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?

10 ways to be a great SEO

Despite the fact that SEO can make or break a business online, SEO still conjures up a lot of negativity.

Some of the negativity is fair. While there are plenty of legitimate SEOs, the market still has its fair share of snake oil salesman going from client to client in a hit-and-run fashion promising the world but delivering none of it.
The negativity and controversy that exists around SEO can make the SEO market a tough place to do business. Here are 10 ways to be a great SEO and to demonstrate to your clients and prospective clients that you're committed to providing a legitimate, top-notch service.

• Don't guarantee results. No matter how skilled you are and no matter how good your track record is, it's impossible to guarantee results since there's so much that is out of your control, even if you do everything right. So instead of promising things you aren't able to promise, describe what you can do to put your client in a position to achieve results and how the things you've done in the past resulted in success for other clients.If you find yourself dealing with someone who is demanding guarantees, consider moving on since these situations rarely end well in my experience.
  
• Set expectations. Even though you can't guarantee top SERPs, you can help a client create realistic expectations. Whether it's giving the client timeframes for the tasks you'll be completing or explaining the process of SEO, it's important to be sure that the client knows what to expect.
• Educate. Some SEOs don't like to tell their clients what they're doing. They think of their knowledge as a trade secret and believe that if they educate the client, the client will eventually fire them and take over SEO themselves. This type of mentality is the hallmark of an amateur consultant. Most clients prefer transparency to secrecy and aren't interested in firing consultants performing services that don't fall under their core competencies. You should think of knowledge sharing as a way to demonstrate your competence to clients, making yourself even more valuable.
  
• Admit when you don't know something. SEO is a dynamic field and things are always changing. In many cases, hard and fast rules don't exist and there aren't any 'official' answers. So when a client asks you about something and you don't have an answer, don't make one up; say so and look into it.
• Keep your skills and knowledge up-to-date. Search engine algorithms are in a constant state of flux and the field of SEO is one of the most dynamic on the internet. Make sure you're staying on top of the latest developments since no client wants an SEO in 2009 who has 2005 skills and knowledge.
• Define deliverables. Last week I wrote that SEO is a journey, not a destination. It's important for clients to understand that. If someone wants to hire you for a few weeks, there's a lot that you can deliver but there's also a lot that you can't deliver. Therefore I always recommend detailing what deliverables you can provide in the timeframe that the client gives you, being realistic about what this means to the client's overall SEO strategy.
• Don't push the limits. The line between white hat and black hat is often blurred and even if your risk tolerance is high, you shouldn't assume that a client's is too. Think of yourself as a doctor when working with clients and remember to 'do no harm'.
• Provide references. Even though some prospective clients won't ask for them, offering up references proactively is a good idea because it helps you stand out in a market that still has more than a few snake oil salesmen.
• Don't confuse SEO with PPC. Be careful about confusing organic SEO and paid search marketing. Yes, I've actually met people who didn't know the difference because their SEO 'experts' had led them to believe that the two were the same. Obviously that was probably a way of masking the fact that they were unable to deliver organic results.
• Remember that SEO is more than just Google. Even though Google deservedly receives most of the SEO attention because it has the marketshare in the major markets, good SEO is holistic and many of your clients might receive significant benefits from other search engines. Therefore don't exclude other search engines from your services.

WordPress SEO resources and tips

WordPress is a popular open-source blogging platform that has a powerful set of features and can be extended through the use of free plug-ins, of which there are thousands.
 
To maximize the usefulness of WordPress as a business tool, you should take advantage of every opportunity to optimize your blog for search engines.
WordPress Documentation

WordPress' Codex includes a page dedicated to SEO topics and this page is a must-read for anybody operating a WordPress blog.
This page includes important information about setting up SEO-friendly permalinks, maintaining a healthy Robots.txt file for search engines and making sure that you're taking advantage of feed submissions. It also links to websites with useful SEO information.
WordPress Plugins

There are a number of great plug-ins that make it easy to implement SEO techniques with WordPress.

All in One SEO Pack

The "All in One SEO Pack" is one of the most downloaded WordPress plug-ins and performs a number of functions, including optimizing your page titles, adding META tags automatically and removing common duplicate content.

Google XML Sitemaps

Another popular plug-in, Google XML Sitemaps creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap for your blog.

KB Robots.txt

This plug-in enables you to create and edit Robots.txt files from within the WordPress admin.

Redirection

Redirection helps you monitor 404 errors, automatically manage 301 redirections when a post URL changes and has a powerful set of features that helps you redirect users to different pages based on various conditions.

Breadcrumb NavXT

Add breadcrumb navigation to your WordPress blog with this plug-in.

WordPress Related Posts

This plug-in allows your blog to feature "related posts."

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images automatically adds the ALT and TITLE attributes to images.

Nofollow Case by Case

This plug-in enables you to decide which comments, pingbacks and trackbacks have or don't have the "nofollow" attribute which is otherwise automatically added by WordPress.

SEO strategy for new websites

Starting a new company is extremely hard, which is probably why most businesses fail within the first couple of years.
Challenges such as marketing and hiring the right staff are some of the major issues that even good managers struggle with.
Launching a new website is just as hard and, as if things weren't difficult enough, Google gives people an extra hurdle which is sometimes called the "sandbox".

When you launch a new site, Google doesn't trust it at all. Even if the BBC launched a new site it would start off without any trust and would receive very little traffic.
As the site attracts links from other sites, it gradually earns enough trust to start ranking for some long tail search terms.
If the site gains enough trusted links it may start to rank highly for competitive keywords (ie keywords with lots of PPC advertisers) but this can take up to 24 months.

You are probably thinking that this is a harsh move by Google, but with the sheer volume of sites being launched it needs to have some method of making sure only the really good ones reach the top.
Luckily you can follow a few simple tips to reach the top quicker.
1. Your first links
When you launch your brand new site the first few links can make all the difference. Linking to it from other trusted sites right out of the gate can dramatically shorten the time it takes to build trust. Conversely, starting a site off with low quality links is suicide.

Submit to a couple of trusted directories such as Business.com and the Yahoo! Directory and maybe link to the site from some of your other company's websites (link from the news sections to appear more natural).

2. Spin-off sites
Sometimes a new site is a spin-off from a particular section of an existing site. For example, a car insurance site might have a caravan insurance section but then decide to launch a dedicated caravan insurance website.
In this case, the best method would be to create the new site on the new domain and not allow Google to access it. Then once the site was ready you would 301 redirect the old pages to the new pages and hope that the rankings and trust from the old domain passed across.

3. Building trust
Most people try to get relevant links to their sites, which are great for improving rankings in a particular niche but not quite as good for building trust. The ideal links for building trust are from major blogs and news sites.
These can also be quite relevant as usually the article linking to you is related to your niche - even though the rest of the site isn't.

Sites that receive a lot of attention from the mainstream press almost always start ranking a lot more quickly than sites that don't have the benefit of a large PR budget.

Why you need to know PPC to be great at SEO

Andrew Girdwood wrote an article in April last year, which spoke about why to be great at PPC you have to be good at SEO.
There are some excellent tips here, which are well worth taking a look back over, but I believe this can be applied both ways.
Looking at this from the opposite perspective, I have listed some reasons why, in my opinion, having a strong understanding of the paid search advertising model can be a big advantage to improving SEO techniques.
Below are a few tips about how you can integrate PPC knowledge into your SEO strategy:

• Paid search helps you to understand the importance of click through rates (CTRs) because PPC managers will try to write concise and interesting PPC headlines to generate a maximum number of clicks.
  
  For SEO, you can look to integrate the top performing PPC ad headline ideas into webpage title tags; maximising CTRs for organic listings, while still using optimised keywords relevant to a specific search.
  
  
• In many cases, optimising a website’s homepage is the easy option for targeting the most important keywords. However, if this was a paid search campaign, you would not send users to a general webpage where the navigational options are high and where the user may not find what they have originally searched for, get confused and hit the back button.
  
  Instead, you would try and keep the bounce rate low by selecting a PPC landing page containing content related to a specific query. Shouldn’t you be doing the same for organic search traffic?
   
• Organic search snippets are commonly very bland and boring to read for users, but the main objective of a PPC ad is to be compellingso that it attracts a user’s eye and increases the number of clickthroughs.
  
  PPC descriptions can be very time-consuming to perfect, but once they are performing well they can easily be applied to freshen up meta descriptions and provide a more interesting listing in the SERP’s.
  
  You should also remember not only to use important keywords (so that these are highlighted when searched for), but also to clearly describe the landing page content so that the description attracts as many relevant clicks as possible where traffic is likely to be of a good quality and convert at a higher rate.
  
  This can be very effective when applied to webpage’s which are already generating significant volumes of search engine traffic.
   
• Landing page optimisation is often overlooked during an SEO project. However, it is possible to optimise a webpage effectively while still using many of the usability techniques you would apply to a PPC ad.
  
  This should create a clear navigational path to direct users towards the end goal of a converting sale or lead. Sometimes you may have to finely balance the importance of landing page, perhaps for example with a #6 ranking achieving a 5% conversion rate, compared to a less optimised #8 ranking with a 15% conversion rate.
  
  But the end goal should always be the quality of traffic, so optimising for conversions should always be a major consideration.
   
• Many website URLs are long, messy and often don’t contain targeted keywords. If you have a PPC display URL which is achieving high CTRs, try to incorporate this into your organic strategy to build a URL structure which is tidier for the search engine spiders and more attractive to click for a searcher.
  
  
• PPC is frequently seasonally-based. For example, in PPC you may heavily promote summer holidays during the early months of a New Year. Seasonality isn’t as common in SEO, but if you look at this with a PPC mindset you may try and optimise for seasonal keywords more heavily.
  
  Perhaps aiming to improve organic rankings for specific terms such as “Beach Holiday Destinations in 2009”, also targeting additional traffic from Google News and Universal Search results.
  
  If you already have high rankings for more competitive terms such as “summer holidays”, rather than creating new content on a separate URL you could update the previous version instead, maintaining rankings and providing users with more relevant and higher converting content.
   
• Actual PPC keyword data can be invaluable to an SEO campaign. While there are many very good keyword research tools available, few compare to actual search volume, impression data from Google AdWords.
  
  In addition to improving the accuracy of estimating search traffic, the clickthrough rate and conversion figures can be very useful towards selecting terms which are key to a business. Some keywords may not convert as highly as expected when put into practice, so testing these first using PPC means you can focus upon proven high-quality keywords, rather than basing selection on assumptions which may prove to be incorrect.
  
  This is especially important when you consider that it may take over 6 months to find this out while waiting for rankings to reach a high-traffic referring level.
  
  
• Many high converting PPC keywords are likely to be long tail variations which you may not have considered otherwise. When added to an SEO campaign, these are likely to be less competitive to obtain high organic rankings for and may quickly become a very profitable source of traffic.

Six design tips for better URLs

It’s an area that is overlooked on many websites, but URL design is an important consideration. Bad URLs may mean that you website won’t be found, visited, or submitted to sites like Digg.
Ideally, URLs should be short, readable, descriptive and memorable. Visitors to your site, other sites linking to yours, and of course the search engines will appreciate the care you have taken over your URL structure.
Here are a few tips for URL design…
Make URLs readable
If your URLs are readable and describe the content of the web page they lead to in some way, people will be more likely to click on them.
For example, this URL from VentureBeat is easy to understand: http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/17/google-to-buy-valve/, but this one from ClickZ is incomprehensible: http://blog.clickz.com/080916-122203.html. There are far worse ones out there too - for some reason, laws of nature and all that, the bigger the media brand the worse this seems to become (serial offenders include CNN, Reuters, MSNBC, etc).
Keep them short
A short URL is more likely to be remembered and is much easier for people to type it straight into the address bar on their browser.
Also, if you need to email a link to someone, a long longer than around 70 characters will not display well in many email clients. Easier said than done, in many cases (it can be tricky for publishers).
Make them permanent
People bookmark webpages on their browsers, or on social sites like Digg, and Delicious so, once you have published a web page, don't alter the URL as users clicking these bookmarked links will just encounter an error.
Make them guessable
If your URL structure makes sense, then people will be able to guess and navigate around a site by editing the URL. For example, if you are on this page: http://econsultancy.com/blog, then you know that, by removing the 'blog' part you can get back to the homepage, or add another term, such as research to reach that section of the site.
Use keywords in URLs
Having keywords in URLs can be useful for search engines, as well as making them more readable. This is something that Google has advised in the past.
Another reason for including keywords is that, as the URL will be displayed under the page title and extract in search results page, this information may be used by people considering whether to click on a link.
Avoid session IDs
As different URLs are generated for different human visitors,  Session IDs cause search robots problems. As a result many search robots have a rule that they don’t crawl these pages since there are many different pages addresses for different sessions.
Websites that have registration processes, or wish to track user activity will often use session IDs; an alternative is to use session cookies instead.

Google provides tips on duplicate content

Duplicate content is an important issue and something that can have an adverse effect on a website’s search engine rankings.
So lots of site owners will be pleased to hear that Google has provided some tips on how to address it.
According to Sven Naumann on Google's Webmaster Central Blog, there are two main types of duplicate content:
Duplicate content within one website
This is often unintentional and can be the result of sites having pages for similar products where the content has been only slightly changed, or because landing pages have been created for PPC campaigns.
In this case, Google recommends that webmasters include the preferred version of the URL on their sitemap file, which will help the search engine's crawlers find the best version.
Duplicate content across domains
This refers to content identical to that on your website appearing on third party domains, often when sites use scrapers to copy your text and use it to push themselves up the rankings.
Naumann claims that Google manages to determine the original source of the content "in most cases", and that having your content copied shouldn’t impact on your search rankings.
He offers the following tips if sites with scraped content are ranking higher than the original website:

• Make sure your site’s content is being crawled by Google.
  
  
• Check the Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
  
  
• Make sure your site is in line with Google’s webmaster guidelines.