Entries Tagged as 'What is SEO'

Deadly Seo Sins - Common mistakes even experts fail to notice

Search engine optimization is the crux of any good website. It helps boost your business by increasing your online visibility, increases targeted traffic and boosts your page rank. Professional search engine optimization aims at making the website search engine friendly which initiates the website layout to be relevant to its theme as well as increases its online popularity. But there are a number of common mistakes made by seo experts that can sabotage your website in more ways that you can ever imagine.

Deadly seo sins and frequent mistakes that even professionals tend to overlook:

1. Overlooking the Overview:

Most seo experts tend to focus on a single page, word, phrase or technique, thereby missing out on the comprehensive picture. For instance, a site for helping a small or medium size business needs several pages targeting thousands of keywords and an array of techniques, all of which must work in accordance to help meet the specific requirements of your service or industry. A concrete plan needs to be laid out based on various search engine optimization techniques such as keyword research, site map creation and navigation, on page optimization comprising of code optimization, script optimization, template optimization, content optimization, Meta tags optimization, link architecture optimization and off page optimization comprising of directory submission, link building and link buying.

2. No SEO analysis strategy in place:

It is very important for you to know your goals. A good seo strategy must focus on increasing your rankings, sales and brand visibility online, keeping in mind the vision, values and strategies of your company. SEO analysis prioritizes the list of a company’s target markets on the basis of defined keywords and phrases used on search engines.

3. Inability to synchronize SEO with the sales and marketing teams:

What is the use of having fresh content on your site without expert search engine optimization services to maximize targeted traffic and increase your online visibility? Marketing is an essential tool that helps convert the potential visitors into clients. Without marketing you cannot expect to increase your sales- the two go hand in hand.

4. Not tracking the results:

It is important for you to keep a track of the traffic, rankings and response for relevant searches from time to time in order to get the desired results. Once you are satisfied with the results you get from your home page, you must move on to the other pages of the site.

5. Ignoring the homepage:

The home page of any website is considered to be the most power-packed page as maximum number of inbound links come there. It is essential for you to test a variety of keywords and phrases to find what works best for your site and increase its flexibility.

6. Overemphasizing on your home page:

On the one hand it is important for you to neglect your home page, while on the other you must also avoid overemphasizing it. You need to understand that at some point it becomes necessary to maintain a balance between your site’s homepage and the other pages on the site. Expert search engine optimization services depend upon distributing the success of the homepage on to the other pages of the site as well. This requires keyword insertion, link building and content optimization.

7. Neglecting the Content Management System:

It is essential for seo experts to have a CMS that gives complete control over the content, site navigation, main menu and marketing content.

8. Saving seo for later:

Search engine optimization is the most important aspect of online marketing. A number of experts concentrate on other strategies and neglect seo while developing the site. For the success of any business, it is essential to go in for professional search engine optimization services in order to boost your sales. Delay in seo can result in having to spend a fortune to get the desired results later on.

9. Targeting inappropriate keywords:

This is one of the most common mistakes made even by seo experts. Keywords are the core of a successful seo campaign. You might go on to describe your products and services in a very elaborate manner, but without appropriate keywords and phrases, you might not be visible online and lose out on a number of valuable customers. It is essential for you to plan out an seo strategy and emphasize on the targeted keywords that are searched by the average user or you might end up losing your business.

10. Leaving out the title tag:

This is another common blunder that is committed by a number of seo experts who tend to leave the title tag empty. The presence of a keyword in the title tag is a must as it enhances optimization as well as shows the various search results as your page title.

11. Neglecting the URLs:

The importance of a url is ignored by a number of individuals. Inserting keywords in the url gives you an edge over your competitors. It is significant to have keywords in the url for search engines such as MSN and Yahoo, but Google also give relatively high weight age to urls which have appropriate keywords inserted in them.

12. Backlink spamming:

A number of seo experts have a misconception that more backlinks always work well for the site and end up linking with forums, websites, spam etc. This may eventually lead their site to getting banned. Therefore, it is necessary for you to concentrate on getting quality backlinks rather than any link that is available.

There are hundreds of other common seo mistakes that are made by experts on a daily basis. Search engine optimization is the key to increasing your sales and boosting your online visibility. Therefore, it is recommended that you select a professional search engine optimization company for meeting your organizational needs lest you may end up being nowhere.

5 simple steps to increase your ranking in google

Throughout this article I’m going to use some terminology you may not be familiar with.

Inbound link - Theses are one way links coming into your website

Outbound link - There’s are one way links that are leaving your website

Cross Links - These are link exchanges, eg you link to site A and site A links back to you

Page Rank/PR - This is on a scale of 1-10 and is how Google measures how important your website is

SEO or Search engine optimization is key to driving traffic to your website from search engines. People often wonder how to get those coveted 1-10 ranks for your keywords, but struggle in doing so. The first and most important step in obtaining those rankings is to target specific key phrases. Its better to target a specific phrase than an individual word, as competition for the individual words is very high and usually dominated by massive businesses.

1) Check out your competitors

For example, lets assume your business sells computers. It would be an impossible task to optimize your site for the keyword ‘computer’ or ‘computers’. If you do a Google search for ‘computer’ you will see there are 1,330,000,000 results and the top ranking sites include apple and dell to name a few. You will never get into that top 10 list, there is simply to much competition.

2) So, what do I do?

Have a look at your website and ask yourself what do you sell? Is it computers specifically built to play games? If so you should try ‘custom gaming pcs. This search term returns 413,000 results much easier to beat than the previous 1,330,000,000 results and the #1 spot only has 53 inbound links. This should be fairly easy to beat and take their precious #1 spot.

Before we start looking at how to build links, you need to make sure that your website has being optimized for your chosen keywords. I recommend a piece of software called http://www.seoelitedirect.com

3) Checking out competitors inbound links

If you haven’t purchased SEO Elite (http://www.seoelitedirect.com) which has this superb feature built in. I will show you how to check out your competitors links, the long way…

Access toolbar.google.com and install the toolbar on your browser. Type your keyword into the search (in this example ‘custom gaming pcs’) and then click on options > more tab and tick the page info box. Simply click on the blue circle icon with an I in it and then choose ‘Backwards links’. This will show you a sample of the incoming links a page has, as you can see the #1 spot has 53 inbound links.

4) Make friends with other websites

Look at each inbound link the #1 spot has, see if each page is relevant to your website, it probably is! Browse around the site and find a way to contact the webmaster, there is usually an email address somewhere. Simply contact the webmaster and ask if they would like to trade links with you. Take not of the green bar on Google tool bar, this tells you the Page rank of the page. Links from sites with higher PR are better than links from sites with low PR.

Do this for every site that is linking to the #1 site for your keyword. Then do it for spot #2, #3, #4 and so on. Some webmasters will just ignore your email, don’t get disheartened, there are plenty more links out there waiting for you! If a webmaster refuses to trade links, thank him gracefully.

5) Results

After doing the above for a couple of weeks, Google will re-index their rankings and you will jump up the search rankings. It can take a few months for your page rank to be updated though so don’t worry about that. The more links you build, the higher you will rank. The more you put in the more you get out of it.

How Search Engine Optimization Can Boost Your e-Business

The process of how search engine optimization works can be a little hard to people who aren’t used to the process to understand. The most frequently asked question when it comes to search engine optimization is: How will it increase my sales? After all, that’s why you’re on the Web in the first place right? You want to sell your product and your brand. Search engine optimization is the only way to get your website noticed by the search engines. And without traffic from search engine results pages your site will remain hidden from most people who are searching for your product or brand.

You may already be doing a lot of networking and forming linking alliances with other sites and that is great. Links are necessary and really links are a part of the search engine optimization process because the more sites that are similar to yours link to your site the faster the search engine spiders will find your site. But ultimately it’s what is on your site that is going to make a difference.

Still not sure what the benefit of having search engine optimized content is? Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that you have your own line of makeup that you make and sell. Cosmetics is a very competitive industry. How are you going to drive traffic to you site? You can hand out business cards, promote at the grocery store and the post office, and take out ads in local papers. All of those methods do work. But if you add search engine optimized content to your website you can increase the traffic to your website by thousands.

If you add SEO keyword articles to you website such as tips on how to apply the makeup that you create, articles that give information about the ingredients in your makeup and why you chose those ingredients, tips on how to create a particular look or style using your makeup, articles that have beauty tips from around the world, articles about the history of the use of cosmetics and so on then you will get two results.

One result will be that you are giving customers added value in the form of useful and interesting information and that will keep them returning to your website over and over to see what’s new. The other result will be that the search engine spider will index your site and rank your site higher in the search engine results pages based on the beauty keywords that you base the articles on and then everyone who is searching for beauty tips, or the history of cosmetics, or a particular kind of makeup will get a link to the article on your website. Once they go to the article and read it they will probably look around the rest of your site, find your product line, and make a purchase. Even if they don’t purchase immediately they might bookmark the site to come back to later or send it to friends and family.

Promoting at the grocery store, church, work, or other places like that does work but only on a small scale. If you want to take your website to the next level where you are getting thousands of hits and possibly hundreds of sale per day you have to have interesting, original, search engine optimized content on your website.

Benefits of Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are said to drive more than half of all online purchases for businesses around the world and with half of the world’s population having access to the Internet these online sales are only going to get better as nearly 90% of people find websites through search engines.

Due to this current trend and the ever growing need for your businesses website to feature high up on the search engine rankings you need to master the art of organic search engine listings and to make the Internet an accessible and successful addition to your business. This is done by making your website attractive and visible to browsers by using natural Internet Search Engine Optimization.

The way in which Search Engine Optimization works is through the process of optimizing the HTML coding and page content of a website for both search engines and site visitors in order to attain higher search rankings than your competitors. This idea of Search Engine Optimization first began in the mid 1990’s when site owners begun to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked in Search Engines.

Search Engine Optimization tactics may also be incorporated into the web site development and design. This is because the term Search Engine friendly may be used to describe a web sites design, including the menus, content management systems, URL’s and Shopping carts. All of these are easy to optimize and will help your site reach the higher search engine rankings.

It should however be noted that web marketing is far more complex than simple submissions to search engines. If you want your site to achieve increased volumes of traffic then your website needs to be engineered for searching. As previously mentioned this process is done through the practice of modifying a website so that it is considered to be Search Engine friendly. You need your website to be properly read by search engine spiders as this gives you an increased probability of achieving desirable results within the Search Engines Result Pages (SERP’s).

Search Engine marketing is the key to a successful website that will enable potential customers to see a website. Some of the aspects that are considered when it comes to Search Engine Optimization are keyword analysis. This involves finding the best keywords for your website. You also need to ensure that your website is content rich; this is best achieved through the daily up-date of a content management system. As well as ensuring that all of the content on your website is keyword rich and updated on a regular basis you also need to consider link competition. This is done by estimating how many links will be required to get you into the sough after one and two positions on major search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

If your website is in need of Search Engine Optimization then it is important that you enlist the help of a professional Search Engine Optimization company. This will not only mean that all of the work is done in the best possible professional manner but it also means that your time will be free to concentrate on other aspects of your business. Search Engine Optimization takes a lot of time; in many cases more time than most business owners have so to lighten your load bring in the help of a Search Engine Optimization company.