SEO and SEO Techniques

What is SEO?

SEO is the process and practice of optimizing your website so that it ranks well on search engine results pages. When someone types a word or phrase into search engines (like Google) looking for your product, you want to appear on the first or second page of the search results.

0 SEO Techniques All Top Web Sites Should Use

This post focused on elements relating to design, content and development. This time, we?ll move onto the important issue of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is such a hot topic these days. How do you get your web site within the first page or two of the search engines? How do you increase your Google page rank? There are companies who dedicate themselves full time to doing SEO at a pretty penny. Something a lot of people can?t necessarily afford to pay for or spend the time on. However, there are some simple things you can do when building your site that will help increase your chances of having good results. In no particular order, below are 10 of these items?

1. Title Tag

Near the very top of a web site?s source code you?ll find various meta tags ? the standard ones being the Title, Description and Keyword tags. The title tag is technically not a meta tag, though it is commonly associated with them. The title tag plays such a large role in the indexing of your web site, that it is considered the most important of the three. A page title is the first thing a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing. It?s important to include a keyword or two in the title tag ? but don?t go overboard ? you don?t want to do what?s known as ?keyword stuffing? which does nothing but make your web site look like spam. Most people will include either the company name, or title of the particular page here, as well.

2. Meta Tags

There are two primary meta tags in terms of SEO ? the description and the keyword tag. It?s debatable whether the search engines use the description tag as far as ranking your results. However it is one of the more important tags because it is listed in your search result ? it is what users read when your link comes up and what makes them decide whether or not to click on your link. Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don?t stuff it with keywords either. The description tag should read like a sentence ? not a keyword list. Due to ?keyword stuffing? many search engines now completely disregard the keyword tag. It is no longer nearly as important as it was years ago, however it doesn?t hurt to include them in your source code. When creating your keyword list, you?ll want to think of the specific terms people will type in when searching for a site like yours. Just don?t go overboard ? too many duplicates are not a good thing (as in ?web designer? ?web designers? ?custom web designer? ?html web designer? ?your state here web designer? ? you get the idea). Those are all basically the same, so pick one or two variations at the most and move onto the next keyword.

3. Proper Use of Heading Tags

This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are. Your main page title should use the h1 tag ? this shows what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as h2 and h3 are equally important by helping to break down your copy. For one, you?ll see a visual break in the text. But as far as the search engines are concerned, it will automatically know what your topics are on a page. The various heading tags give a priority to the content and help index your site properly.

4. Alt Attributes on Images

Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings. In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader. They can?t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is.

5. Title Attributes on Links

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That?s the little ?tool tip? that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links. As a note, you should use descriptive text for your links. ?Click here? doesn?t really tell a person ? or more importantly, the search engines ? what the link is. At the very least put a title tag that will explain that ?Click Here? really means ?Web Design Portfolio? for example. Better yet ? make the main link text something like ?View my web design portfolio? ? this will give some value to the link showing that the resulting page is relevant to searches for portfolio?s.

6. XML Sitemap

My last post referenced the sitemaps used by web visitors to help them navigate through your site themselves. However, there?s another version ? XML sitemaps ? that are used by the search engines in order to index through your site, as well. This list of ALL pages / posts / etc. of your site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what you feel the most important pages of your sites are. All elements that help the search engines properly find and link to all content of your site.

7. Relevant Content

Having content relevant to your main page or site topic is perhaps the most important SEO aspect of a page. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc ? but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt. While it is important to include as many keywords in your page copy as possible, it is equally as important for it to read well and make sense. I?m sure we?ve all seen keyword stuffed pages written by SEO companies that honestly don?t make much sense from the reader?s point of view. When creating your site copy, just write naturally, explaining whatever information you?re discussing. The key is to make it relevant, and to have it make sense to the reader. Even if you trick the search engines into thinking your page is great ? when a potential customer arrives at the site and can?t make heads or tails of your information and it just feels spammy to them ? you can bet they?ll be clicking on the next web site within a matter of seconds.

8. Link Building

We?ve probably all heard of Google Page Rank ? it seems to be every web site owner?s dream to have as high a page rank as possible. While the algorithm for determining page rank encompasses many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your web site. Now, you?ll want to steer clear of link farms and other spammy attempts at getting links to your site. However there are many reputable and niche directory sites that you can use to submit your web site, or specific blog articles to. With genuine content ? especially if you have a blog ? you?ll be able to generate links with other web sites and blogs, as well. It?s somewhat of a give and take, in that if you link out to other sites, you?ll find sites linking back to you ? and hopefully see your page rank going up, as well!

9. Social Media

Although technically not SEO, Social Media is such a growing factor in getting your web site noticed, that it?s an important element to include in your plan. Social media ranges from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn ? to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more. There is a lot of relationship building involved, but as you build your own networks and build quality content on your web site or blog, you?ll see traffic to your web site increasing, as well. As with any relationship, it is a give and take. Don?t just expect to join a site like Twitter for the pure sake of pushing your content. That just won?t fly ? your true intentions will stick out like a sore thumb and do nothing but turn people off. Even if you are on the site purely for networking reasons, the key is to make friends. Help out members of your network if they ask for a ?retweet? or Digg, give helpful advice if asked, etc. You?ll see the same in return. If you write a great post and have built meaningful relationships with peers in your niche, you?ll often find that friends will submit your posts and give you votes on the social bookmarking sites. The more votes you receive, the more likely your post is to be noticed by others and shared around, often resulting in additional link backs from other blogs, etc.

10. A Few SEO Don?ts ? Flash and Splash

Along with any list of Do?s come the Don?ts. As far as SEO is concerned, two of these items are splash pages (often consisting of a flash animation) and all flash web sites. Yes, flash is pretty! Full flash web sites can actually be amazing to look at ? their own bit of interactive artwork. But unfortunately the search engines don?t get along well with Flash. Although there is talk of possible advancement in this area, for the most part the search engines cannot read Flash. All that great content that you wrote for your site will not be seen by the search engines if it?s embedded into a Flash web site. As far as the search engines are concerned, your all flash web site might as well be invisible. And if the search engines can?t see your site content, a good chunk of potential customers will miss out on what you have to offer, too. Equally as ?pointless? are splash pages. Once very popular, the splash page should no longer be an important feature of any site. While splash pages used to serve as an introduction into a web site (often with a flash animation), it is no longer seen as helpful, and often times might actually annoy visitors. For one ? it?s an extra click to get into your content. Worse is when you don?t give a ?skip intro? option or set of links into your main site content ? because you?re essentially forcing your visitors to sit through the full animation. If you?re lucky, this will only annoy them? if not ? they?ll just leave without giving your main web site a shot. And without an html link pointing into your site, the search engines have no way to continue either (unless you made use of a sitemap.xml file ? but still?) A good alternative to both issues is to make use of a flash header. There?s no problem to include a flash animation at the top of your main site, or as a feature within the content area, etc. Because this is an addition to your web site, as opposed to a full separate element.

Snap Shot For Seo Spyglass

So you enter an URL

SEO Spyglass Tools

Mass of precious information, all well-structured, all up-to-date and up-to the-point. In no time, it will give you numbers of facts that are not in the least easy to get! To name but a few, this is

1. The total number of backlinks the site has;
   
2. The exact URL of each and every backlinks;
   
3. The Google PageRank of both the domain of the backlink and the backlink itself;
   
4. The Alexa Rank of the backlink domain;
   
5. The total number of PageRank 0 to PageRank 10 backlinks the site has;
   
6. The exact IP address of every backlink;
   
7. The total number of backlinks coming from the same IP addresses, allowing you to easily identify site-wide links;
   
8. The exact anchor texts the site owners are using;
   
9. The exact anchor URLs of the site's backlinks;
   
10. Whether or not the backlinks still point to the site;
    
11. How many of the backlinks come from forums and blogs;
    
12. How many of the backlinks come from homepages of other sites, rather than internal pages;
    
13. The total number of outbound links on the Webpage backlink resides on;
    
14. The total number of links on the Webpage backlink resides on;
    
15. Whether or not the site has backlinks from the Yahoo! Directory;
    
16. Whether or not the site has backlinks from DMOZ Directory;
    
17. The exact link value of every backlink the site has;
    
18. The exact age of every Website linking back to the given site;

Keyword Research -SEO Step One Of Ten

SEO Step One Of Ten: Keyword Research

Welcome to part one in this ten part SEO series.
Back in October 2004 I launched a series of articles outlining the ten crucial steps to a well optimized website. The steps were:

1.                  Keyword Selection

2.                  Content Creation

3.                  Site Structure

4.                  Optimization

5.                  Internal Linking

6.                  Human Testing

7.                  Submissions

8.                  Link Building

9.                  Monitoring

10.              The Extras (all those things that didn't fit in the first 9 steps)

Well in case you've been asleep for the last few years on in case you've just recently joined us in the SEO-realm, I - along with some of my good friends in the web marketing world - have decided to re-write the series with new information and new perspectives.
The New Series
In our updated series we'll be dropping some of the articles and adding others to account for changes in the industry. Another major change in this series is that we're going to compliment it with a weekly segment on Webmaster Radio's Webcology on Thursday afternoon at 2PM EST where we'll be conducting interviews and discussing tools with their manufacturers to help our readers and listeners make the most of this information. If you miss the show, you can always download the podcast free of charge afterwards.
The 10 steps covered in this series will be:

1.                  Keyword Research & Selection

2.                  Competition Analysis

3.                  Site Structure

4.                  Content Optimization

5.                  Link Building

6.                  Social Media

7.                  PPC

8.                  Statistics Analysis

9.                  Conversion Optimization

10.              Keeping It Up

Step One: Keyword Research & Selection

There are two times in a site's life when keyword research is conducted - when researching a site to rank in the organic results on the search engines and when researching keywords for a PPC campaign. In our article today we're going to focus on the former and save the research involved with PPC campaigns for step seven in this series.
So we've got the topic down to "just" keyword research and selection for organic SEO campaigns - from there the topic once again gets split into a variety of areas. Those that we will cover here are:

·                     The raw data

·                     Studying those who've gone before

·                     Understanding your choices

The Raw Data
The raw data is the raw estimated searches/day that you can expect a phrase to get on the major search engines. There are a number of tools you can use to compile this information. Here are some of the more commonly used:
Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
Yahoo!'s keyword suggestion tool. It's fast and it's free but it has some serious drawbacks. The tool often mixes singular, plural and common misspellings into one so it could lead you astray (admittedly it's gotten much better lately but still far from perfect).
Is a bed and breakfast in Banff, BC better to target "banff accommodation" or "banff accommodations". How about the very common misspelling "Banff accomodations"? That said, it's based on easily the largest pool of search data made available in this way which gives it a huge edge in accuracy based on the pool of data it's collecting from.
WordTracker
WordTracker is easily one of the most popular of the paid keyword research tools. It solves the problem with the singular vs plural vs misspellings however the data it accesses is from a few meta engines and is not as comprehensive as one might like.
They offer a free trial and have options to pay for just a day or up to a year so they provide options for people who simply need it for a quick round of research on one site to SEO firms who need it on a daily bases. It sells for $59/mth.
Keyword Discovery
This tool is very similar to WordTracker in the advantages/disadvantages category. Better specification of keywords, lower pool of data to base them on. I personally prefer Keyword Discovery simply for some of the features and the ability to export data for clients to view easily. Of course, that could well be due to my increased experience with it.
They have a free trial as well and it sells for $69/mth.
Aaron Wall's Summary
Noted above are some of the most popular tools and the ones I've used the most. There are some other tools definitely worth taking a peek at. Aaron Wall did a great summary on his site of the major tools, their pros and cons, etc. Definitely worth taking a peek at. Admittedly it's a couple years old so some of the features have changed a bit but most of it is still valid and accurate.
Now What ...
Now that we've looked at the tools, let's take a look at what we're supposed to do with them. As noted, we'll cover how to use these tools when launching or updating a PPC campaign in a future article, however there are still a few areas and considerations that we need to consider here.
So let's get started ...
In case no one told you - size doesn't matter. It's not how big it is, it's who's using it. Let's use as an example a phrase we at Beanstalk targetted and that's the phrases "search engine positioning". At first this was our big phrase which now gets 7,689 estimated searches/mth (a bit higher than it was back then). "search engine positioning services" gets a lowly 2,636 searches/mth. Of course we should be targeting the one with the higher number of searches (or so I thought).
Once we have attained top 3 rankings for both I started looking through my stats and setting up filters for conversion (forms filled out and visits to our contact page). People who entered "search engine positioning" were sure interested in our blog and articles but only those who added the word "services" contacted us. And so the big phrase was abandoned as a target and we began focusing on what I refer to as "buy phrases". So bigger isn't better if the people you want are searching using phrases with a lower search volume.
There's another time when bigger isn't better. Which of those two phrases do you suppose we ranked for first? If you guessed the services phrase then you're right. When you launch a new website (which we had) you're likely up against sites that have been around for a while, have some solid backlinks and a good number of pages. You're not going to want to go up against them for the top phrases out of the gate. Choosing to go with phrases that are lower in search volume and lower in competition will almost always result in higher rankings faster, put some money back in your pocket and ready you to go for the bigger phrases.
It's here that the model we followed works well. When you're selecting your short term and long term targets it's wise to choose phrases with the same root keywords ("search engine positioning" and "search engine positioning services" for example). This basically enables you to work towards your long term goals during link building for your short term targets. And who doesn't like to kill two birds with one stone? Or perhaps you have all the time in the world and you're one of those people who likes nothing more than working on developing incoming links.
Which brings us to ...
Studying Those Who've Gone Before
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Let's just hang onto that thought while we research what those who are successful in your industry are targeting in order to glean some insight into what works.
I've recently discovered (much to my pleasure) a very cool tool that, while a bit pricey for some, simplified MANY of the processes of keyword research, tracking and competitor keyword dissection. A company called AdGooroo has created what I've now discovered to be an awesome keyword tracking tool (I'd call it keyword research but it does a lot more than list off search phrases). The tool allows you to do the generic keyword research that we're all used to with the same limitations as the tools above (i.e. Google doesn't hand out their search keyphrase volumes) but that's just the first step.
They then take a look at your competitors on both the organic and PPC results, figure out what they're ranking for and bidding on and provides some great reports on saturation levels, competition levels, and a lot more. With this in hand you can then begin to analyze how they're ranking (that'll be covered next week in our article on competition analysis).
The folks at AdGooroo also store historical information so you can look back over trends in the past and compare that to what you see now. As noted, a bit pricey for some but worth it for those who can afford to know this level of information on who's doing what and what you should be doing.
I should also note that I'm experienced in their SEM Insight product which costs $399/mth. They also do offer AdGooroo Express which has a lot of the same feature (but missing a lot of the ones I personally feel can give a researcher a HUGE jump on their competitors). The Express version however sells at $89/mth so far more affordable for some. And like all my favorite tools, they provide a free trial. :)
But if you can't afford that level of information you'll want to run ranking reports on all your top competitors (you likely know who these are but if you don't - they're the ones who rank in the top 10 for the most competitive phrases). You can either do this manually or use a reporting tool such as WebPosition Gold (again, has a free trail).
If you find weaker sites ranking for large numbers of phrases, you know who to watch (again, we'll get into this more next week). The only problem with this method is that you can only think of what you can think of. The site might be ranking for phrases you never thought to look into and which, in knowing, might provide some great insight into additional targets and tactics. Of course, you might well be from an industry with very obvious and defined keywords.
Understanding Your Choices
So now you've got choices to make. You've got a list of perhaps hundreds of keywords and you need to shorten that list down. The number of phrase you target will only be limited by your site and the amount of time you have to dedicate to it.
You will likely need to pare down your choices to those that will produce the fastest and highest ROI possible. This will likely be the phrases that provide the lowest competition levels for the highest searched "buy phrases". Once you have attained these rankings you can move on.
The alternative is to go for the gold and target the biggest phrases in your industry. This will take longer (99% of the time) but might be necessary if there are no suitable secondary phrases. In this event you have to ready yourself for a slow rise to the top and a longer period of stagnant traffic with a big return (hopefully) at the end.
Another major choice you'll have to make (especially if you have a large number of potential phrases) is whether to start out with a PPC campaign for the traffic or to test keyword phrases for an organic promotion. While these will be covered in more detail in part 7, if you just can't wait you can find a past article on the subject titled "Using PPC To Maximize Your Search Engine Positioning ROI".
More Info On This Series
As noted but worth mentioning again, this article series is being supplemented with a weekly show on WebmasterRadio.fm. Be sure to tune in or download the podcast to get the full information and hear some great interviews with the tool makers and experts.
Next week the topic will be competition analysis and will be written by StepForth, Inc. author and owner Ross Dunn. Ross will of course be on the show with us next Thursday along with some great guests.

Hats in SEO

How many Hats in SEO?

As per my knowledge is concern only 3 Hats matters most in SEO:

1. White Hat SEO
2. Grey Hat SEO
3. Black Hat SEO
   

1. White Hat SEO:

White Hat SEO means completely following the ethical methods to acquire good rankings in search engines for a website. If a website really providing good information to visitors then white hat SEO works very well
and gives the best results. Now you have question that “what are white hat SEO methods?” All the methods which aren’t trying to cheat or manipulate search engines or visitors are called white hat SEO methods. I hope only few sites like Wikipedia, Google etc... follows white hat SEO methods.

2. Grey Hat SEO:

Grey Hat SEO means following combination of ethical and unethical methods to get fine rankings in Search Engines for a website. Most of the SEOs use Grey Hat SEO Methods to attain rankings. Grey Hat SEO works fine most of the time and most of the professionals recommend it. Grey Hat SEO methods aren’t unethical, it includes little stuffing of keywords in the site and back links etc. Now a day’s these methods are quite common while promoting website. Most of Corporate websites, Personal Blogs etc … follows Grey Hat SEO Methods.

3. Black Hat SEO:

Black Hat SEO stands to follow completely unethical which are used to cheat, manipulate search engines as well as users. In the past years search engines aren’t able to recognize these methods and difficult to find out and filter the websites which use Black Hat SEO techniques. Search engines are became smarter now and able to find out and blocks websites which use black hat techniques. Search Engine Quality Professional are working hardly and updating regularly the SE algorithms to give the best results to the visitors.

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Article Sites	Page Rank
http://goarticles.com/	6
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http://www.washingtonwizardsblog.com	5
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http://lewisseo.com/	4
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http://www.afreearticle.com/	2
http://www.articlecupboard.net/	2
http://potomodel.com/	2

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