Optimize Your Internal Links

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

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

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

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

Optimizing HTML Meta Tags

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

Title Tag

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

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

The Title Tag looks like this:

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

Description Tag

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

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

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

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


Keywords Tag

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

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

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

Create Lots Of Content And Update Your Site/Blog Regularly

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

Position Your Content Toward The Top of HTML Code

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

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

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

Choose The Right Web Host

Search engine bots don’t use websites the way you and I do. They need your site to be designed and built in a particular way. If you don’t do it right, you can severely hamper your search engine presence.

So here’s why you are going to choose a right web host. Google shows different search results to different people,depending on where they’re searching from.This is particularly true of shopping-type searches for goods that are likely to be purchased in person (as opposed to online). For example, if you search “bank” in the Google US, you’ll probably see Bank of America at number 1, whereas if you search “bank” in Google Australia, you’ll probably see The Commonwealth Bank. When deciding what sites to display, Google considers where each is hosted. It assumes that Americans will want to see American banks, and that American banks probably host their websites with American web hosts.

Put simply, if you’re after visitors from a particular country, choose a web host with servers in that country. And if you’re after visitors from a particular city, choose a web host with servers in that city. And the best way is to submit your site to the search engines’ local business centers because more and more people are narrowing their searches to the local area. So if local search traffic is important to your site, then you should definitely register your business to Google Local Business Center (Google Maps), Microsoft Local Listing Center and Yahoo Local. You also need to use the geographic targeting tool in Google Webmaster Tools to tell Goggle what geographic location your business targets. This won't affect your ranking in the normal results,but it will help ensure your listing displays appropriately for searchers who use advanced search.

All About Keyword Research

Before doing anything, you need to know what keywords you want to rank for.And that means finding out what keyword/s your target customers are searching when they're looking for a products or services like yours.

What is Keyword Analysis?

Keyword Analysis or Keyword Research is a process of uncovering the words that customers are searching for in the internet. There are quite a few reliable keyword analysis tools out there. You can use Google Keyword Tool it is a very accurate tool and easy to use. You enter a term that you think your target visitors are searching for, and it will tell you how many people are actually searching for that term. It use real search data - usually from the previous one or two months.

Keyword Analysis Complexities

You will find this tool very helpful and very powerful. It will give you a great insight into what people are searching for. But it won't tell you everything. Ultimately, it just provide the raw data. Once you've uncovered the raw data, you need to analyze it to make some decisions.You’ll need to apply all of your knowledge of your business, the benefits you offer your customers, and how prospective customers think and talk about your products and services. You also need to have a good understanding of what your competitors are doing, and why. And finally, always remember that search engines don’t read as humans do. They’re nowhere near that smart. So sometimes you have to make allowances for them. Following is a rundown of some issues that quite often have people tearing their hair out.

Single keyword or keyword phrase?

If your niche is all about business, target a niche keyword phrases, not single keyword. For example: "cheap second hand cars" instead of "cars". Use a keyword phrases because the more specific the keyword, the fewer websites there will be targeting it. This means you will move up the rankings faster, and you will find it very easy to achieve a high ranking. And also most people use keyword phrases when they are searching for a specific product or services. By targeting a specific keyword, you will attract more customers in your website.

How long will it take for SEO to increase a ranking?

There are no guarantees in SEO. It all takes time. If your site is new, it’ll probably take some time for the search bots to even get there to crawl it. (You can speed this process up by getting a link from a high ranked site.)In fact, because they don’t crawl it all at once, it can actually take some time for them to get through the whole thing. And even once they’ve crawled a page,it can take a while before it’s indexed. And then it has to be ranked, which takes yet more time.

To avoid disappointment, expect everything to take months. Not days and not weeks. It typically takes months for a new site to make it into the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and months for any site to see any increase in rankings. It can happen faster, but it usually doesn’t. SEO is an ongoing (often tedious) task. You need to be dedicated and systematic. In other words, you need a strategy.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the art of increasing your site’s natural search engine ranking, so that you rank high in the right searches. And remember, being ranked number 1 when you search for your company name or web address doesn’t count. You need to rank for the keywords your target customers use at search engines. So you need to:

1. Tell the search engines what your site is about so that they would know what searches it’s relevant to. This is called ‘on-page optimization’. You make your site search-friendly so the bots can crawl it, and you use the right keywords in your content and a basic code on HTML. By itself, this usually won’t increase your ranking much, but it’s a necessary first step.
2. Prove to the search engines that your site is important in its field (i.e. will likely be helpful to searchers). Embark on an ongoing campaign to increase the number of links pointing to your site they are called “backlinks” or “inbound links”). This is called ‘off-page optimization’. Building more links will increase your ranking.

How do Search Engines work?

Search engine companies like Google and Yahoo are all about finding content that will bring them more traffic (and thus more ad revenue). In other words, their results must be relevant and high quality. In the words of Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search: “Our whole role in life is to find the best content on the web and bring it together with people who are looking for that content. And to do that, we’ve invented a couple of algorithms to figure out what people think is good content.” Here’s a simplistic explanation of how search engines work:

1. Crawl - They send out ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ that crawl your pages and send back details for processing.
2. Index - They then use really complex mathematical algorithms to deduce the subject matter of your site from frequently used words and the text on links to, from, and within your site. This tells them which searches your pages are relevant to.
3. Rank - They consider some 200 factors when ranking, but the most important – of those that you can actually manipulate – is the number of external links pointing to your site, where those links come from, and what anchor text is used in those links. If there are lots of links pointing to your site, all from quality sites, and all with relevant words in their anchor text, you’re likely to rank well. The logic is that if all those webmasters are willing to link to you and they’ve used a variety of relevant words in their links (i.e. they’re not automated links), your site must be relevant and important.

The difference between organic search results and paid listings

Most search engines, these days, return two types of results whenever you click Search:

• Natural/Organic Search Results - The results that most users are looking for. When we talk about search engine ranking, these are the results we’re talking about. The order of these results is determined by how relevant each is to the searcher’s query. Important: You can’t pay a search engine to give you a high ranking in the natural results. You can only get a high ranking if your content is seen as relevant and important by the search engines.

• Paid Listings - Pure advertising. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers pay the search engines to display their ad whenever someone searches for a word that is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labeled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window. The order of these results is determined mostly by how much each advertiser is prepared to pay.

Here is the sample:

The blue border represents the natural/organic search results and the red border represents the paid listings.

Which is more effective?
For most industries, the natural results are significantly more effective than paid listings:

• 89% of people click on the no.1 result, 33% on no.2, 17% on no.4, 17% on no.5, 6% on no.7 and 0% on no.8 (Microsoft Eye-Tracking Study of informational searches)
• 94% of people see the no.1 result, 94% see no.2 (Microsoft Eye-Tracking Study of informational searches)
• Only 50% see the no.1 paid listing (PPC/paid ads) and only 40% see the no.2 paid listing (Eye-tracking Study, Enquiro, Did-it and Eyetools, 2005)
• Organic results get clicked 8½ times as often as paid listings – excluding search results that have no paid ads (Enquisite 2008)

Introduction to SEO

Before we begin into an explanation of SEO, let's talk a bit about search engines on what they are used for.

Why are search engines so important?

• The Internet is the world’s second most commonly used medium after television (Internet Statistics Compendium, 2006)
• Approximately 1.5 billion people use the Internet, worldwide (Internet World Stats, 2008)
• That’s a massive 305% increase since 2000! And still it’s only 21.9% of the world’s population (Internet World Stats)66% of online Americans have purchased a product online (Pew Internet)
• 93% of users worldwide use search engines to find websites (Forrester Research)
• Search engines are the way most people (85%) find new sites, and the way most businesses find new sources for products and services (Direct Marketing Association)
• Roughly 750 million people worldwide over the age 15 conducted a search on the Internet in August 2007 (comScore)
• About 15% of traffic on brand names is landing at competitor, affiliate or ‘other’ websites in US and AU markets where trademark restrictions are not strictly enforced (Hitwise)