55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

 Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

Compete Says Bing’s Combined U.S. Market Share Rose To 29% Last November

Compete Says Bing’s Combined U.S. Market Share Rose To 29% Last November

A couple of weeks ago, comScore came out with a report that said Microsoft’s Bing had reached an all-time high market share of 11.8% in November 2010.
According to rival Compete, however, Bing’s market share is actually much larger than that.
Based on search data from its panel of more than two million US-based internet users, the Kantar Media company says Bing-powered search engines as a whole grew 4.3 percent month-over-month in query volume, driving Bing’s total market share up by 1 percentage point.
Bing (‘MSFT’) and Yahoo’s search products (which are powered by Bing these days) had 14.4% and 14.6% market share, respectively, which means the combined market share of the search engines rose to a healthy 29% in November 2010, according to Compete’s search data.
Bing.com also saw the highest growth in the number of unique visitors, with a month-over-month increase of 7.4 percent (Yahoo’s number of UVs actually declined .3 percent). In November 2009, Bing’s market share was just over 10%, according to Compete.
Both ASK and AOL’s share remained flat from October 2010 to November 2010, which means there’s only one search engine whose market share effectively declined last November: Google‘s.
According to Compete, Google has seen its query volume decline for the second month in a row now, with a recent 1.1 percent month-over-month drop. Compete registered 66.4% market share for the search engine, down a noteworthy 7 percentage points compared to November 2009.
Excuse the blurry screenshot, but this was the best I could do (see source image).

Share Your Best Google AdWords Practices Week

Google is trying something new this week, encouraging AdWords professionals to share their best practices on a daily basis over the course of this week.
AdWordsPro Mini posted a thread at the Google AdWords Help forum asking AdWords advertisers to share their best practices. The official Google AdWords representative explained:

This week is "Share your Best Practices week - March 28 to April 1". What is this?: To show our appreciation of your dedication to this forum and to give you a special opportunity to demonstrate what you know, we're launching this "Share your Best Practices week - March 28 to April 1". Over the course of this week, we encourage you to share your AdWords Best Practices on important, difficult, or confusing topics.
How does it work?: Everyday, we will choose a topic and post it as question and let you share your own Best Practices! You are encouraged to share tips, tricks, useful resources that you may have developed, and your experiences on what has worked for you on this topic.
The best of the Best Practices shared for each topic during the course of this week might even receive a surprise gift!

The first topic posted was "Tips and Best Practices on optimizing AdWords ad text." The thing is, it has received very limited participating as of right now. So I am hoping to drive a bit of attention to it and start the conversation.
Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Is Google Rolling Out A Farmer / Panda Update?

There has been a slight uptick in the number of people reporting an update to the Google Farmer/Panda algorithm change.

Yesterday I gave a status update on farmer/panda and said I do not believe it is rolling out. Some disagreed with me but most did not.
The thing is, as Donna said, it might be rolling out on certain Google datacenters and not to everyone yet.
Trusted sources at the ongoing WebmasterWorld threads are saying that they have seen a 20-25% uptick in traffic post the Google update. So while they saw a 60% plus drop in Google referrers, since then, and recently, they saw a 20-25% increase in traffic. In addition, some are saying they are seeing the update roll out to Google UK.
Related to an improvement in the Google US algorithm update, a senior WebmasterWorld member gave some deeper insights into his traffic:

About 85% of my traffic comes from the homepage. So when I saw a 60% drop in traffic post-Panda, it was via phrase-based re-ranking on the homepage, but I did see 200 to 400 position drops (according to WMT) on my 5 shallow pages (that had affiliate links). Since internal pages only account for about 15% of my traffic, I really didn't notice their demotion impact. So what I think I am seeing, is an increase in traffic due to a specific phrase. That phrase (for the homepage) fell 550 positions, but has recovered to the top 100. This seems to have resulted in a slight upward nudge in longer-tail phrases that utilize that phrase. So "blue widgets" fell to -550, but as of Saturday it now ranks about #99. Subsequently, "big blue widgets" went from #20 to #16. For me, this has been very phrase specific, but I see the "shallow content" aspect. I'm not sure which is the chicken or which is the egg.

So maybe we are seeing early signs of Google updating and rolling out the Farmer/Panda update even further?