Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Off-Page SEO strategies

Perhaps you'll be a little surprised, but off-page optimization starts with the content (which is the king, as you remember). The very first step you should accomplish before starting any link building is quality content. Remember, it is much easier to get a link onto some amazingly creative or informative article rather than onto a scanty set of trivialities. Deliver the content and the qualtiy backlinks will become much more closer to you than you think.

Nevertheless, the content alone is not enough. You still need to put some efforts into your link building strategy. Here is the rough step-by-step:




Know your product
Seems stupid at first, isn't it? But surprisingly many people all over the world simply do not know what do they offer! They simply cannot explain what they sell, what product they deal with, what's its features, why do other people need this product and what differs this product from other 2567 products of that kind. They simply do not know. But you must know that! Think of your product or service. What's unique in it? How can it help others? Who are your potential customers? You see, you cannot offer your services or products to some average and faceless customers. You must clearly understand who your customers are and why do they need you product. Start with that, figure it out for yourself, then formulate it into words to explain this for other people as well.

On-Page SEO strategies

The content is the king. Your main on-site SEO strategy is to build the content interesting to your visitors, providing info and value, correctly describing the services you offer, but not being a dull piece of text leaving the memory two seconds after you have finished reading it. At the same time, the content must serve its SEO purpose - to be a landing page for search engine queries. Surely, the process of writing a good copy is a creation, not the hack-work, but nevertheless there are few steps that you can follow walking this path:

Discover your keywords
This is the first thing you should think of while starting to optimize your site content. It doesn't matter what industry you're working in - every industry, every sphere of human work can be described in hundreds if not thousands of different words! And your potential customers enter many of those words in the search box every day! You can't afford yourself to sit and look how this money river just flows downwards passing you by.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Top 10 Mistakes of search engine optimization

  1. Targetting the wrong keywords This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.
  2. Ignoring the Title tag Leaving the tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title.</font><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">  </span><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3"> </font></li><li><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">A Flash website without a html alternative Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it. </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3"> </font></li><li><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">JavaScript Menus Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable. </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3"> </font></li><li><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">Lack of consistency and maintenance If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines. </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3"> </font></li><li><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">Concentrating too much on meta tags A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this. </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3"> </font></li><li><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">Using only Images for Headings Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach: </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3"><a href="http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text">http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text</a>. </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">  <br></font></li><li><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">Ignoring URLs Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs. </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">  <br></font></li><li><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">Backlink spamming It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks. Here are some more information on </font><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">The Importance of Backlinks</font><span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;"> </span><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">  <br></font></li><li><font style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;" size="3">Lack of keywords in the content Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them. </font></li></ol> </DIV>