Incoming links are like votes in election for your website but it’s not like majority is authority, quality incoming links are considered more valuable than poor links even if you have 1000s. One quality link is equal to 100 poor links, in this article you’ll come to know how to get qualified links which can strengthen your website ranking and also how to build successful link building campaign.
Do you want to waste your hard earn money on getting poor incoming links to your website? Even if you don’t spend money, are you ready to spend your valuable time focusing on those irrelevant incoming links pointing to your website? Choice is yours!
Mistakes You Should Avoid When Link Building
It’s never too late to focus on the right direction to get qualified incoming links. Now look at the mistakes why majority of the people go wrong when they start link building. They misuse their money and valuable time, here is a list of the few major mistakes that you should avoid in link building.
1- Focus on Quantity than Quality: If you are looking for healthy amount of incoming links rather qualified ones, you should focus on getting quality and qualified links. Don’t go for amount, it’s the quality of incoming links that will bring your website at 1st page
2- Link Exchange or Reciprocal Links: Link exchange or reciprocal links should be avoided specially after Google big daddy update
3- Ignorance of Check and Balance for Links: If you don’t check and balance your listings periodically, you may lose your hard gain incoming links
4- Purchase Bulk Links: Search engines become very intelligent these days, you can’t make them fool by purchasing bulk links, because search engine check your incoming links frequency as well with time
5- Paid Links: Paid links can be very healthy but if they are used as a part of the strategy, if you have no idea of how many paid links you are going to have, that can create big upset in your overall link building campaign
Do You Have Categorized and Simplified Database?
In link building campaign, your database is your key to success, it is the backbone of your overall link building strategy. If you have a poor database, which is not categorized and simplified, you can’t be comfortable from your link building strategy.
Try to have categorized and simplified database, make a master database with following mentioned fields.
Important Fields for Master Database for any Link Building Campaign
- URL
- Direct Link (Direct Link of Submission or Registration)
- Industry Type (Show Biz, Construction, Telecommunication…)
- Link Type (One Way, Reciprocal, Paid)
- Link Style (Anchor link, Title Hyper Link, URL Link, Vote Link)
- Link Period (1 Year or Life time)
- PageRank (1, 2, 3…10)
- Title Limit (Characters Limit)
- Description Limit (Characters Limit)
- Keywords Limit (Characters Limit)
Let Everything Come to Your Master Database!
Now your master database (structure) is ready, what’s next? You need to make it valuable by inserting data to it, it requires an on-going updates. Don’t let anything go away, if it’s not required right now that’s ok, you might need it for your future projects.
It’s a two part article series, in next part (Part 2) you’ll come to know, how to make a successful link building strategy, linking types, styles and their weights for you link building campaign.
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There are just 12 simple steps to follow basic Search Engine Optimization for SEO starters, expertise and in-depth knowledge of these steps can take you to the expert level as well, this article has just an overview of the basic SEO.
- Research and select appropriate keywords to target
- Effective page Title Tags
- Effective and optimized META Description Tag
- Effective and optimized META Keywords Tag
- Integrate search keywords within Website copy
- Web design elements to avoid ensuring your site is search engine compatible
- Effective Alt Image attributes
- Effective and optimized text navigation menus
- Link titles and anchor link effectively
- Set up search engine friendly site architecture
- Creation of search engine friendly sitemap
- Robots.txt and its META tag
1. Research and select appropriate keywords to target
- Collect the business terms
- Check keywords relevancy with industry and conversion
- Check competition
- Check count on word tracker and Overture
- Make estimate traffic chart using Google Adwords
- Distribution of keywords on the basis of their weight
2. Effective page Title Tags
Title tag is the most important tag, almost all search engines evaluate webpage with title tag and check the relevancy with other elements of the page as well, and search engines also present results of a search by displaying webpage titles as links in the first line of each query result.
3. Effective and optimized META Description Tag
Description tag is the very important tag, search engines take webpage description through this tag, though search engines don’t give any importance to this tag in their ranking algorithms but this tag can lead searchers to motivate and visit your website.
4. Effective and optimized META Keywords Tag
Keywords tag has lost its value, search engines keep getting smarter, they have set their own criterion to identify web pages with their relevancies, they take each word as “keyword phrase” that is presented at webpage and they keep those words in priorities with their densities. There is no harm in utilizing this tag for marginally better results.
5. Integrate search keywords within Website copy
Since a very early stage of search engine revolution, search engines were able to evaluate website with relevance to their content, though they were not very efficient and intelligent like they are these days, but they were able to read the content at website and content still plays very important role in top ranking positions.
6. Web design elements to avoid ensuring your site is search engine compatible
Usually a website is designed keeping few elements in mind such as user friendliness, attractive design, beautiful flash animation, easy navigation, client specific or functionality oriented. In fact all these elements are very useful and important but what benefit is your web site if it has no visitors, search engine compatible websites are designed and developed keeping search engine policies and algorithms in mind, which enable websites to be easily crawled and understood by search engines.
7. Effective Alt Image attributes
Alternate text commonly referred to as Alt, is a text description that can be added to the HTML tag that displays an image. The ALT text is displayed by the browser when the cursor is moved over the picture. If pictures are turned off in the browser, the Alt text is automatically displayed instead.
8. Effective and optimized text navigation menus
Navigation is a very important part of any website; it gives guidelines to website visitors and directs them to relevant part of the website.
9. Link titles and anchor link effectively
Link title is displayed text by the browser when cursor is moved over the link.
An Anchor link is a little different from a hyperlink, a hyperlink directs to a complete webpage but anchor link directs to a specific area of a particular webpage, it may be at same page or different page or even at different domain.
10. Set up search engine friendly site architecture
A Website’s information architecture can greatly affect on its search engine visibility. Specific page elements, such as the site navigation scheme, and design technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript, can interfere with search engines ability to spider a site.
11. Creation of search engine friendly sitemap
A site map helps visitors navigate large, complicated sites by showing its entire structure. It is also used as a master diagram of the Web site for Web designers.
12. Robots.txt and its META tag
Robots.txt is a file placed on your server to guide the various search engine spiders not to crawl or index certain sections or pages of your site. You can use it to prevent indexing totally, prevent certain areas of your site from being indexes or to issue individual indexing instructions to specific search engines.
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Code of the website is the very first element that is unfortunately ignored by most SEOs, website code allows search engine bots to go through the web pages, and if bots are unable to understand code they won’t be able to access content of the web pages because content is kept within the code, this is enough to tell you about the importance of website code.
Three major elements of Website Code Optimization:
- Code Validation
- Code Compression
- Code Optimization
Code Validation
Today web designers and developers, who use WYSIWYG tools to design and development websites. These tools are really a great help especially when it come to time saving, these tools provide huge relaxation to designers and developers. All these tools can be very effectively used by trained and experienced designers and developers, but the real problem is that new designers and developers get trained using these tools that’s why they have very poor concept of coding. All WYSIWYG tools are very easy to use and if they are used improperly they can generate GARBAGE, which makes webpage HEAVIER and MEANINGLESS to search engine bots.
Search engines can’t see your webpage, they send their BOTS to crawl all web pages, and these bots work on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. They ONLY UNDERSTAND CODE, if your web page code is not validated they will stop reading from there and will evaluate your web page on the basis of received information. If you want search engines to read everything you have at your web page, validate your code before putting it online.
Code Compression
There is another very important issue, which can make your webpage more complex and less valuable when it comes to search engine’s point of view. Webpage visitors see only upfront of the webpage, they don’t care either webpage code is compressed or not. But you have to take care of code compression, so that your valuable content can be read by search engine bots and will be able to get good ranking in search engines.
Search engine bots always try to extract content from web pages, they don’t like to read code, though they can understand the code. On-page CSS and JavaScript declaration push your valuable content down, since top 2000 initial characters including code are very crucial to create good meaningful impression to search engines. That’s why you should try to call external JavaScript and CSS and also should try to make short naming for CSS classes, this way your code will be compressed and there won’t be any visual difference to your website visitors.
Code Optimization
Code Validation and Compression comes in Code Optimization, but there is more to do with the Code. Code Optimization is basically using search engine friendly CODE (Tags & Attributes) with their PRIORITIES and LIKINGS to search engines. Search engines like “TITLTE, HEADINGS, BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINE, ANCHOR LINK, TEXTUAL HYPERLINK, IMAGE HYPERLINK, PARAGRAPH, NUMBERING and BULLETS TAGS”, they also like “ALT and LINK TITLE ATTRIBUTES”. All these mentioned Tags and Attributes will give your content value to search engines. You should try to utilize all mentioned search engine friendly CODE (Tags & Attributes) as much as possible to take good rankings.
You should take care of your website code periodically (weekly or at least monthly), check your website code for BROKEN LINKS, MISSING and ORPHAN PAGES. Try to update “robots.txt and sitemap” whenever there is a change at the website. Check your website for CROSS BROWSER COMPATIBILITY, especially for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
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It’s a two parts article series, in part 1, I’ve already explained you about “What is SEO Copy Writing? Why Content is Still King? How to Balance Copy Writing Keeping Users and Search Engines in Mind? Who should I Write for Search Engines OR for Visitors? And Well Targeted Written Content is more valuable”
How to Develop a Successful SEO Copy Writing Strategy
There are five very important elements to develop a successful SEO copy writing strategy, a certain amount of content at website need to be updated periodically.
- Research the best keywords for your business / services
- Analyze the content of your competitors
- Logical distribution of selected keywords through out website
- Writing for those selected keywords
- On going fresh content
All these elements are very important and need healthy amount of time, there can’t be a standard because each strategy is unique and different. The more you study the better you’ll be able to produce.
Dos and Don’ts of Writing
When it comes to write for your website, you need to have your target audience in mind rather to facilitate search engines, respect your site visitors and educate them about your offered products or services. There is a list of dos and don’ts of writing for search engine.
Dos
- Try to use keywords in upper top 2000 characters including code
- Start paragraph with keywords
- Start sentence with keywords
- Use keywords in headings and sub headings
- Use keywords in bullets or as numbered
- Keep textual alternate navigation at bottom
- Have a breadcrumb at complete website and try to include keywords in it wherever possible
Don’ts
- Avoid using keywords at images or pictures
- Avoid using keywords in deep paragraph, since deeper use of keywords will have lesser value to search engines
- Avoid using pronoun for replacing important keywords, since pronouns won’t be of any value to search engines
- Don’t have link title for text based links
- Avoid keeping duplicate content on different pages of same website
- Never use copied OR pirated content at your website
SEO Copy Writing Techniques
- Search the relevant words (keywords) which are searched the most : Finding right keywords which correctly represent your company/products/services as well as they should be searched
- Try to focus on the words (keywords) when writing : Whenever write, keep focusing on keywords, try to repeat keywords but keeping the visitors in mind, your copy should be written for your visitors
- Unique/Original Content : Writing original and unique content is one of the most important aspect of your successful copywriting, the moment you upload your content try to make your content crawled by search engines, so that you can have the copy rights of that content, since search engines will take that content original which they crawled first, if your original content is copied and search engines have crawled that copied content first they may find your content as pirated, that’s why it’s very important to make your content authorized and copy right by search engines
- Fresh Content : Search engines give a lot of value to fresh content, since more frequently updates make your website more attractive to site visitors
- Focused and Relevant : Focused and relevant content is highly appreciated by search engines comparatively to those sites which are scatter or not focused
- Selectable and Visible Content : Search engines can’t read text over images, they also dislike hidden text, they can easily read selectable and visible content at website
- Proper Formatting Techniques : Search engines are able to recognize text formatting such as headings, sub headings, emphasis words, slogans, tag line, paragraph title, picture title…
- Short and Compiled : Short and complied content is always liked by site visitors as well as search engines, but as far as the quality of the content is concern it should not be compromised on the length of the content
- Keyword Utilization : Keywords should be used in “Title, Description, Headings, Sub-Headings, Bullets, Numbered, Bold, Italic, Underline, Hyperlinks, Anchor links, Alt Attributes, Link Titles, Table Names, Picture Names, File Names, Directories Names”
- Keywords Specific/Topical Writing Technique : SEO Friendly copying writing is a topical writing where keywords should be treated as topics, and writer should write about that topic, so that search engines can get attracted towards that topic / keywords
Now you know what it takes to write for website, you might be one step closer to improve your search engine rankings. You just need to follow the all mentioned guidelines that are listed in this article, if you have any question or want to have a personal training, write to me at Wahid@wahidqazi.com
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Writing is very specialized skill, it has different styles when it comes to different medias such as paper, television and web/internet, creative writers have no boundaries, no rules to write… but when it comes to get reward of their written material in search engines, they have to adopt certain guidelines, certain rules with standards so that their written stuff can get decent number of audience.
What is SEO Copy Writing?
SEO copywriting is nothing but just a topical writing where content writers always write for topics / sub-topics and those topics or sub-topics are called Keyword Phrases. There are some other techniques with this, which are kept in mind when writing for search engines, but whatever they write is topical as a result search engines can easily understand them and give them the most valuable positions. There is a proper procedure & technique for SEO Copy Writing which will be discussed later on in this article.
Why Content is Still King?
There is a very obvious answer to this question, content is still king because content is the major source of conveying message to search engine. Search engines read the content and then realize the importance of the content, they their-self understand the purpose of the website and then compare it with other related websites in their database, on the basis of your website’s content your website is given some rank in search engines, it could be at 1st page and could be at 100th page. There are plenty of other elements but content is one of the very important aspect of your website optimization, whenever writing for your website, keep in mind that your website is going to be evaluated not only by human but search engine’s bots as well.
How to Balance Copy Writing Keeping Users and Search Engines in Mind
Website copy can be liked and disliked at the same time by different human readers, there are plenty of external things that effect on human mind when reading such as mood, time, easy & flowery language and interests. But to search engines it’s entirely a different thing, they are built on artificial intelligence that’s why it doesn’t matter how difficult the words are, how boring the topic is, they have to read your written content time and mood can’t stop them.
I would never recommend writing for search engines, in fact search engines will never like it. Search engines have a very clear policy and that is “whatever is important for human readers is also important for search engines” that’s why always try to facilitate your readers but there is a simple guideline for search engines by following that you can make sure to balance your well written copy writing for both Human readers and Search Engines.
Who should I Write for Search Engines OR for Visitors?
Another very interesting question, there are many content writers who are worried to either write for search engines OR for website visitors? The answer is very simple, search engines don’t like them to feed, that’s why focusing on search engines is only a waste of time. But you can’t ignore search engines, since search engines are based on pre-defined algorithm (artificial intelligence) and they are compelled on certain things, such if your website code is not search engine friendly then search engines will be finding difficulty to read and understand website content. Content writers should focus on writing for website visitors but keeping search engines standards in mind, so that their content will have good impact on search engines.
Well Targeted Written Content is more valuable
Whatever you are going to write, search the right term to use, it may happen that your written content will get good rankings on certain keyword phrase but what if that keyword phrase is not searchable in search engines. That’s why you make sure that your written content should be well targeted, to search most searched keyword phrase in search engines, and you can use WordTracker or Keyword Discovery
It’s a two part article series, in next part (Part 2) you’ll come to know, SEO Copy Writing Techniques, Does and Don’ts of Writing, How to Develop a Successful SEO Copy Writing Strategy.
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Keywords are gateways through which your website is going to be visited from search engines users, those visitors can be filtered by keywords. Every single keyword or phrase has its target audience, in fact you can evaluate your visitors through keywords such as your visitor’s mind set, psychology, type, age group, interest and intension. If you have selected wrong keywords for your website, it could hurt your eBusiness badly.
What is a Keyword or Phrase?
A keyword or phrase is a single or group of words which is used to construct a search statement to find information by search engine users. It was popularized during the early days of search engine development, as it was not possible to ask natural language questions and find the desired sites.
Keywords are Gateway of Your eBusiness!
It really doesn’t matter how good your SEO Practices are? Or how good your SEO Strategy is? If you are failed to get right kind of traffic at your website. Keywords are the gateway for any website on internet, and with wrong keywords success can never be achieved.
Wrong Keyword or Phrase
There can be many definitions of wrong keywords, such as a wrong keyword or phrase is a keyword or phrase which is irrelevant with services or products of website, which has poor conversion of visitors into paying customers, and which is failed to bring targeted and focused traffic to website.
Wrong Keywords are not Bad Keywords
Wrong keywords are invaluable keywords for any website, they don’t have any worth for website, whereas bad keywords are those which are not searched or hardly searched by search engine users.
Why Waste Quality Time on Wrong Keywords?
Selecting wrong keyword or phrase is the biggest mistake for any SEO campaign, even if you have achieved top ranking on those wrong keywords, it will be waste of your energy and efforts. All your efforts are going to lead you no where if you have a wrong direction, keywords set directions for your efforts, selecting them in quick time will end up giving you nothing. Time is the real money, keywords can be updated anytime but what to do with the time spent on promoting wrong keywords, it’s just wasted. One can get frustrated if doesn’t have desirable results specially in the initial stage for any website, that’s why it doesn’t matter how much time you spent on selecting keywords but make sure that you select the best keywords.
Why Wrong Keywords are selected?
Majority of wrong keywords have good search counts, because they are comparatively search better than specific keywords, that’s why they get selected sometimes by website owner or by SEOs. But results come up after the first quarter or session when they failed to boast sales or right kind of traffic. It’s not the traffic that makes a keyword or phrase wrong it’s the conversion that makes it wrong.
Keywords Lead Your Website to Success!
These are the keywords which lead your website a successful eBusiness or eCommerce business, they can lead you to hell too, you have to be very careful selecting them, after all you or your assigned marketers are going to put their all efforts to bring your website on top of those keywords.
Specific and Focused Keywords will pay you!
Why get crazy of traffic and ask for everything, for example if you provide search engine optimization services then you should select keywords like “seo services, search engine optimization services, seo outsourcing, seo outsourcing”. And you should avoid selecting keywords like “seo or search engine optimizer”, because people typing “seo or search engine optimizer” may be searching for freelance seo or searching for definition of seo and won’t be interested in your services, they will come to your website and go without making any purchase.
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