SEO or Search Engine Optimization Part I

Today I would like to start a discussion about very important topic in your online business strategy. We are going to talk about SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

In modern days websites and internet are becoming one of the most popular ways of advertising. No matter if it is a business, product, service or something completely different; everyone is turning to the web to get their message out there. With the popularity of such marketing medium increasing and the number of websites growing exponentially, it is obvious that everyone wants to get their message at the top of Google. Achieving that is not an easy task, but with a bit of hard work, you can definitely improve your chances of getting that desirable goal; first page result.

There is one question that comes to mind when you are looking at the websites on the first page of Google. What is a secret? How come these websites appearing on those positions? And the answer is - an industry term called "SEO". SEO basically consists of two equally important parts:

1. On-page optimization

2. Of-page optimization

On-page optimization consists of your website structure, content, keywords and metatags among other important factors. Basically it contains everything that you can do locally to your website.

On the contrary, of-page optimization consists of factors that external to your pages, like external links building.

Both of these parts will assist in the overall indexing and ranking of your website in popular search engines. There are many factors that are used in determining a website's ranking and those factors appears to be different between search engines. This makes optimizing your site for Google, Yahoo, MSN and the many others engines quite a task. As you are aware, Google is the most popular search engine today. And because of its popularity we would want to focus our goal on achieving a highest possible ranking within Google first. This task could potentially take months before we start seeing any results, but we have to start somewhere.

The following will illustrate what an overall plan should include:

1. Create search engine friendly content.

Unique and useful content is your number one asset, and ensuring that search engines will read it is crucial. Text in images or Flash looks cool and definitely can enhance an overall look of your site, but it cannot be read by SE bots, so make sure you use your important keywords, headings, and hyperlinks in plain text form. Instead of using images as navigation links try to use Cascading Style Sheets. CSS makes it easy to format those links to look like 'images' or “buttons”. This way you will create good anchor text as well as making it visually appealing. Use heading tags properly. Don't try to “stuff” keywords and hide them by making them the same color as the page background or shrinking them. Just make sure the keywords you aiming for are used frequently in the page copy.

Now that you've created good content, you want to know is it actually being indexed. Copy and paste a page's URL into a search engine and see if it has. Keep in mind that it may take time to show up. There are other factors that may affect your pages indexing such as duplicate content, script generated links (JavaScript instead of HTML), poor site architecture and dynamically generated URLs with special characters.

2. Wisely choose your Keywords

This step needs to be done properly the first time or all your future efforts could end up being completely wasted. Just think about your products, services or web content and then write down general associated with it. Then use keyword research tool to collect word and phrase variations. There are many tools for that. Google AdWords suggestion tool are good starting points. Your goal is to find those phrases and keywords that your potential target market uses in search terms to find sites just like yours. And then, you will need to optimize your site for those keywords. If the keywords that you choose do not generate enough searches your overall profits from ranking for them will be low. At the same time you want to stay away from general terms. You do not want to compete for keywords that are tougher to rank for (i.e. like "video", "computers", "business", etc.) as a great portion of the traffic will be non-targeted traffic.

3. Social Site Networking

The social networking is growing by the hours. Social bookmarking sites Furl, Reddit, and Technorati give their users a way to store their bookmarks online and share it with others users. Aforementioned services also provide users a way to promote their content or create a buzz over a product or service. Creating a Myspace or Squidoo accounts is also a perfect way to network and share information. But keep in mind, if your goal is to generate sales, then you must provide something useful without the promotional hype. Popularity of social media is based almost entirely on public interest. If your information is not unique or of interest to anyone, you will not be successful by using social media communities. Getting your entries and content to the popular pages on these social media and bookmarking sites requires some work. You will need to network with other users, bookmark and share interesting and useful content, create eye-catching titles for your entries e.t.c.  If you have great content and simply share it with as many people as you can, you will see success naturally.

4. Get people link to your site

There are many ways, to get other sites to link to yours. Google defines a “link” as a "vote" from one site to another. The more quality “votes” your site gets the better chance it has of ranking well with SE. Of course all sites on the NET are not equal. If a popular site links to yours, that link will carry much more weight than one would from a less reputable page. If your site has useful and unique content you are already ahead of bunch of the competition. People will need to see a reason to link to your site. Trading links can work, but reciprocal links have decreased in value big time. Buying links is against Google’s policy. You will be “Slapped”. What is a “Google Slap”? Just put that term in a search engine.

Here are some popular methods of acquiring incoming links:

   1. Press Release – Use site like PRWeb to issue press release with a link back to your site
   2. Directory Submission – submit your site to reputable business directories.
   3. Forums and Discussion Boards - participate in relevant forums and discussion boards
   4. Article Marketing - write and submit original articles to web publications in your field
   5. Social Networking – Comment on a blogs and get involved in social media and bookmarking

These points are a general guideline to follow. SEO experts are a good alternative in competitive markets but if you are on a small marketing budget than Do-It-Yourself methods can yield great results for small web site owners. Hopefully this helps get you started.

First we will explore some of the key factors that Google uses to determine a website's ranking within its search results. The list of these factors is quite long ranging from keyword use to manipulating links. I have listed the Top10 factors that you should focus on. These should help you get your website closer to the top.

   1. Keyword in Title Tag and Body Text - Rules of placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page's header and visible text of the page.
   2. Relationship of Keywords to the Content (Body Text) - Relevance of the text on the page compared to keywords.
   3. Keyword use in H1 and H2 Tags as well as in Domain Name and URL - Creating tags with the targeted search term or phrase and including the targeted term or phrase in the domain name and URL.
   4. Internal Link Structure - this refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the internal target pages
   5. External Links - Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages. Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages?
   6. Relevance of Inbound Links to Site - The relationship between the sites linking to the target page and the target keywords.
   7. Inbound Link Attributes - Anchor Text, Link Popularity, Relationship and age of the link. All these factors affect Google's weighting of links from external websites.
   8. Age of Document - Older pages may be counted as more authoritative.
   9. Amount and Quality of Text Content - Refers to the Quality and Quantity of visible text on a page. Search engines can use different analysis methods to determine the validity and value of content.
  10. Global Link Popularity - The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from all sites across the web.

With SEO marketing, there are some things that can actually have a very negative impact on your Site ranking. These following components will negatively affect a spider's ability to crawl a page and its rankings at search engines like Google:

• Server is down and often inaccessible to Bots
• Duplicate of existing content in the Index
• External links to low quality spam sites or link farms
• Duplicate Title/Meta tags on pages
• Overuse of targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

It's now time to start building your external links according to the above guidelines. Remember that improving your position is mostly a technical task. Search engines are changing almost daily and what works now may not work in the future. And it will take some time. In fact - loads of time. But with a trial and error and a good amount of persistence you will get the search engine ranking you're desire.

Building backlinks is an essential but time consuming job. Lets take just one example.

You decide to start you link building process from one of the popular methods; blog posting. You open Google, and start searching for the blogs with keywords that related to your business opportunity. You find the blog, see if it is related to your niche, check if you can post comment with signature (you can add your URL), read-it and post comment. It takes time to search Google for relevant blogs. Now, to make the search process a little faster we can use Google’s own free tool – Google Alerts.

From Google:

“Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

    * monitoring a developing news story
    * keeping current on a competitor or industry
    * getting the latest on a celebrity or event
    * keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams “

You select your "keywords" or "url’s" and Google will alert you via email whenever links or content containing your selected topics appear anywhere on the web. It is perfect for keeping up to date on the latest information about your niche market. It's also a great way to find out what other people are saying about you, your business or your site.

For example:

Let’s say you have a site on "Marketing System" then you would create a Google Alert for those keywords. Google will alert you by email whenever a new link/content related to those keywords appears on the web. This is a valuable source of potential linking partners. Many of those email send by Google will contain links to the blogs. Blogs that will allow comments with a link back to your site. Google Alerts will probably send you dozens of links each and every day. It is all depends on the popularity of keywords that you choose. Just follow these links to the blogs and see if you can leave a comment with some valuable additional information on what's been discussed and … link to your website.

Since we are on the topic of blog link building, there is another useful way to build backlinks. You can use Google Blog search. If you're looking for blogs related to your niche just type in:

"(Your Keywords)" "powered by (blog)"

For example:

You are looking for a blogs containing "marketing system", the blogs powered by WordPress, and you want to leave a comment.

The search string will look like this:

 "marketing system" "powered by wordpress"  "leave a comment" -"no comments"

This will display all the WordPress blogs containing “marketing system” keyword. This blog will have area to post your comments. And blogs with “no comments” will not be displayed in the search results.

Don't Spam

Please, please don't spam; there are intelligent people behind these blogs, and most of them read comments. They will recognize keyword spam when they see it. Your goal is to get targeted traffic back to your site and good permanent link. If you put ban unrelated comment or simply blatant advertising the least that would happen, owner of the blog will remove your comment and your link. Always put the reader first, especially if it's on someone else's site. Do not try to sell. Don't talk about your site - just join the conversation and add your relevant comments. Make their site better and they will reward you with traffic and a link. Just make sure that you put your targeted keywords in the anchor text.

Keyword Rich Signature

If you've done your “homework”, your main keywords should already be included in your domain name or url. If it is not, than there is another way to do that. You can add your "keywords" + "guide" or “Keyword” + “review” to your signature.

    * For example:
    * Your Name
    * Your Marketing System Review.

If you're an expert in your “field”, many webmasters will welcome your comments and links. If your main goal is the traffic, than many webmasters don't worry if there is a "no follow" attribute attached to the link. But if you are concerned about this - one way is to look at the source code to see if it has the "no follow" tag.

No Follow

Many webmaster and SEO believe that is nofollow tag affects a site ranking in Google Search Results.

Wiki:

"nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index."

 Google:

"When Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."

In many SEO and webmaster forums we have seen a lot of debate on this issue, which always result in two conclusions. One is according to Google point of view, that nofollow effect ranking position. But there is also some SEO who think differently. According to them NOFOLLOW only effects page rank of a webpage and not ranking.


According to those SEO’s

"The nofollow link tag is supposed to provide webmasters with the opportunity to add a link to their website without leaking PageRank to the page they are linking to."

According to PageRank Theory

All links on a page which have some page rank got equally divided part of that PageRank to them too. This phenomenon is also known as Page Rank Dilution.

So what is the reality? Which theory is true and which one is false?

You may not believe it but 2nd theory is true.

It has been experimented and proven by many SEO's that:

Nofollow tag is only a myth and it doesn't negatively effect your ranking or its only a myth that a link with nofollow tag have no benefit. In fact, it even may count as a normal link and play its role in enhancing your ranking.

If you're going to use blogs as a source of your backlinks, I suggest you try Comment Kahuna - it will make the task much easier. Comment Kahuna is a great little free tool which will search blogs based on given keywords and let’s you post comments. It will also give you the PageRank of each blog post and many other useful futures.

I’m not going to give you affiliate link, Just Google it.

Always keep in mind that finding quality backlinks is probably the most tedious job for any webmaster. It takes time and it takes patience. By using Google Alerts you can have relevant keyword related links emailed to you each day. By using Comment Kahuna you can search blogs. Use this information to help build your backlinks in relevant related niches. Do this consistently over a period of time and your site will get noticed and ranked higher. And again, for your own sake, please do not Spam!

This will conclude PART I of this article.

Best Wishes,

 

Admin