The Secret of Effective SEO
Search Engine Optimization Tips & TechniquesIntroduction
I've written this SEO guide for those who already know the basics but want to know more advanced techniques. This guide includes some theory, some techniques, some tips and a step by step SEO process that I personally follow. It's powerful so use it with caution ;)
1. Before You Start SEO
Before you start doing SEO, there are some important things to always keep in mind.
•Keywords. Remember that it all starts with keywords. Do a proper keyword research before you put your time and effort (and sometimes money) into SEO. Preferably, you should test your target keywords with PPC to make sure there's traffic you expect and if it's a good traffic (if it converts). Also keep in mind that you should target one keyword per page unless they are very tightly related.
•Content is key in SEO. So what if you do a great job to rank a page with crappy content and the visitors immediately click the back button after seeing your site. Google tracks the CTR and time spent on your site and if these indicators are very low, you will not hold on to your rankings for long. Worse yet, if your site looks spammy, the folks from Google may manually remove your site from their index at all. On the other hand, if your content is great, people will naturally link to you, thus increasing your rankings even more without you having to do anything. What you should strive for is to be better than your competitors on the first page of Google by providing better content than they do. I can't stress enough the importance of this. If you don't have good content, don't even start SEO.
2. What is SEO?
I'll assume that you know what is SEO (otherwise you wouldn't have found this report) and make it quick, if just to be sure that we're on the same page.
Search Engine Optimization is a method of manipulating search engine results to rank your pages higher and get more traffic. While most experts categorize SEO to black hat and white hat (sometimes gray hat), I would argue that. I will not teach you to spam and stick to what is called white hat SEO(with a little bit of grey hat for that extra flavor ;))
There's on page SEO and off page SEO. The former is what you do on your website to increase your rankings (that is, your content and site structure), the latter is link building.
3.On Page Seo
There are just a few elements of on page SEO, and they arguably have little influence to your rankings (as opposed to back-links), however they are so easy to implement that there's no reason not to. These are the musts to have on yourpage:
Page title – make sure to have your keyword in the title while also making it attractive to the user. There's no use of a listing if nobody's gonna click it. Think of it as an ad headline.
Meta description – while it doesn't have a direct impact on your rankings, it's important to have an attractive description because that's what the users will see. In other words, it's your ad. Make sure to have the keyword here too, otherwise the search engines will not display it.
H1 heading – make sure to have the keyword in the heading [h1 tag]
because structurally it tells what the page is about and it makes easier for the search engines to understand what your page is about. While you can rank a page relatively easy even without h1 tags, let's not make it harder than it has to be.
The content – make sure to mention the keyword in your content. The rule of thumb is to let the copy flow naturally without worrying about keyword density. If you are worried, include the keyword near the beginning of the content, once or twice in the middle (depending on the length) and near the end.
Website Structure – your website must have a logical structure and has to be easy to navigate. A quick and dirty solution without having to worry about it is using Wordpress. Here are some guidelines for your site's structure:
•Identify categories. Preferably they should be keywords (use a keyword toolfor ideas). Each category should be listed in a sidebar or a menu.
•If there are a lot of categories and it makes sense, you can have sub-categories. However, try to limit the level to 1 (i.e. Sub-categories without further sub-categories within them).
•A currently opened category should list all pages under it. If there are too many pages to list, implement pagination. The links to the pages must have the target keywords as anchor text.
•The most important pages should be listed in the menu or sidebar on every page of the site. That way you make use the ranking power of the site itself to increase the rankings of those pages.
•Always link back to the home page with the main keyword as anchor text (as opposed to “Home” - unless you want to rank for the keyword “home”).
Age of your domain – this is perhaps the most significant on-page SEO factor that can help with your rankings by itself. The website's age is one of the most important factors that Google takes into account as well as it allows you to be more aggressive with link building. So when starting a new site, look for old domain on auction. There are several domain auctions out there (Go Daddy Auctions, Snapnames, Pool, Namejet – to name a few). And there are thousands
upon thousands of expired domains in different niches that you can buy for aslittle as $10. I recommend doing this for any new project you do as it will help your SEO a lot.
4. Off Page SEO (Link Building)
Now this is where the magic happens. If we take the on page SEO for granted,all SEO can be summed up into getting as many quality links as needed. Assuch, all SEO tips and techniques come down to link building.
But first, let me define what is a quality back-link. There are 2 important factorsas far as votes for your page (i.e. links from other sites):
1.Importance
2.Relevance
An important note is that at least as of writing this relevance is not that importantof a factor and links that are considered important, still help your ranking regardless of the relevance of the page they're on. However, many experts believe that Google is moving towards relevance and it makes sense to aim for relevant back-links. Another reason why it makes sense is that you're likely to get more direct traffic from relevant sites than irrelevant.
The importance of a page is simply defined by PageRank. The higher it is, the more important the page is. Note that there's a common misconception to assume a home page PageRank of a site to be the PageRank of the whole site. There's no such thing and every single page has its own PageRank. So just because you get a link from a random page without a PR on a site with a high home page PR, doesn't mean you get any benefit from it. That doesn't mean that you don't get it either, but you should always look for the PR of that particular page and not other pages.
Also, keep in mind that the PR you see in Google Toolbar, is not an actual PR and is rather a snapshot of the actual PR at some time in the past. This
snapshot is updated every few months. That means a page with a PR may have a different PR in reality, and more importantly, a page without a PR may actuallyhave one.
Here are the guidelines you must follow when getting backlinks:
•Never SPAM. Nobody likes spammers and you should not be one when building links. While technically only e-mail spam is illegal, that doesn't mean you should spam forums, blogs and other sites. If a website doesn't want to have your links – don't push them.
•Pay attention to other outgoing links. Your link shares the PR with other outgoing links on the same page, so the less of them there are, the better. Avoid pages with 100s of outgoing links, as you will get little benefit from them and Google might consider it a link farm (a “bad neighborhood”) and in extreme cases decrease your rankings by a notch rather than increasing them. However, don't worry too much about it as bad incoming links rarely have significant negative influence (otherwise anyone would be able to sabotage their competitors by simply building some bad links for them).
•Try to get links closer to the top of the page (preferably in-content) rather than the footer or sidebar. While it doesn't have such a huge impact, it canhave a slightly better effect.
Where to Get Backlinks?
Here are most of the places you need to know:
•You can get some, what I call, “filler links” (links of lower quality) from article
directories, Web 2.0 sites, social bookmarks, blog comments, forum posts,classified ads, press releases, videos, etc. But again, don't spam. To be safe,stick to just article directories. All of these sites give you only low importance back-links so it's natural to post low quality content.
•Use your other sites! I can't believe how often this method is overlooked but itis. To tell you a secret, I've grown to have so many sites that I can rank for most keywords I want just by linking back from them. Linking to yourself is natural thing to do and even Google agrees with that. An important point to note is that if you create sites for SEO purposes (and you should do it ;))you should use different hosts/IPs as much as possible. Google “seohosting” for more information.
•You can buy high PR links. Keep in mind that this is considered as a no-no byGoogle and they recommend against it as well as may ban your site if they catch you. On the other hand, you can buy links for traffic and nobody can enforce the site that sells you the link to use the no follow attribute. If you can get both, traffic and SEO benefit, why not!
•You can exchange links. If you do it, use the 3 way exchange. That is, you get someone to link to you, but instead of linking back to them from the same site,you link from another. This is to avoid the reciprocal linking which searchengines de-value. Keep in mind that like buying links, exchanging links is also“grey-hat”.
•Buy other websites. If you don't have other websites yourself, buy them. Whilehigh traffic websites are expensive, you can find some low traffic websites witha good PR that would sell for cheap.
•Buy expired domains. You don't even have to buy a whole website, just a domain with age and PR is even cheaper and will have the same effect once you rebuild the site. You can retain the PR of an expired domain if you rebuild
it as soon as you get it transferred to you. This is a very advanced technique so I suggest you to find more information about buying domains if you decide to try doing it.
•Guest posting can be a great source for high quality links as well as traffic.There are many high profile blogs in any niche and many of them are more than welcome to publish guest posts. You can find them on Google by searching for “write for us”, “guest post” and similar phrases. The key to keep in mind here is the quality of the content you can provide them.
6. Closing Word
So that's about it. I've tried to make this report as short and to the point as possible and basically condense all I know about SEO to these few pages. I hope it helps you in your SEO endeavors. Good luck!
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