Search engine optimization effort can be categorized into three basic elements “Code, Content and Linking (CCL)” these three diverse elements play very important role in search engine rankings, you will come to know about their effectiveness and usability with some of the very useful tips in this article.
| Code |
Content |
Linking |
| Writing Code |
Content Writing |
Internal linking |
| Validating Code |
Formatting |
Incoming or Inbound linking |
| Cleaning & Optimization Code |
Content Placement |
Anchor linking |
| Cross Brower Independence |
Content Distribution |
Navigation |
| Robots.txt and sitemap |
Content Updating |
Site Structuring |
Code
Code of the website is the very first element that is unfortunately ignored by most SEOs, website code allows search engines bots to go through the webpage, and if bots will not be able to understand code they will not be able to access content of the webpage because content is kept within code, this is enough to tell you about the importance of website code.
Code of the website has to be clean and optimized, here i means that code like JavaScripts or CSS should be called externally, try to keep your code as short as possible and ignore too much nesting.
You must validated complete website code either everything is working fine or not, check for browser compatibility, orphan pages and broken links, don’t forget to have robots.txt and sitemap.
Content
Content is still king, no one can deny the fact that since the revolution of search engine in mid 90s, content is undefeated king. Content needs special treatment, today search engines automatically take keywords within content, they become more conscious about content, they follow basic fundamentals of writing techniques, such as headings, sub-headings, bullets & numbered, inverted commas.
Now it’s up to you either you are successfully able to give an impression of your important keywords to search engines, try to use your important keywords in headings, sub-headings and try to start paragraphs with important keywords.
Note: – Here content means selectable content, content on images can’t be selected and read by search engine bots.
Linking
Linking is one of the most important criteria to get better rankings in search engines specially in google. Linking is divided into two categories onsite linking and offsite linking. Onsite linking belongs to links that are mentioned at your web-domain either they are internal or external it doesn’t matter, they have to be declare at your website (domain). Offsite linking belongs to links that point your web-domain from a different web-domain, they are inbound or incoming links to your website (domain).
In internal linking you should try to keep web pages as close as possible to root, if you have a big site of over 100 pages or 500 pages then you have to make relevant directories and keep relevant pages in them.
In link-building you have to keep few things in mind that link has to be one way, and link title and description should be very focus, try to have incoming links from relevant sites, since one relevant link is equal to 100 irrelevant links, when submitting to directories, go as deep as possible and try to find most relevant category where you can submit your site.
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It is seen many times that website rankings get stuck and some times started going down. Is it due to lack of SEO knowledge? Weak link popularity? Poor content? Pathetic coding? There must be a way to get things going. In this article you’ll come to know what makes your web ranking stuck and how to improve your rankings!
Search Engine Minimization!
The term search engine optimization is not valid specially after Google’s Florida update, in that update google introduced a new term called “Over Optimization” and it’s very well known today. Well there is no measurement tool to analyze either the practice is optimized or over optimized that’s why SEO should go for search engine minimization, what is search engine minimization? Search engine minimization is a technique that deals with basics and its primary purpose is to get the website listed in top 500 website rather looking directly for top 5 placements.
Focus on the Competitors!
When your website rankings stuck and you are short of ideas, what to do? How to move forward? The very first thing you should do is to not worry, but don’t get relax it’s time to keep an eye on your competitors, observe the top 5 competitors and the top 5 above of your rankings that means 10 for each keyword, look at them and try to find out either there is something missing what you are doing or your competitors are very intelligent enough. Your competitors can make you learn the best lesson sometimes.
There are certain areas in search engine optimization which should be improved with time, if you don’t take care of those elements, your website will be out-dated and miss-fit in front of your competitors, since all your competitors are fighting for top positions.
On Going Content Improvisation
Look at the content either your website has fresh original content with balanced keyword density, content is still king, never ignore the value of quality content, you can compare keyword density balance with your competitors.
Active Link Building Campaign
The more inbound qualified links your website has the better position it will get, never let your link building campaign die, link popularity is like oxygen for life, try to find out more relevant and qualified incoming links, permanent and one way links will be obviously preferable than temporary reciprocal links.
Optimized, Validated and Error Free Coding
Your website code is one of the very important element of your search engine ranking, you must check your website code for quality assurance periodically, sometimes everything looks fine but you never know your competitors, they might be doing something very special which you might have ignored.
Some other Tips to Get an Extra Edge over Your Competitors
- Increase domain registered period for at least next five years
- Keep the same address at website and at domain registration
- Apply proper formation technique such as H1, H2, Bold, Bullets…
- Don’t miss Alt tags
- Don’t miss title tags for image base links
- Proper directory and file structuring
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It’s a two part article series, in part 1, I’ve already explained you about mistakes you should avoid in link building, how to categorized your database and create your own master database for link building campaign.
Few Lessons from Your Competitors!
If somehow you are finished with your database and you require more incoming links for your website, you shouldn’t worry about it as far as your competitors are there to guide you. You can easily see how many links are pointing to your competitors from search engines. Google doesn’t show the real figures but you can take it from Yahoo and Msn, now what you have to do is to find out where exactly your competitors are linked and start putting your competitors’ incoming links to your master database with all required fields.
After you finished with all your competitors, don’t waste your time start submitting your website.
Important Aspect of Incoming Links:
Incoming links are evaluated on certain criteria and weight, there are four major aspect of incoming links on the basis of them each links are considered more valuable.
- Link Age
- Link Text Relevancy
- Link Page Relevancy
- Link Domain Relevancy
1. Link Age
Link age is one of the factors your website or webpage is going to be tested through, the older the links are the better they will be reliable.
2. Link Text Relevancy
One relevant link is equal to 100 irrelevant links, you better guess how important is the link text relevancy, here relevant link text means the title of the link and very next paragraph after title.
3. Link Page Relevancy
Page relevancy is also very important factor, your pointed links should be placed on the relevant pages. The overall page content should be relevant with your page.
4. Link Domain Relevancy
Link domain relevancy is something that can’t be ignore, if your pointed incoming links are placed on the relevant domain and relevant page they will be highly appreciated and have more weight than your competitors.
Incoming Link Types and Styles:
Link type and style are very important, you should try to maximize their effectives and values in favor of your link building campaign, each link has different value and weight to search engine, and I’ve defined almost all types of incoming links with their styles. I’ve distributed links in five groups with descending order.
1. Title Anchor Links: Title anchor links are area or content focus incoming links on any particular page
2. Title Hyper Links: Title hyper links are those links where the actual linking area is title
3. Description Text Links: Description text links are those links where the actual linking area is description
4. URL Links: URL links are those links where the actual linking area is their website addresses or URLs
5. Static Links: Static links are placed on plain SEO friendly pages that have plain URLs, they are considered very important links
6. Dynamic Links: Dynamic links are placed on dynamically generated pages and considered to be less important
7. One Way Links: One way links can be either dynamic or static but they will be only incoming links, they won’t be linked with your domain
8. Reciprocal Links: Reciprocal links can be either dynamic or static but they will be linked with your domain, if you don’t put their links to your website, they won’t put your link at their website
9. Vote/Rank Base Links: These types of links vary with their reputation, people gives votes or ranks to links and on the basis of those votes/ranks their link position vary
10. Lifetime Links: Lifetime links are those links which will be active for life time as long as the domain is there
11. Periodical Links: Periodical links are those links which will be active for certain period (such as 1 year or 2 years) after that they will be no more, usually these types of links are paid links
12. Same Window Open Links: Same window open links are those links which open in the same window or they refresh themselves
13. Blank Window Open Link: Blank window open links are those links which bring you to blank windows and open the pointed links on them
All these link types and styles have different meanings and values to search engines, being an SEO you should try to utilize your best available resource and try to focus on the right direction rather getting just links coming to your page.
I hope this article will help you in developing a successful link building campaign, since I’ve tried to explain almost all types of links with their values and weight according to search engine.
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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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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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