spam comments will be protected to prevent your blog from being spammed. Google Analytics can locate traffic on your website. Finally, there is no substitute for content.

Article Writing in SEO

Professional SEO Consultant declares that article writing is very important step in SEO of any website. Think of an attractive, keyword-rich title that is one of the most crucial steps. You will require doing this right otherwise, you might not obtain the kind of open rate that you’re hoping for. You would desire your titles to be very compelling because you require getting as several people as possible to notice and open your articles. This will occur if you can encourage them that reading your articles will actually benefit them. So, exchange a few words what is in articles for them in a way that you will target their exciting hot buttons. Don’t forget to utilize the main keyword that you’re targeting as this will facilitate your articles in securing superior page ranking on Google.

Write all the articles according to the taste of your readers. You can appropriate the things that you have learned about SEO article writing. What you require to do is to focus on your readers and on addressing their learning needs. In order for you to impress them, you must present them amazing information that they’ll discover either interesting or useful to their lives or careers. It will also facilitate if you guarantee that the information you’re sharing with them is something that they will not simply discover on other articles. Also, guarantee that you make studying a massive knowledge for these people. Make your articles consistent, legible, friendly, relevant, meaty and to the point.

Formerly you are done giving out enough information; the next point is to make the search engines pleased. Start by placing your main keyword on your heading and also remember you can only utilize it one time on this part. Then, place it on your first paragraph if at all possible on the 1st ninety characters and go on by placing it one time or two times for every hundred words. If you have your own website or blog and using your articles on these, you can utilize these keywords as fix texts so search crawlers would recognize the keywords that you are placing.

10 SEO Tips for Joomla Websites

As we are already aware of the fact that the main focus during website creation should be to make it search engine friendly, so it is very important to optimize your website for search engine like Google. And now, not only webmaster can utilize their skills to make any website search engine friendly but also you as a owner can make it search engine friendly or in simple words we can say that you can put your website in ranking of search engine by utilizing content management system (CMS) like Joomla. Joomla web design is in high trend these days. With Joomla, you can create and manage a website on your own without any help of webmaster. Below mentioned are best Joomla SEO tips and these tips will help you to get your website into higher rank in Google.

Whenever you are deciding the title of your article, you need to keep in mind that this tittle will be in the tittle tag of Joomla and moreover in in-site links. So it is very important to choose the title of article very carefully, keeping the trends of search engine in mind.

Use anchor text in your article as inbound links using the keywords which you want to be in ranked in search engine ranking results.

Try to get more and more external sites links to web page of your website. But always keep the quality in order to increase the page-rank of web page of your website. For that, create quality content web page with help of Joomla to get bound links.

It is better if the age of site is more, so keep extending your domain registration
because registration of spam sites is not done for longer period and having higher age of your website increases trust on website and helps increasing page rank also.
Never forget the link popularity within the website. Use in-site links to navigate from your one webpage to another. You can use site map for that in your home page. If there are so many web pages in your website, then that will also increase your page rank.

This is good if you get so many inbound links from other website to your web page but you need to assure that you are getting qualitative inbound links. Qualitative links means links from external website having high page rank and link from related field also.

Keywords of your content are very useful. It can increase the page rank of your web page. For that, write the quality content and then find out the keyword density in your content. From keyword density, pick up top two or three words and add them to the meta keywords. It optimizes the web page for the particular keyword.
Smaller sites usually have higher ranking in Google but generally, size of file is not responsible for ranking in search engines. Always optimize the images you have in your website. Joomla developers need to keep this point in mind while working on Joomla websites.

When you are working in Joomla and want your website to be search engine friendly, make use of clean URL with few parameters.
There comes error pages like 404 or file not found, in your screen. It happens when connection does not build up with the destined server and displays 404 error. Mostly people forget about this error page. Error pages should always be utilized by placing text links to site pages.

These are few tips for working with Joomla and put your website in the higher ranking of search engine. Utilize these tips to get your website in higher ranking in search engines and increase your page rank also.

What to Do When You Run Out of Keywords to Target in your Keyword Research

When you were first starting your website, you most likely picked a relatively modest keyword to target. You mastered that keyword, got ranked for it, then targeted higher traffic and more difficult keywords. You also probably went lateral and targeted similar keywords, synonyms and keywords that mean the same things but have different root words.

At some point, you’re going to hit a wall. You’ll have targeted every keyword you can think of in your industry. You might not be ranked for all of them yet; some of them might take time, some of them may be impossible to rank for and some of them you’re already at the top of. But you will hit a wall where it just seems like there’s no more room to expand.

There is to expand beyond this wall, you need to go beyond the basic research tactics. You need to really dig deep and use unconventional tactics to find new keywords to target.

Here are a few different ways you can go above and beyond to find new profitable keywords. As you’re browsing these different methods, keep in mind that the goal is to find keywords that are both relevant to your site and can generate substantial traffic.

Look Through Your Analytics


In your analytics data will be a section dedicated to telling you what keywords people typed in to access your site.

Many of these keywords will come from SERPs that you deliberately targeted and know you rank for.

However, a handful of people will have arrived at your site from keywords you’ve never heard of. Look into these keywords. There might be a whole host of related keywords you could target to get people to your site.

Look at Your Competitors’ Sites

Look at what your competitors are doing. What kinds of keywords are they targeting? Are they going into any peripheral markets?

Open up a few pages on their site and look through the source code. What keywords are they putting in their meta tags?

Put their site through the Google Keyword Tool. What keywords does Google think their site is relevant for?

Jump Through Wikipedia


Head on ovusing wikipedia for keyword ideaser to Wikipedia and lookup a few keywords related to your industry. For example, if you’re in the chemical business, head over to Wikipedia and look up a few of the chemicals you sell.

Look for other keywords that you might be able to target. For example, in this case you might look for specific chemical processes, precursor chemicals or special uses of the chemicals that you might be able to try to rank for.

Use Google’s Related Search Tool

One fast and simple way to brainstorm new ideas is to type your keywords into Google, one at a time. Scroll to the very bottom. Google will give you a list of keywords that they think are related to your search term.

Repeat this process with each and every one of your keywords. If you find any that you think might be good ideas to go after, write them down. Plug those new keywords back into the Google search tool and keep looking for innovative new keyword branches.

Come Up With Completely Different Ideas

A radical approach you could take is to take on a completely new direction or a completely new idea. The idea must be strongly linked to your site’s main idea right now.out of the box keyword research tips

For example, let’s say you sell chemicals that are used in manufacturing plastics. You’re ranked strongly for all the chemical names that you’re selling and many of the chemical processes. You’re looking for more keywords to target, but can’t seem to find any keywords in the chemical industry or the plastics industry.

If you hit a wall like that, why not try taking on an entirely new idea? In this case, you might try taking on green plastics and green manufacturing. If you sell chemicals that can be used making green plastics, try to rank for those processes and those chemicals. Try to build your brand in this entirely different yet strongly connected market.

Using these ideas, you’ll be able to take your basic keyword list and vastly expand it. You won’t run out of keywords to target for quite some time.

Beyond Basic Stats: 7 Ways to Track Visitors

Having good visitor intelligence will allow you to market to your customers and optimize your website on a completely different level than before. Most people never look beyond the surface with their visitor intelligence. Sure, they’ll use Google Analytics to figure out their bounce rates and their time on site – But rarely do they go beyond that.

A world class business on the other hand goes far, far beyond the basic stats. They want to really get inside their customers’ heads and figure out what makes them tick. Why are some customers more valuable than others? Why do some customers choose you, while others go to your competitors?

Here are 7 ways you can use visitor intelligence in your marketing efforts.

1) K.I.S.S


The first thing you should remember about visitor intelligence is to “Keep it Short & Simple!” (KISS.)

A lot of companies make their visitor intelligence far, far too complex. You don’t need to track 20 different stats for every visitor or every marketing campaign.

Figure out your most important stats and keep a close eye on those. Use other stats to improve your overall processes, but stop watching them once you’ve gotten what you need.

2) Analyzing Your Lead Followup


How is your lead followup system performing? What percentage of people who come into your funnel ultimately end up buying?

One thing every dedicated marketer should absolutely do is spend some time analyzing his or her lead followup system. Where do your customers drop off? What aspects of the system are working and what aspects aren’t?

3) Analyzing On-Site Customer Behavior

Use tools like CrazyEgg to learn about how your customers behave when they’re on your website. Use software that allows you to take videos of customers browsing your website. Or better yet, have real customers come in physically and use your site.

Watch them, then ask them questions about what they liked and didn’t like about using your site.

Analyze your customers’ on-site behavior to really get a sense for what they like and don’t like.

4) Replicate Previous Marketing Successes

Go through your past marketing campaigns and examine the ones that succeeded particularly well. What was it that made them stand out? Why did those campaigns succeed while others failed?

Take the winning elements from those campaigns and rinse and repeat. Make sure you change other things, so it doesn’t look like you’re just doing the same thing over and over again.

5) Implement Customer Scoring
Once you have a large amount of past customer behavior data, you can implement what’s called customer scoring. That means based on what you know about how your customers behave, you can assign your customers a score. That score is how likely they are to buy future products.

For example, you might assign customers who’ve never bought a product a low score. But if they’ve given you their phone number, they get a slightly higher score. If they’ve been opening your emails for 6 months, they get a much higher score. If they’ve bought a low end product, their score is increased as well.

You can then dedicate more marketing efforts to higher scoring customers. For example, you might do direct mail and phone campaigns to customers who score above a certain threshold, as the ROI will generally be more than worth it.

6) Understand Your Customers’ Real Desires
What is it really that your customers are buying when they come to your website? What is it that they want that they’re getting when they come to your site?

Try to get deep in your customers’ psyche. Don’t just look at your site as keywords; instead look at them as desires that you’re helping realize. Figure out these desires and you’ll be able to better market to your customers.

7) Move Beyond Basic Keyword Research

Once you know what your customers really want and what makes them tick, you’ll be able to move beyond just creating content around keywords. Instead, you’ll be able to create content and products based on what people truly want. That’s what’ll get you tons of press, buzz and shares.

Using keywords is a good platform to start with in the beginning. In the long run however, you want to move towards truly understanding your customers and providing solutions that others want to help spread in their communities.

Top 10 SEO Tips for Real Estate

1: Do Your Research

When creating (or promoting) a real estate website, it is essential that you pick the perfect keywords or keyword phrases. When doing so, utilizing Google Keywords can help you to not only find out the competition for each of your desired keywords, but also how many searches each keyword receives locally and globally. This research can help you tailor your keywords to your desired audience while also increasing your chances of success in marketing these keywords.

2: Effectively Utilize Titles

Now that you have your keywords, it is essential that you use these keywords effectively. When creating titles for everything from your website pages to your blog posts and URL links, you should include your keywords in these titles. As a result, search engine are more likely to pick upon your keywords and help move your website toward the top.

3: Include Internal Links

This is a SEO tip that is often overlooked but is incredibly important for search engine optimization. When you create blog posts (or website pages) that are related to other content on your website, include an internal link back to that blog post or website page.

4: Increase Content

One trap that many people fall into is spending a surplus of time creating relevant content for their website and achieving the desired ranking and then stopping all efforts. In a matter of weeks, they stop creating new content and slip in the ranking as a result. Therefore, keeping your website updated with fresh content is important for effective real estate SEO.

5: Monitor Link Count

Although it is important that you include internal and externals links in your blog posts and website content, it is also essential that you do not over link. Just like adding your keyword too many times on a single page can hinder your SEO efforts, having 100 links on a single page can hinder you as well. Therefore, link within your blog posts but ensure that you are not linking too often.

6: Utilize Images

Especially in real estate SEO initiatives, properly utilizing images is very important. Make sure you put a description for the image and a URL that includes one of your targeted keywords or key phrases. As a result, search engines will award you for this simple effort.

7: Ensure Usability

One of the most important things for real estate SEO includes usability. Google is a huge advocate of user-friendly websites that provide helpful links and information. Therefore, ensure that your content is beneficial to your users and provides a simple—yet effective—interface.

8: Include Virtual Tours

The utilization of videos and pictures are incredibly important in increasing SEO for any website; however, they are even more important for real estate SEO efforts. Including virtual tours of the properties you have for sale can actually help increase your search engine ranking while also drawing potential customers to your website.

9: Obtain Backlinks

One of the ways that search engines determine the quality of your website is by the number of authoritative backlinks you receive to your website from other quality websites. Keep in mind that not just any link to your website will work; instead, they should be from quality websites that are relevant to real estate. For example, a link to your website from Business Insider will be a lot more effective in increasing your page ranking than a link from a random blog.

Although it may be tempting, do not submit your website to free directories that claim to provide quality backlinks to your website. These “free” backlinks that require little effort often turn away search engines as opposed to drawing them to your website.

10: Keep Patient

It is essential to realize that it takes time and effort to increase your search engine ranking; therefore, patience is required. Your website will not go from nonexistent on search engines to the #1 spot in a matter of days. However, if you are property utilizing real estate SEO tips that prove to be highly effective and remain patient, your website will start climbing in rank before your eyes.

Title Tag SEO Tips Cheat Sheet

Recently Google came out again and emphasized the important of page titles in search results. As they pointed out, they are the first line of any search result and part of the actual links to click on. We already knew this, right? Why did Google decide to inform us again when you’d think that all webmasters, and especially marketers are very aware that a page title is the most important part of SEO?

It’s simple: despite what we should now, many marketers focus on other things and ignore the importance of titles not only in SEO, but in actually getting people to click on the link. It’s a call-to-action, and if its boring, not that interesting and doesn’t engage a user, then perhaps that is the difference between lots of clicks and no clicks whatsoever.

For those that need a refresher, here are a few key tips on Titles

1) For most search engines the maximum length of a title tag is between 60-70 characters and if you are over 70 characters, the title will be cut off.

2) Title Tags should reflect the content of EACH page. Don’t use a boiler plate for every page in your site, actually change the title on each page, to show what is new about that page opposed to the other page. This is really important for SEO, because everyone searches differently and one keyword difference could affect traffic.

3) Don’t overstuff keywords. Besides making sites often unreadable, it’s consider spammy and actually will make users ignore your site. It also will cause high bounce rate, and gain Google’s attention as content spamming.

4) Despite what everyone claims, no need to use your company’s name always in all the titles. If you are trying to get attention of users, sometimes using all the characters and not having a site title is better.

5) Put important keywords in front of the title tag. According to several experts, the closer the keyword is in the front of the title.

Top 8 White Hat SEO Tips for E-Commerce Websites

1. Use META Tags

A META tag is a special HTML tag that lets you provide information about a specific page on your site. The most important attributes within the META tags are the description and keyword attributes. The description and keyword attributes are exactly that — a short description and the most important keywords found on the page. META descriptions should be less than 155 characters long, an accurate description of what a visitor will find on the page, and should incorporate your most important keywords.

2. Incorporate Relevant Keywords

META keywords can help focus your writing as well we help searchers find your site. The first thing you should do when writing the META keyword attribute is make a list of all of the words or phrases you would like to use for each individual page. To help you decide what words will work best, use analytics tools to see what searchers are looking for most often. Visiting your competitors’ websites to see what keywords and phrases they’re using will also help.

Next, list your keywords and phrases in order of their importance using commas to separate. Let’s say that you sell lamps. One of your product pages is for a Better Homes and Gardens Victorian floor lamp. Better Homes and Gardens should be your first keyword for the page, and Victorian floor lamp should be your second. You could even combine the two into one keyword for users who search for that specific lamp. Keep in mind that keywords can be a word or a phrase, and you can list up to 25 of them — although you may want to focus your keywords on three to five important key words or phrases.

Now you need to incorporate these META keywords and keyword phrases into the body of your page. Let search engines know how important these words are to you by including them in headings, sub-headings and link text, and by using them at least three times on the page.

3. Create Clear, Descriptive URLs

Search engines like Google look at URLs when filtering search results, so the URL you create for your website should reflect what’s on the page. A good URL for that Victorian floor lamp would be http://www.yoururl.com/better-homes-and-gardens-victorian-floor-lamp as opposed to http://www.yoururl.com/product04884687.html. Clear, descriptive URLs will also let searchers know what they’ll find on your page.

4. Write Meaningful Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. When writing the anchor text, make sure it relates to the attached link. For instance, if you’re anchor text reads “Victorian floor lamps,” but it links to a page selling televisions, then that will only hinder your SEO ranking.

5. Know How to Build Backlinks

A backlink is a link to your website from another website. Google views backlinks as votes, and uses them to help determine your website’s PageRank (PR) — based on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best. However, not all backlinks hold the same weight. If you have a backlink from a website with a PR2, it won’t be as affective as a backlink coming from a website with a PR7.

There are several ways to gain backlinks, but one of the most popular techniques is through guest blogging — publishing a post on someone else’s blog that links back to your website. Writing guest blog posts related to your specialty will also help build your online reputation. Additional backlinking strategies include:

Creating a Resources or Partners page and exchange links with others looking to build their backlinks.
Submitting your website to online business directories, niche category directories, and social book marking sites.
Signing up for social media websites and include your URL in the profile section.
Writing legitimate comments on blogs and making sure you include your website’s URL.

6. Always Interlink Between Pages

Similar to backlinking, internal links connect to pages within your website. It’s not as powerful of a strategy as backlinking, but Google loves interlinking, so it needs to happen. Make sure the internal links make sense and are useful for your visitors — don’t stick in a link just for the sake of SEO. Don’t forget about your blog (if you have one, and if you don’t well, then you should!) when interlinking. Here are some good ideas for internal links:

1)Landing page to landing page
2)Landing page to blog post
3)Landing page to FAQ question
4)Blog post to blog post
5)Blog post to landing page
6)Blog post to definition (if you work in an industry with specific jargon)

7. Write Image Descriptions

Since Web crawlers only search text, it’s important to include an accurate description of the images you use on your site. A Web crawler, also known as a spider, crawls across the World Wide Web in search of fresh, new content. Use important keywords in your image descriptions so spiders will know when to show them in search results.

8. Update your Content

Search engines like to offer the most up-to-date results in search inquiries, so make sure you’re updating your website’s content on a regular basis. Updating your content will increase traffic no only from Web crawlers seeking it out, but also from your customers wanting to see what new content you have on your site.

Best SEO Tips for Small Business Websites

Small business owners need to create the best website they can, that scores well with search engines and also provides the value people want when they come to visit your website. This is a tall order. You not only need to satisfy your customers or visitors, but also Google, Bing and other search engines.

SEOThere are a few ways to do this. The first is to make use of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you have an email address you probably have received an email trying to sell you SEO or some software that automates the whole process.

You don’t need to purchase an expensive software application or hire a well paid consultant to do a good job at SEO. SEO is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines.

The best advice I can give is to forget about the search engines. Start by creating the best content that you can. Provide engaging articles that are unique. Write about what you know best, your own small business.

Tell the world everything you know about your business. Write often. Write detailed posts or pages that are of value to anyone who would come to your business.

The key is to write about what your customers want to hear about. That is how your business can help them fulfill some need or want in their life. Think of your customer. Write from their perspective. We all want to know, “What’s in it for me?” Tell them.

If you have created great content that gives your customers what they want then the SEO is easy. Many WordPress themes come with SEO options built right in. The best small business WordPress theme that I know of is the SmallBiz theme by Expand2web.Expand 2 Web WordPress theme

On each page or post you will need to scroll down the page and fill in three fields. These are the custom title tag, the meta description and the meta keywords.

The custom title tag is a title other than the title of you page. Use this if you want the title in the search engine results page to be different than the actual page title. You can think of what value your page has for customers when you do this.

The meta description is the page description. This is what will appear after the title on the search engine result page. By default search engines use the first 150 characters of your first paragraph. This may or may not be what your article is about. Think of a good description for your page and put it here.

The meta keywords are the keywords that you believe people would enter in a search to find your page. They can be phrases or short sentences. You will need to separate each phrase or keyword by commas. For instance this page may have keywords of “SEO for small business, how to score well with search engines”, or something like that.

The SmallBiz, small business WordPress theme takes care of the rest. If you have created a great page then these SEO fields should be easy to fill in.

How to Use Keywords in Your Articles

Even after the Google Panda and Penguin episode, keywords in your articles are just as important as it has always been. How will your website visitors know what your article is about if you do not have keywords in your articles? Google has not stopped SEO, they have only made you do it properly.

We all know that having too many keywords in your articles is a definite no-no. So there are a few things that we need to avoid and a few things we need to include to get your articles perfect.

Have you ever watched a TV commercial and wondered what they were trying to sell? I guess you have. This is the same for an article with no keywords; you cannot leave people wondering what the point of your article is.

What is your keyword?

You need to ask yourself what your article is about. Make a list of about five keywords that you think your article is about. Then choose the one that is really closest to your subject.

Then you can use this main keyword to find other related keywords that you should also include in your article.

Keyword density

Now this is where some webmasters may split because their views will be very different. I can only give you my point of view here as there are no clear rules to keyword density in your articles. I personally only like 1% to 2% keyword density and then include various related keywords scattered amongst the article. I find this to be a great mix and I never have a problem with over optimization. This means I mention my main keyword 5 times in a 500 word article.

Some Webmasters will tell you that you need 3 to 5% keyword density. I do not like this as I have read articles with this much keyword density and they look awful. 5% keyword density means the main keyword is mentioned 25 times in a 500 word article. We should be writing SEO content for humans and that kind of writing just does looks terrible!

Related Keywords

Including related keywords in your articles is a fantastic way to not repeat a keyword too many times. If you include related keywords, you will have a list of keywords to use instead of just concentrating on one keyword. This make sure article interesting and covers the subject well. To find all the related keywords and which ones I should be targeting I like to use Keyword winner. Before I had this program, it would take me hours to sort out the keywords for my articles.




Headings and subheadings

Now that you have your keywords and your related keywords, you need to use their use only here and there, in your headings and subheadings. This not only breaks up the article and makes it look fantastic for the actual reader; the search engines also love these keywords as subheadings. Again we cannot overdo the keywords but only mention them in one or two headings. Of course we need to mention the main keyword in the title of the article, but only twice in the subheadings. This is all included in SEO basics but some webmasters still forget to use these methods.

Using keywords in your articles will help you rank in the search engines and will also let your human readers know what your article is really about. Just do not forget that after writing your article, you should use your keywords and your related keywords to link back to your article. Again we must not overdo this either!

SEO 10 Tips for Backlinks

1) Backlinks should contain a variety of words.

Although we are not privy to Google's search algorithm, or any search engine's for that matter, many tests have been done and conclusions drawn that are well worth practicing. For example, the text link or anchor text matters.

Link Text (anchor text) should:

•contain a variety of text, sometimes with keywords or even the URL
•be concise - focusing on one idea

Avoid Link Text (anchor text) that contains:

•generic text, such as click here or home

It should be noted that having many backlinks with the same anchor text may trigger a Google penalty. Again, this is another reason in favor of organic links that naturally have a variety of anchor text.

2) The higher up the backlink is in the html, the better.

Links pass value to the destination or target web page and the higher up the backlink appears in the html code of the page, the more value it gives to the target page. For example, if you link identical text twice on the same page, targeting two separate pages of a target website, the target page that is linked to first is given more value than the second, all other things being equal.

If you think about it, the logic makes sense. If I want to convince you of something, I am going to present my best argument first. Why should Google be any different? It considers our first "reason" for following a link more weighty.

3) Backlinks should be within the content of a page.

Backlinks located within the content of a web page provide much more value to the target page than if they are located in the sidebars or footer.

4) The first instance of a backlink to an URL on a page is the only one that matters.

This is a case where quality is better than quantity, which, like so many things related to search engine optimization, is usually the case. In addition to the fact that a page overloaded with links to the same target just looks spammy, it is ineffective.

Say for example, that you have included five links in an article all leading to your money-making destination website. The only link that Google values is the first link that appears on the page to that particular URL.

5) Backlinks on pages with fewer links give the target URL more value.

If a website has a lot of links on a single page, then the value each of these backlinks might add to its target website is diminished. Once again, quality over quantity is at play. While there is no known link density to avoid, it is always best to only include relevant links that add value to the content which surrounds them.

Google Webmaster Tools lets you see what sites link to your site.
There are many things that website owners can accomplish with Google webmaster tools, including:

•Using Webmaster Tools to see what sites backlinks to yours, and
•Using Google Webmaster Tools to add an URL or submit a site.

6) External backlinks are more weighty than internal links.

It goes without saying that all websites should have an internal linking structure, connecting all the pages within the site to one another. In addition to navigation though, website owners can also create some backlinks within their own content to their own pages. This is internal linking.

However, backlinks from external websites increases the ranking of the destination page more than internal links. While you cannot dictate the keywords that external websites use in the anchor text to your site, having clear and compelling content surrounding a single topic, makes it easier to get good backlinks from external sources.

7) Backlinks from a unique domain matter more than a new backlink from a previously linking domain.

Let's suppose that site A already backlinks to your website in three different locations. Did you know that a new backlink from site B, a site that previously never linked to your website, adds more value to your website's rank than a new additional link from site A?

Backlinks from a variety of domains that are relevant to a website's content is one key to long term ranking.

8) Links from relevant sites provide a lot of value.

Suppose you have a friend who has a website for his plumbing business and this friend offers to place a link on his website to your dog walking business. While this is a very kind gesture, it will not provide you with a relevant backlink. On the other hand, if you have a friend with a website for a successful dog grooming business then a backlink to your dog walking business would be beneficial.

The relevancy of the linking site to the desitnation site's content matters.

9) Backlinks from trusted, reputable sites help destination sites.

Not only is site relevancy important, so too is a site's reputation; its trust factor. Perhaps you've seen terms such as trust rank, trust scores, and trust seeds. Backlinks from trusted, reputable sites pass more value to the desitnation site, than non-trusted sources. Google doesn't single out sites for trustworthiness like .gov or .edu, but these sites tend to have a high page rank because of the number of sites linking to them. Additionally, links from sites closer to the trusted seed may help search engine rank.

It's also speculated that a backlink from a less important page on a site with high trust rank, is more valuable than a backlink on a more important page (i.e. home page) on a site with a lower trust rank. This makes sense because the less important page on a reputable site may in fact have a higher page rank than the page rank of a non-reputable site's home page.

10) Having a quantity of quality backlinks is best of all.

Having multiple, quality backlinks, especially from relevant and trusted sources, is key to increasing the target website's rank in search engine results.

Although a website owner can only control SEO and backlinks from their own articles, blogs, press releases, other websites, etc., it is important to write content where the topic is readily apparent. This will make it easier, a "no-brainer," for external websites to come up with keyword-rich backlinks to your website.

In summary, successful off-page SEO for backlinks is a matter of applying these 10 SEO tips for backlinks and working smarter, not harder.

The Key SEO Mistakes That You Must Avoid

Optimizing a website for search engines requires a lot of consistent effort. Many internet marketers expect immediate success in ranking high on search engines, and they soon realize that this is not possible.

This article presents the common mistakes which people make in search engine optimization (SEO). They could be mistakes or some webmasters intend to try out “frowned upon” SEO methods. Either way you will learn to avoid these mistakes in order to build a great SEO reputation for your website or blog.

Consistency is the Key

Failure to apply constant effort in optimizing a website for search engines, this is a big mistake. SEO involves continuous effort in carrying out all the key activities that can help you rank high on search engines. Many people fail in their efforts to rank high on search engines because they expect overnight success, and they soon give up when they fail to see immediate results. It is important for you to gradually add new content to your website so that search engines visit your website more often. You also need to steadily build links to your website in order to improve your ranking on search engines.

Vary Your SEO Strategies

Failure to use different SEO strategies and tools. It is important for you to use different tools for optimizing your website. You must also aim to rank high on several major search engines. Choose about four main search engines and aim to rank high on them. Write and submit articles, participate in relevant forums, submit your website to many directories and search engines and exchange links with related websites that have high popularity rank. List the strategies that you intend to follow in optimizing your website for search engines, and make sure that you carry them out on a regular basis.

It is no good just performing one part of SEO. A variety will get you better results.

Get to Know Your Keywords

Lack of a good understanding of your niche’s keywords and phrases. If you want to successfully optimize your website, it is important that you know all your keywords and it is also important that you use these keywords on your website content, in your articles, and in any other content that you use to promote your website. Many people make the mistake of using untargeted keywords and phrases on their websites and other content that is meant to drive traffic to their website. Some internet marketers and website owners also fail to use their keywords on the title tag of their website.

When the wrong website visitors come to your website you get less sales and more customers that do not like your content.

Patience Takes Time

Lack of patience. Many web masters get impatient and they want to see their website rank high on search engines immediately. They fail to apply constant effort in implementing their SEO strategies. SEO requires that you patiently use your selected strategies and tools in optimizing your website for search engines.

If you want to succeed in optimizing your website for search engines, it is important that you avoid the mistakes outlined above.

7 SEO Marketing Tips for Bloggers

1. Make a Plan:

Before starting a business blog, making a solid plan for launching the blog is extremely important. Your mission, objectives, goals, metrics, tactics and the very bits and pieces must be documented before starting a blog. It will help you to plan and launch a well organized blog.

2. Clear blogging guidelines:

you must have a clear strategy for marketing your products not only online but also offline. Blogging material must be easy to understand and must follow the guidelines which clearly define the writing blog post’s requirements. Irrelevant material will not be absorbed by the visitors. Therefore, the contents must be related to the subject.

3. Draw realistic expectations:

Blogging is a patience-based task. You cannot become a shining star overnight; rather it needs hard work and dedication. Closely follow the guest posts, reorganize your blog in light of feedback and take a note about the volume of incoming traffic to analyze your business. Do not set big dreams and only set a clear objective and realistic expectations. It will help you to redraw your strategy for future business.

4. Make participation easy:

The visitors to your blog must be given the opportunity to leave comments and suggestions. Take the visitors along your desired track through fun and interesting ways to participate in a friendly manner. Launch weekly or monthly incentives to bring more people to your blog. These are marketing tactics to lure the clients. Highly interactive blogs get more traffic.

5. Promote your blog:

Lose the old marketing tools and get your blog well marketed in the modern world of high-tech advertising. Provide blog links on the main website and vice versa to keep your visitors closely bonded. The visitors must remain in the vicinity of your business enclave to get their desired services. Put navigational ads on other relevant pages for promotion of your blog and attract your targeted customers.

6. Increase usability:

Bring a positive experience for blog visitors and make it easy for them to read, share, subscribe, and bookmark your blog so that they remain under your influence for a long time. Use widgets and plug-ins to help to bring in the maximum number of clients.

7. Be part of the blogging community:

It will be more beneficial if you join conversations on the blog, respond to comments, and become part of blogging community. Drive your visitors through your influential qualities and increase the visibility of your blog by linking back to main websites. The visitor must feel close to you as a friend.

SEO Tips For WordPress

The first and most important aspect of ranking high on search engines is keyword research. The following SEO tips for WordPress are the result of years of conscientious study of experts and trial and error which have brought me to this list:

Niche Selection

Start with a Niche that you are familiar with, something that you like and are passionate about, a theme that you can write about.
Ideally this is a Niche where people are desperate for a solution and where you can offer it to them.

Keyword selection

Main long tail keyword. Perform a keyword analysis with Google’s Keyword tool and find a main keyword (subniche) where competition is mild (less than 13,000 competing phrase websites) and traffic is decent (around 100 daily searches).
Spend most of your time doing your keyword selection, this is the foundation of your business and is crucial for ranking well in organic search results.
There is several high quality paid software packages which can save you a lot of time if you do this at a professional level, like Market Samurai, Keyword Elite, Niche Finder by Brad Callen (these are my favorites).

Domain name

Purchase a domain name that is closely related to your targeted keyword.
Try for .com if available, otherwise go for .net or domain names with a prefix or a suffix, avoid hyphens.
If you are targeting a low competition keyword (which you should when you are beginning with SEO) this alone can catapult you to the top of organic search results.

Hosting

Use an reliable and cheap hosting company like hostgator which offers “Fantastico” installation script for free with the Cpanel control panel.

Installing WordPress

Once your hosting environment is set-up, use the fantastico installer to set up your wordpress.

WordPress SEO plugins

Yoast SEO plugin is my favorite as it rates each of your posts for SEO quality and makes suggestions on how to improve it.

WordPress SEO themes

There is so many options for WordPress themes that they can be overwhlming, I suggest to stick with the simple ones and spend more energy in developing content.

It’s late for the moment and I will cut off this post here, I hope this is useful if somewhat shallow and I will work on detailing each of the points at my next posts.

7 Practical Tips How to Use Targeted Advertising in Social Networks Effectively.

1.CTR

CTR is one of the main parameters influencing the success of any advertising campaign. The higher the CTR is the lower the cost of a click. It would seem simple. But achievement of high performance in the first places requires considerable experience in advertising campaigns. But we can definitely state that attractive image on advertising banner, catchy title and correctly selected target audience – can give you what you want.

2. Image

Always choose quality and meaningful images for the ads. More than 80% of users first and foremost pay attention to the image. Intrigued, the user moves to the reading of the title.

3. Headline

Always use special words which are called “magnets” (discount, the action, staggering, etc.) in the headlines; questions, statements, calls to action, the benefits of your product or service – in general, anything that would make the emotional component for the user.

4. Target audience

Choosing the right audience for the advertising campaign is half the battle. Best option is to work on the target groups and on the interests of users. Also, if you know where your audience is located geographically – use the targeting by cities, districts, streets, down to the subway station. Also, the choice of age in the audience greatly influences the formation of a pool of your target audience. However, the choice of the city and narrowing the age gap increases to a lesser extent the recommended rate for ads. Analyze your successful ads, look at the records who, at what age and what cities is interested in your ad – and in future you will have no difficulty with target audience definition.



5. Mistakes

Do not make grammatical mistakes in the headlines and text ads, which can lead to distortion of the perception of advertising offers. Practice shows that mistakes sometimes cause confusion in users and increase the number of unnecessary clicks.

6. Ads “weariness”

Almost every ad has a so-called conditional period of life. That is, starting at the initial stage, it is of interest for many users and is popular. But after a certain time (usually 3-6 days), ads effectiveness begins to decline significantly, for quite understandable reasons – become familiar announcement, the majority has already passed through an advertising proposal, which subsequently leads to an increase in the value of clicks and reduce the scope of the audience. To avoid this, every two or three days you need to add new and cut off the underperforming ads. This allows you to always keep your advertising campaigns in good shape.

7. Track the effectiveness

We strongly recommend to always mark each ad with special utm tags, which subsequently give an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of the advertising campaign – namely, the level of involvement and interest of the audience, time spent on the site, the number of committed purchases, average check, the average value of each new user of the social network, and many others. This approach will give an opportunity to evaluate each individual ad and save invaluable information on the use of targeting options that lead to the maximum ROI of your advertising campaigns.

How SEO Fits Into Social Media Marketing

Twitter
By nauture Twitter considered a 'micro-blogging' service in that it focuses on short status updates that lead to news and information. Within the 140-character limitations your focus is to capture the attention of current followers. Of equal importance, your tweets should target visibility under related phrases for twitter search. As with any online medium, seeking out the right information is at the forefront of readers goals.

Facebooks
Wall posts and notes allow more opportunity to create a blogging-style / resource hybrid where you can create direct links directly to your website. These content rick features are a great opportunity for you to build a strong fondation of keyword rich content. SEO best practices filter into each faucet of Facebook's many features.
Although you will want to focus on following and interacting through social media channels as a way to drive followers and ultimetely your potential reach, the types of information you generate has a substantial impact on whether or not visitors will continue to stay interested.

Social profile bios require careful consideration. Your description offers a great opportunity to market your social goals. And while Twitter is concise conversation and Facebook centers around a led conversation, both create opportunity for your social efforts to include the right targeted information to increase your ROI.

Targeting readers has always been about offering the types of topics that generate appeal and stay visibile under key search terms. If you are not focusing on how SEO incorperates into your social media strategy, you are at the very least loosing potential visibilty.

How does link building fit in?

Sreamline each social media avenue by determining specific goals with each and you open up opportunity for interlinking between your profiles and other linking opportunities.

In finding and sharing beneficial information, you open the door to more interaction within your social channel. Rather then centering your social media efforts on leading visitors to your business, you can create opportunity for others to share your information in a much broader, viral, capacity. Social media is more about word of mouth marketing because the reach of the masses far outweighs what you can accomplish single handedly.

Even as a direct author of industry related information, it makes sense that you will find existing resources that will be beneficial to your readers. This also opens more potential for other industry professionals to share your information and can increase your visibility under that topic. If the opportunity presents itself for you to interact, retweet, comment, and share.

Chances are, that through these opportunities to interact on other channels, you will have an opportunity to introduce your expertise on the subject. In many cases there are also opportunities to showcase related information from your blog, or wall post. This opens a plethora of link building opportunities in a unobtrusive way. Creating a resource that continues to stray further from cramming your message down the throats of followers.

Basic SEO Tips Every Web Developer Should Follow

1. Place Your Keywords In the Title Tag
The title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people. Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.

Please keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters(about 8 words) of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have a page title that's too long. Source: Google – How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?

2. Optimize Your Robots.txt
Having an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling wp-admin and plugin folders.
Take a look at my my Robots.txt to get an idea of how it works. Its code is pretty much self explanatory but if you want a better understand of it take a look a the links mentioned below.

3. Proper Use of the ALT Attribute
The attribute should be used to describe an image, not to spammed with keywords that have nothing to do with the image.
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images, they can however read the attribute, and having it spammed with keywords that are totally irrelevant to the image will make Google aware of what to derank you for.

4. Anchor Text of Links
The anchor text is the text inside your <a> tags that links to other pages. Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link is going.

So avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt both your website and the website you're linking to. One more thing to keep in mind is to keep the characters in your anchor text under 55.

5. Quality of Inbound and Outbound Links
While most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a high pagerank links to your website in an article.

Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100 unique outbound links on a single page.

6. Importance of the First Paragraph
Your first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.

If you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place it in the meta description, which is the text that search engines display under the title of your page.

7. Ensure Your Site is Accessible
An accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server, validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select other websites to visit.

Use tools like:
1) Are My Sites Up?
1) Link Validation Spider

8. Use SEO Friendly URLs
The URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like example.com/p=981489894.

Furthermore, when using Dynamic URLs try to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very important.

9. Site Usability
If your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility, navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a web designer to redesign your website.

How to SEO: Four Common Mistakes and Problems

Many SEOs and Internet marketers are still failing to get a good balance between on and off-page optimisation.

Often, this comes about because they are focusing too much on external activities, such as link building. This means they tend to neglect basic housekeeping on the web pages themselves.

1. Trying to get results too quickly.

There is no quick-fix method for driving traffic to a website other than resorting to underhand Black Hat techniques, which can only ever be short-lived. Building a solid community and remaining totally organic is hard work and very much a long-term project.

2. Not having a solid web content strategy

Despite numerous online articles written on the subject of web content, as well as very specific advice from Google, webmasters still harbour pages on their sites that contain out-of-date information, are badly written and lack basic functionality, such as correct internal linking.

Many sites also lack consistency in their updating policy, thinking that once optimised, their site can look after itself; sadly, this is far from the truth. Modern search engines, especially Google, demand a constant supply of new, relevant content for the site to have any chance of achieving and maintaining a good ranking in the SERPs.

3. Failing to use Analytics properly

Analytics are a useful and necessary part of every online business if used correctly, but many webmasters fail to really understand what they are actually about. This can result in a panic response when they experience an unexpected drop in Google ranking.

Relatively new websites are the most likely to experience this due to a phenomenon colloquially termed the Google Dance. When new websites are first indexed they will often appear quite high in the SERPs, then after what is known as the ‘honeymoon’ period they will assume a more natural position.

4. Not keeping up with Google Updates like Penguin or Panda

An older website that has dropped down the rankings, especially when this is immediately following a major algorithm update, has a bigger problem to overcome. The only way to regain position is to find out exactly what the site has been penalised for and to correct it as soon as possible.

This will involve a professional SEO carrying out a full site audit for you, carefully reviewing how your site sits within Google’s most recent guidelines.

Inbound links are still one of the major issues, especially following Google’s Penguin attack on spammy and unnatural link profiles. This update was largely aimed at Black Hat sites that have thousands of low-quality and irrelevant inbound links, but it can easily affect organic sites which are inadvertently displaying similar traits. There are literally hundreds of articles on good link-building practices to be found online, but the main thing to remember is that one good-quality link is better than 1,000 low quality links.