Are you new to SEO or just want some SEO help then the Econsultancy SEO Guide is place to look.
The SEO Best Practice guide at over 200 pages is packed full of SEO tips and help. The guide takes you through a proven SEO process and for each step in the process gives you all the details you need. This is not generic stuff but real proven useful information that a lot of Search Engine Optimization or Internet marketing agencies are keeping secret from you.
Rather than spend $300-$500 on an website audit I would recommend joining Econsultancy where you will then get this best practice guide along with many other useful reports, guides and templates.
On-site Optimization also known as on-page optimization is the process of analysing and amending a website so that it is optimized against a set of keyword phrases. Your Website’s architecture, layout, and design can significantly impact your search engine results. The basic items to consider fall into three categories: design, navigation and content.
Design – Ideally, your Web site should be built from the ground up with all your keywords in mind and with consideration of SEO best practices. If you consider SEO early then it is easier although still not impossible if your website is already in existence.
Your website designers must either have or work with someone that has deep SEO skills. The previous stage of keyword analysis should have returned very focused keyword phrases relating to what the website’s audience is actually searching for. This will then dictate the overall site information architecture and content.
Some high level SEO best practices should include:
- Avoid search engine “non-viewable” content, e.g. flash, splash pages.
- Use cascading style sheets (CSS) for layout, enabling a cleaner HTML file.
- Use header tags (i.e. H1, H2, H3) to provide structure.
- Comply with W3C guidelines (HTML and CSS). Place in your contract that all deliverables must validate against the standards.
- Page speed. Pages should load fast and implement caches to speed up page display speeds.
Navigation – A website’s navigation plays an important role in a visitors experience and in the search engines ability to value your site’s content. Nowadays the navigation menu is not important to tell the search engine of your pages as most sites use XML sitemaps to communicate changes but it does provide valuable information as to how important a page is within the site’s architecture. For all menus remember:
- For button menus us the alternative text (or an alt tag) to tell the search engine the context of the button.
- For text links the text describing the link [anchor text] must match the target pages keyword phrases.
- Use the header and footer. The footer should be used to hold the standard items like contact-us, terms, privacy policy etc and leave the top for site content.
- Don’t hide the menu through complex coding, e.g. javascript, it must be visible to a search engine.
Content – Each page has a keyword phrase to target against and this should be used for the focus of the page content. The page must be seen to describe the topic not just the keyword phrase so use synonyms and alternative ways to describe your topic. But, remember don’t just write a page for the search engines as it is the visitors that will read and buy products or services based on what you say and not the search engines.
Thus, On-Site Optimization is the process to design, develop and refine each page on your website against a clearly researched set of keyword phrases. This process never ends as you should constantly measure your progress and adjust to keep ahead of the competition.
If you do a search for tools to help, you will find endless packages ranging from FREE to monthly subscriptions. At Help2SEO we swear by two tools which sit at either end of the market. The first, Traffic Travis although primarily a keyword research tool does have options to help optimize a page against a given keyword phrase. This does give a basic score but at the price of FREE is still a good starting point. The other tool we use is SEOENG which is a tool that crawls your site like a search engine robot and analyses each page giving very detailed reports on what may be causing you a problem. The below box will provide you with a free report that gives you an idea of what it can do:
Don’t complain if you have no website visitors if you don’t have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Everyone website owner or marketeer is looking for the perfect search engine optimization strategy that has an outcome of a top search engine ranking i.e. your site on page one. This can be difficult when you think all your competitors are all trying to do the same.
Any search engine optimization strategy must encompass both on site and off site optimization and I don’t think it is worth investing in off-site strategies until you have a sound website that has passed through on-site optimization.
On-site Optimization
This should be the first step in an SEO strategy and for some with low competitive search terms may well be all you need. Don’t confuse this with Google Page Rank, Google has some 200 factors it considers of which a considerable amount are related to the website and individual pages. This phase also covers the initial writing of the pages so that when a customer lands [landing page] the page is relevant to the term they used and the call to action gets them to convert. It is NO good getting visitors to your site on a false pretense as you won’t get any money out of them.
On page optimization includes page design, page content, keyword selection and then optimization, alt tags on your images, deep navigation, seo friendly links, title tags, page speed and SEO friendly code.
Off-site Optimization
Off-site optimization is a balance between a number of techniques listed below:
- Article Marketing
Article marketing is another search engine optimization strategy that has been around for a long time and is remains highly successful. You will write articles with a single keyword focus and this article will link back to your website using anchor text relevant to the keyword. These articles are then uploaded to article directories. This can be very time consuming and a number of article networks with automated tools have appeared like SEOLinkVine (click for more info).
This gives you two advantages; (1) these articles provide high quality single way links to your site that the search engines index, and (2) you will get visitors directly from the article sites. Article marketing is not a one time process, you must continuously post new articles over time.
- Trusted Site Inbound Links
Article marketing generates inbound links, but if you want valuable inbound links, you need to find trusted sites. Trusted sites are those that Google holds in high regard or thinks are an authority on a topic. In general any domain that ends in .GOV or .EDU is regarded as a trusted site. Additionally, a few high level directories like DMOZ or Yahoo! are trusted sites, along with major forums or information resources. Google is known to hate paid links and so if you need to pay for a link you must check the site is trusted by the search engines or it could count against you.
- Link Baiting
If you take the time to create high quality content that people like this will naturally attract attention and over time you will find people link to the article from blogs or social bookmarking sites. The seach engines also like this as it starts to make them think you are an authority on a subject or niche area.
- Social Media Marketing
Social media is not new anymore and is used by a large percentage of the population, though many marketers still don’t know how to take advantage. The goal is to use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to set yourself and your business up as an authority as well as a recognizable brand. You need to provide constant uptodate value that your followers/readers can participate in, the participate bit is key in that this is not about you telling them but about you listening and discussing with them.
- Viral Marketing
As a search engine optimization strategy, viral marketing is hard to measure, but can be one of the most successful ways of getting new visitors to your website. Examples of viral marketing include sending out free reports, video productions, and giving away free ebooks and software.
I hope you take away from this article that a Search Engine Optimization Strategy is a activity that is a blanace of techniques, both on-site and off-site. You don’t have to do it all at once, but do need to plan of what you will do and when you will do it, whilst keeping a measurmeent of which parts were successful and at what cost – ie. the Return on Investment (ROI).
If you are not using the strategies above, you’re missing an opportunity to get free targeted traffic for your site. A search engine optimization strategy starts with a long term view and a detailed plan on how to get your site to the top of your niche. Use multiple strategies, test constantly, and adjust when necessary – only then will you find the traffic you’ve been dreaming of.
For all those people that have spent hours trying to get quality backlinks to a website by writing articles will welcome SEOLinkVine. We all know that once you have your website optimized you need to start building up inbound on-way links, often referred to as link building. These need to be built up over time and only from quality, relevant sites. This costs a lot of money if you outsource to an agency purely because it is time consuming so when considering this product have the hourly rate of a good SEO agency in mind.
More information on SEOLinkVine can be found here!
So what does it do?
- First you need an article. You can write it yourself or get a freelancer to write it for you.
- Add backlinks with anchor text including your niche keywords.
- Submit the article to SEOLinkVine.
- All done! SEOLinkVine will take on the rest.
SO SIMPLE!
So this is really a mechanism to get access to a large network of article sites. The network sites included are quality independently owned.
This is a useful service for both the independent website owner wanting to execute SEO by themselves [DIY SEO] or for SEO agencies big or small. No limits just a monthly fee and if you don’t like it then get your money back.
No questions asked, money back guarantee – so give it a try!