The SEO Pro...Learn The New SEO and Rank Your Site!

De BISAWiki

Mistake #1. Inappropriate keyword use

The goal of keywords is to lead people to your site the moment they search for them in search engines. So what's the point of using keywords when they are not the words people usually search for in search engines? If you do not use the appropriate keywords that are linked to your site, people will never be able to see your content.

Mistake #2. Making your site private (Search engines will be blocked from your site)

If you create a company website, you're aim is supposed to publicized what your company has to offer. If there are contents you do not want to pop up on search engines, then you better have another account for that. Having the search engines block your pages or content may pose a danger to a probable advertisement for your site - and you definitely do not want that.

Mistake #3. Making "sharing" options limited

Again, the sole reason for your company website is to deliver a message across probable clienteles about your business. If you restrict, sharing options, you are similarly hindering the publicity of your site. The common sharing options used by many today are through social networking sites where people are most likely to notice the ad as they spend much of their time in these social sites.

Mistake #4. Forgetting to encourage readers to take action

The purpose of your company website is to invite readers and visitors which can eventually become your customers. Make sure they have something to think about or much more, look forward to. If you sell products, include descriptions of your products or order sheets; if you provide services, you can include testimonials about satisfied clients, this way; you are encouraging them to patronize your products and services. After all, that's what you want, don't you?

Mistake #5. Not updating your content regularly.

Visitors who have had a great time checking your site have most probably bookmarked your site (you wish); and they will be looking for fresh content from you, interesting ones. If you fail to provide these updates, they are most likely to look and search for other sites that can give that to them - and that's the least that you want to happen.

Keeping and maintaining a company website is not as easy as it appears, nor is it difficult. It is simply a matter of knowing the what-needs-to-be-done and the what-needs-to-be-avoided. If you master these things and know the rules to the game, that is, keeping your site in the list given by the search engines, it means you're doing what is appropriate for your site and your site is doing the same to you.

Google's algorithm updates have legitimized SEO practices. The days of tricky strategies or trying to dupe the search engines are gone. So if you're looking for "easy," don't bother.

Small Business owners, big brand companies and marketing pros are reeling from the aftershocks of Google's recent updates, Panda and Penguin (code-names).

Launched in February 2011, Panda began to enforce Google's SEO guidelines using artificial intelligence in new ways. Google's longstanding SEO "rules" were beginning to change and Panda just was the tip of the iceberg. Lazy SEO managers who didn't pay attention to this warning would soon be in for a rude awakening.

If Panda was just the tip of the iceberg, Penguin's release in April was like the whole damn iceberg that sank the Titanic! That's exactly want happened to the traffic of millions of websites, as they seemingly overnight saw their website traffic sink!

So what happened?

The Google Penguin and Panda updates "humanized" the way the search engines view your website. The new standard focuses on legitimate and quality content, originality, and the overall user experience. The message to marketing pros and website owners is very clear... stop focusing on tricks and "technology" to dupe the search engines, and start focusing on people. Obtaining generic backlinks or content, keyword stuffing, or pursuing affiliate "traffic" will do little for your website. It may likely even hurt you. If your website appeals to a real person, it will appeal to Google's new algorithms too!

You may saying to yourself, "okay, so I'll just make sure I update my site regularly with good original content, and I'll appease the Google gods!" If only it were that simple. The Penguin and Panda messages go much much deeper. With this series of changes, the search engines are openly acknowledging that a website isn't the only place online that the Brand needs to maintain a responsible presence. Big brother is watching and indexing everything you do online with regards to your website. That means social media interaction, engagement with customers, and how well your website content is received and shared online, all factor into this new ranking.

For those of you who had a well optimized website prior to the releases, pay attention! Brand's can no longer rest on their laurels and expect to earn the attention of Google. You must be actively updating your website and engaging with customers and viewers. The "set it and forget it" mentality is ancient history.
How do I move forward?

1. Know the State of the Union of your site.

I suggest in researching and investing in a qualified online marketing expert to help you evaluate your current SEO situation. This requires viewing the analytical history of your website prior to the update releases and comparing it with your current statistics. By analyzing this data you'll be able to determine where to begin on your quest to participate in the new SEO world order.

2. Is what you have to say worth listening to?

Look at the content you have on your website. I'm not referring only to blog posts or articles, but the page content. If you were to share a given page with 10 real people in your industry or potential consumers of your product, would they find it interesting or informative? Would they be compelled to forward it to a colleague or another potential customer? If not, then the search engines won't place high value on it either.

3. Does your site read like a book? Or a stack of old newspapers?

Duplicate page content, broken or inactive links and redirected pages will kill your chances at ranking. Your site structure determines how engaged your customer is with your website. In analytical terms this is referred to as bounce rate. If your customer is leaving your site seconds after they arrive, the search engines know this and push down to the bottom of the rankings.

4. Are you encouraging interaction with your customers or trying to hide it?

For years we've known that more than 80% of internet users will research reviews on a product or website before they make a purchase. Now the search engines are taking this into account. Product reviews, testimonials, and customer feedback are golden with the new SEO rules.

5. Does your Brand exist outside of your own website?

If not, you're in trouble! The search engines place high value on those major websites we all know and love like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. If you're a B2B Brand you should be engaging with LinkedIn, posting and interacting with groups, and sharing links to the information on your website. The search engines index all of this. If you're a direct to consumer or eCommerce Brand you need to be putting your Brand where your buyers are and doing everything you can to get them to share, comment, and engage with your Brand.

While it may seem like you're standing at the base of Mt. Everest right now, relax. It's not as daunting as it seems, and in fact the new SEO is simply taking us back to the days before the internet if you think about it. If you have a legitimate product or service that you can sell effectively and you interact well with your customer or clients and build a honest and positive relationship, you'll succeed.

Search engine rankings are ever increasingly local concentrated to aid individuals to track down local business solutions, wherever and whenever suitable.

Fairly recently, Google presented the "Venice Update", which more intensely improved natural search results, with the help of localized indications. As you more than likely recognize, it once was the truth that to pinpoint a result in your neighborhood, you had to start looking using the city and/or state geographic modifier. For example: "Philadelphia Cosmetic Surgeon" to search for this expert this locale. Queries like this are still exceedingly well-liked, however companies whom are well-designed for regional online research also are given the added advantages of possibly being visible when an individual looks up the general query in that area.

The Venice Update can help deliver local results without the need for the addition of a local modifier to the search term. In most cases, your location is automatically specified by Google if undeniably it found an ideal locale influenced by your tailored options. Essentially, without even discovering it, consumers are finding local search outcomes for general key terms in several different categories.

We know that customers are experiencing a much better local encounter, so the debate today is, how do you be sure that you are routinely working to rank significantly in the local search results?

Recommendations Impact Local Internet Search Results

One of the main factors establishing whether a site will rank in your area are testimonials. There are wide-ranging customer feedback niche sites.

Info from all of these niche sites, which includes both profiles and testimonials, are widely used to enhance the geo-location of your corporation. Further, the amount, caliber and freshness of testimonials helps offer the search engines with a variety of significant indicators that play a role in your web site's general authority and relevancy based on their unique scoring.

There's also an added gain from employing customer review websites, in some instances they are going to be offering the ranking web pages for local search results, in place of local sites. A site, like Foursquare or Yelp, can be quite dominant and often will rank for searches on its own, even if your site does not position, there exists a clear chance that a customer feedback website can certainly acquire a ranking position on its own.

By being sure that you have an executed profile within preferred review sites, correctly geo-optimized and with customer testimonials, you'll definitely give rise to helping your organization and website beef up its position within related local organic and natural results.

In simple terms, what is it?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are a necessary evil for any online business today. That's because everybody is vying for that most coveted prize that Google is offering called Page Rank or PR. The actual term is PageRank (one word) and it was named after it's creator Larry Page, co-founder of Google. The term PageRank is a trademark of Google. Technically speaking, it really doesn't refer to what "page" your webpage shows up in Google's organic search results, but the ranking value assigned to it. Obviously, the higher the value, the closer to the top of the list of results. The closer you are to the top of the list of the search results (and only 10 results per page),... well, you get the picture. Therefore, SEO techniques that are properly employed will help your webpage(s) (website) be more visible to the search engines and in turn, the people doing the searching will find you.

Now that we have that out of the way let's move on. Search engine optimization involves tailoring of the content on your website in such a manner that it can easily be accessed by the search engines and assigned a value of importance that will determine your page ranking. This is basically a two-fold process that involves keywords and backlinks.

The two parts

Keywords: By using the specific keywords or keyword phrases that you have determined are relevant and distributing them throughout your website or article will help the search engines to understand what your website or article is about. It's important to spend some time researching your keywords or keyword phrases before just haphazardly sticking a bunch of words into your article or website. Google provides a free tool to do this called Google Keyword Tool. You'll need to setup a Google AdSense account to use it, but don't worry, it's free and you will not have to use AdSense if you don't want to. Afterwards, once you are confident you have the keywords or phases you would like to use just be sure to include them in any articles you write and disperse them throughout the content of your webpages on your site. If you have a static HTML site you'll want to be sure to include them in the meta tags (meta title & meta keywords) in the head section of each page. For content Content Management System sites (CMS), like WordPress or Joomla, this is usually handled when you go through the "General Settings" right after you install your site.

Backlinks: A backlink is simply a link from another website back to your site, also known as an "inbound link". If you have a lot of backlinks or inbound links to your site this will help to improve your PR with Google's search engine. However, if the inbound links are to be considered by the search engines they must be quality links or "relevant" to your website. For example, let's say you have a niche site and your niche is about fishing. You talk about saltwater fishing, freshwater fishing, types of fish, the newest gear and maybe even a few reviews. Now, there is another website out there you're aware of and this guy's website sells fishing gear, accessories and even fishing bait and his site has a blog too. His site is kick'in it and has lots of traffic. He writes an article about a new product he's selling and at the bottom of the article his blog allows people to leave a comments (typical blog) along with your name and website address. You leave a comment and fill in your name and your URL... you've just created a backlink. This is a backlink in it's simplest form, but it works as long as the site linking back to yours is relevant. Fishing + Fishing = Relevance, and that's a good thing. another simple way of doing this is by writing articles and submitting them to some of the large article submission websites. By including a link to your site within the article will create another backlink. As you can already tell, after doing this for a while you will eventually build a large number of inbound links to your website, but it does take some time and effort on your part and it wont happen overnight, but we'll bet back to that in a bit.

Why SEO is important?

SEO is important because if done properly the end result will mean more traffic to your website. After all, that's the whole purpose of a website; visitors. An online business can only be successful when people can get access to the information about the products or services you offer and that will only happen if the Search engines can see you and assign a high PR and of coarse, you must be optimized before any of those things can occur.

As stated prior, SEO also increases the visibility of your content on search engines. Application of search engine optimization strategies increases visibility of your content which makes it easy for your content to appear on the first pages. Did you know that majority of people using Google or one of the other search engines of their choice never look past the first page of their search results? Most never look at the second page. Why is that? Human nature! People feel the important, most relevant information should be on the first page. They believe if Google thought it not important enough to include it on the first page then neither do they. If your content appears on the first page, chances of it being accessed by online users and eventually visiting your website are very high.

Can anybody do it?

Although anyone can easily learn SEO techniques and use them to write articles or to spice up the content within their website, the process nowadays has become professional or at a minimum, time consuming. If you are building your very first website and you have the time it will take to fully optimize your site ( SEO never ends) then I say, give it a try. It will be good for you to know the process for yourself.

Professional SEO companies (the good ones) do what they do best. They specialize in SEO so they'll know all of the ins and outs to accomplish the desired result, but, this can be expensive. There was a time when I was using a professional service to do all of the SEO for several of my websites and I was paying close to $300/month. All I can say is this; if you have the money to spend and want more free time to do other things, then hiring a professional SEO service. I've seen prices of $100 - $200 a month for a single site.

Another alternative is to purchase software that can do the SEO for you. It's much more cost effective and most can be purchased for under $50 and for anything over that amount do your homework before investing.

SEOPressor is another very good alternative. This software actually comes in the form of a plugin for your Wordpress website. This software handles all of your site SEO and your article writing too. When you write an article SEOPressor will scan it and provide you a scorecard of the results. It will show you everything about your article that needs to be fixed before it is SEO ready. Your articles and website content will always be fully optimized with this software. The best part of it all is you will have more free time to do other things like planning that next website you've been thinking about. Did I happen to mention that SEOPressor is multi-site capable?

Final thoughts

Your online business is very important to you and the last thing you would want to have happen to it is for it to fail. A lot of thought, time and effort went into the creation of your website and if you will allow me to use a new car analogy? The owner of a new car needs to wash and wax their new car regularly to keep it clean, shiny and new looking. They need to perform regular maintenance (oil changes, tire rotations & new belts and hoses) to ensure the car will always run at optimum efficiency. Your website requires the same! Updated graphics, nice colors and pictures keep it clean, shiny and new looking. SEO keeps the engine (website) running at optimum efficiency.

SEO is still vital today if you have a website and want to see real traffic results. Achieving a high ranking in the search engines for a competitive keyword will almost guarantee you traffic. I'm talking about targeted traffic that is relevant to your website content.

SEO as we know it today has changed dramatically. Particularly in recent months with the Google Panda and Penguin updates. The search engines are moving the goal posts on a regular basis which means us web masters and internet marketers need to adjust and move with the trends.

Previously you could just throw up a web page and throw some links at it for it to rank. Now it takes a lot more than a load of backlinks to achieve a high ranking. If you want to see results you first need to focus on creating good content. Search engines want to provide their users with quality so therefore it is vital to give the likes of Google what they want.

Some of the recent updates have wiped away millions of web pages, many of which were considered spammy or contained poor content. These updates were thought of as harsh by many marketers as they saw their websites plummet in the rankings. SEO had changed. Most marketers who suffered have had to either try and recover their website rankings or have simply started again.

So, the first task is to create high quality content. These still need to be focused around a main keyword, which needs to be relevant to your site or page if you want to appear in a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.

With today's SEO, the internet has gone more social and the search engines are looking for social signals such as Google+ or Facebook likes. Simple link building does not work anymore so in order to get more traffic to your site you must diversify and cover more areas in order to create exposure.

If you use Wordpress, or any other web 2.0 sites then make good use of tags. It's quite possible to rank for many alternative keyword phrases simply by adding tags to your pages.

URL submission is still useful so bookmark or post your new blog post URLs to popular sites.

Also, do not take in all the information you read on the internet relating to SEO. The best method is to find your own strategy by testing different techniques and discovering what works best for you. This can take time but the results will be worth it.

Ensure you use meta tags in all your pages. Not necessarily for the keywords but more the description and title tag.

Take time on your keyword research as well. Find terms that receive a decent amount of traffic but has little competition. Those keywords will give you the best results.

Forget about black hat SEO methods. In order to receive organic visitors from the search engines you now need to focus on content along with quality links and social exposure.

You also need to vary your anchor text when building links. Even use anchor text that doesn't include your keyword or search phrase.