21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques

1. Commit yourself to the process. SEO isn’t a one-time event. Search engine algorithms change regularly, so the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. SEO requires a long-term outlook and commitment.

2. Be patient. SEO isn’t about instant gratification. Results often take months to see, and this is especially true the smaller you are, and the newer you are to doing business online.

3. Ask a lot of questions when hiring an SEO company. It’s your job to know what kind of tactics the company uses. Ask for specifics. Ask if there are any risks involved. Then get online yourself and do your own research—about the company, about the tactics they discussed, and so forth.

4. Become a student of SEO. If you’re taking the do-it-yourself route, you’ll have to become a student of SEO and learn as much as you can. Luckily for you, there are plenty of great Web resources (like Search Engine Land) and several terrific books you can read. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, Jennifer Laycock’s Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin are three I’ve read and recommend.

5. Have web analytics in place at the start. You should have clearly defined goals for your SEO efforts, and you’ll need web analytics software in place so you can track what’s working and what’s not.

6. Build a great web site. I’m sure you want to show up on the first page of results. Ask yourself, “Is my site really one of the 10 best sites in the world on this topic?” Be honest. If it’s not, make it better.

7. Include a site map page. Spiders can’t index pages that can’t be crawled. A site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site, and help the spider understand your site’s hierarchy. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu. If your site is large, make several site map pages. Keep each one to less than 100 links. I tell clients 75 is the max to be safe.

8. Make SEO-friendly URLs. Use keywords in your URLs and file names, such as yourdomain.com/red-widgets.html. Don’t overdo it, though. A file with 3+ hyphens tends to look spammy and users may be hesitant to click on it. Related bonus tip: Use hyphens in URLs and file names, not underscores. Hyphens are treated as a “space,” while underscores are not.

9. Do keyword research at the start of the project. If you’re on a tight budget, use the free versions of Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, both of which also have more powerful paid versions. Ignore the numbers these tools show; what’s important is the relative volume of one keyword to another. Another good free tool is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, which doesn’t show exact numbers.

10. Open up a PPC account. Whether it’s Google’s AdWords or Yahoo’s Search Marketing or something else, this is a great way to get actual search volume for your keywords. Yes, it costs money, but if you have the budget it’s worth the investment. It’s also the solution if you didn’t like the “Be patient” suggestion above and are looking for instant visibility.

11. Use a unique and relevant title and meta description on every page. The page title is the single most important on-page SEO factor. It’s rare to rank highly for a primary term (2-3 words) without that term being part of the page title. The meta description tag won’t help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing. Related bonus tip: You can ignore the Keywords meta altogether if you’d like; it’s close to inconsequential. If you use it, put misspellings in there, and any related keywords that don’t appear on the page.

12. Write for users first. Google, Yahoo, etc., have pretty powerful bots crawling the web, but to my knowledge these bots have never bought anything online, signed up for a newsletter, or picked up the phone to call about your services. Humans do those things, so write your page copy with humans in mind. Yes, you need keywords in the text, but don’t stuff each page like a Thanksgiving turkey. Keep it readable.

13. Create great, unique content. This is important for everyone, but it’s a particular challenge for online retailers. If you’re selling the same widget that 50 other retailers are selling, and everyone is using the boilerplate descriptions from the manufacturer, this is a great opportunity. Write your own product descriptions, using the keyword research you did earlier (see #9 above) to target actual words searchers use, and make product pages that blow the competition away. Plus, retailer or not, great content is a great way to get inbound links.

14. Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally. Anchor text helps tells spiders what the linked-to page is about. Links that say “click here” do nothing for your search engine visibility.

15. Build links intelligently. Submit your site to quality, trusted directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva, and Best of the web. Seek links from authority sites in your industry. If local search matters to you (more on that coming up), seek links from trusted sites in your geographic area—the Chamber of Commerce, etc. Analyze the inbound links to your competitors to find links you can acquire, too.

16. Use press releases wisely. Developing a relationship with media covering your industry or your local region can be a great source of exposure, including getting links from trusted media web sites. Distributing releases online can be an effective link building tactic, and opens the door for exposure in news search sites. Related bonus tip: Only issue a release when you have something newsworthy to report. Don’t waste journalists’ time.

17. Start a blog and participate with other related blogs. Search engines, Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there’s no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links. Related bonus tip: Put your blog at yourdomain.com/blog so your main domain gets the benefit of any links to your blog posts. If that’s not possible, use blog.yourdomain.com.

18. Use social media marketing wisely. If your small business has a visual element, join the appropriate communities on Flickr and post high-quality photos there. If you’re a service-oriented business, use Yahoo Answers to position yourself as an expert in your industry. With any social media site you use, the first rule is don’t spam! Be an active, contributing member of the site. The idea is to interact with potential customers, not annoy them.

19. Take advantage of local search opportunities. Online research for offline buying is a growing trend. Optimize your site to catch local traffic by showing your address and local phone number prominently. Write a detailed Directions/Location page using neighborhoods and landmarks in the page text. Submit your site to the free local listings services that the major search engines offer. Make sure your site is listed in local/social directories such as CitySearch, Yelp, Local.com, etc., and encourage customers to leave reviews of your business on these sites, too.

20. Take advantage of the tools the search engines give you. Sign up for Google’s webmaster Central and Yahoo’s Site Explorer to learn more about how the search engines see your site, including how many inbound links they’re aware of.

21. Diversify your traffic sources. Google may bring you 70% of your traffic today, but what if the next big algorithm update hits you hard? What if your Google visibility goes away tomorrow? Newsletters and other subscriber-based content can help you hold on to traffic/customers no matter what the search engines do. In fact, many of the DOs on this list—creating great content, starting a blog, using social media and local search, etc.—will help you grow an audience of loyal prospects and customers that may help you survive the whims of search engines.

How To Do A Link Campaign ?

There are many reasons for engaging in a link campaign. In Google, links are one of the most important factors in determining a sites rank in the search engine results page (SERPs).

Since this is such a crucial factor in Google's algorithm (as well as the other search engines), a link campaign should be part of your search engine marketing efforts.

First, let's define the different types of links that a site can have:

Reciprocal link - this is where two sites exchange links to each other's sites.

One-way (In-Bound) link - where one site links to another site without receiving a link back.

Reciprocal linking is a very time consuming task when done correctly. During this process, a webmaster will scour the Internet looking for relevant sites that he or she can trade links with.

Once they have obtained a list of suitable sites, a personalized email is sent to the respective webmasters and a request for an exchange takes place. A typical letter would read as follows:

Dear Webmaster:

While researching quality sites to request link exchanges from, I found your site. I would like to offer an exchange of links from my site to yours. Below is our site's information:

Title: SEO Experts in India | SEO India
URL: http://seo-experts-in-india.blogspot.com/
Description: We are SEO experts in India, providing freelance SEO as well as PPC, web development services in cheapest rates.

If you are interested, please reply with your site's information and where our link was placed.

If you're not interested, your lack of response will indicate your desired action.

Thank you for your time,

Your name
your email
www

If and when you receive some repsonses, you should add their sites as soon as you can, and send them an email telling them that their link has been added, and include the url where they can see their site.

You will have to routinely check your partners to make sure they are still linking to your site in order to continue the partnership. Most webmasters are honest and will keep you linked, but there are a few rotten apples out there.

In-Bound (One-way) Links are the best type of links if you can get them. It's not all that difficult to do so, but as in anything worth while, there will be an amount of effort involved.

The easiest way to get In bound links to your site is to do directory submissions. There are many great free directories to submit to, and it's worth the time and effort to get listed in as many as you possibly can.

There are also fee-based directories which you submit to, and as your budget allows, you should try to get listed in all directories that are relevant to your site's topic.

The next way to get one-way links to your site is to do a press release. With sites such as prwire, you can submit a press release to them for free, and that will not only get your site exposure, but it will also get you some in-bound links.

If you have the ability to compose articles or columns, there are many sites that can get your site exposure by you allowing them to re-print your content. While some may argue that this procedure may penalize you in the search engines for duplicate content, as long as you have posted your article to your site first, you shouldn't get hit by a duplicate content penalty.

Depending on how many sites you allow for your information to be published wil also create in-bound links to your site. So the question you have to consider is control of your content versus web exposure.

If you have an online business, you should always include your site's url in your email signature. Many people use either Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail which are all web-based systems, so they read the urls contained in the email and thus add to your back-link totals.

One piece of consideration: When you submit your site information to be linked from, make sure your anchor text (the clickable part) is one of the keywords you are trying to get your site ranked for. What you are telling the search engines is that the destination of the url is about whatever the text link was. So, if your text link says "eggs", the search engine would expect that page to be about eggs.

Linking Policy

Before we continue with this chapter, it is time to introduce the concept of Google PageRank (PR). PageRank will be discussed in more detail in “Chapter 9 - All About PageRank”, but is discussed here in order to understand why it matters how you link pages on your website together

PageRank is a numeric value that Google places on how important a page is on the Web. PageRank is determined by how many incoming links there are for a page. Incoming links are links that point to a page from another page. Links may be located on pages on the same website (internal links) or on pages on different websites(external links).

Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is in effect “casting a vote” for the other page. The more incoming links (votes) there are for a page, the more important the page is to Google, generally speaking

Note: Google PageRank is but a single factor used in the ranking algorithm. Many

have over-hyped PageRank and therefore introduced complexity that probably don't even exist.

The proper linking between pages of your website, if done right, will help retain the total PageRank of your site and will also distribute or channel your site’s overall PageRank value to your most important pages.

Internal links share or distribute PageRank among all pages of your site. Links on your site that point to other websites can decrease your site’s overall PageRank, while links from other sites can increase your site’s overall PageRank.

In general, the more internal links there are between pages of your site, the more evenly distributed the PageRank becomes in your site. Let’s see why this is important.

What are doorway pages ?

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for high ranking in Search Engines, most of these pages have a high ranking for 2 or 3 search terms (keywords), and are not a part of the original web site.

Most web sites that use this technique are successful and appear in the first 10 results of the major Search Engines

There is nothing wrong to create doorway pages for your web site, but Search Engines do not allow it and identify it as spam, so that's a bigger problem

Our SEO consultants do not advice to use these kind of technique. It's unethical and web sites who use these kinds of tricks can get penalized by the Search Engines.
We advice to optimize your web site as professional as possible, this will be the best solution in our opinion.
How do you know if this page is an Doorway page or Cloaked ?

First: When you search in one of the Search Engines on the internet, results will come up for the relevant keyword or search term you searched for. Suppose its Google, just click on the button "Cache" it's located under the web sites URL. You can exactly see when and at what time the Search Engine crawled the site last for the last time, there is also a snapshot available of the web page.

Second: After having done that, just visit the real web site and compare it with what you saw in the cache, if it's identical it's not a cloaked web site or doorway page

What is link building?

One of our web site promotion efforts is link building. Links from high ranking web sites to your site can dramatically increase traffic. The goal of link building is to create an excellent source of consistent and targeted traffic through hyperlinks placed on content related and sharing the same audience web sites, linking to your site. If you have no links at all means that Search Engines will drop the site from their index. The more links you have the higher is the link popularity of your site.
Link popularity
Link popularity is the result of link building. It means being a popular web site. Many quality links to your site generate additional Search Engine traffic and is a requirement for a good ranking on the search result pages. Some web sites have more than half a million hyperlinks targeting them. I bet you are surprised by this number?
Our link building team
Our SEO consultants provide link building service and additional link popularity checks on a regular and on a timely basis for your web pages. You will receive all details in our special report documented by SEO-Watch. We also monitor existing links and make sure that links are still implemented on the pages where we posted them for you.
Avoiding mistakes when building the links
Be aware that the links on your web sites grow naturally and not too fast. An unethical practice is to send out messages to hundred thousand webmasters in one go and request that they link to your site. In no time a couple of thousand links will be organized. Know that context of links is also taken into account, rather than sheer numbers. The consequence is that Google will ignore your links or even blacklist your site because the link structure is growing too fast or poor links are added. Solution: An "organic grow" should be achieved with the focus on quality. This takes time but it's worth it.
Link popularity checker software
To be able to check your link popularity in the major Search Engines you need special software. Many products are available on the market (freeware and commercial software). If you would like to check your position, you can do this right here on our web site for free at our Link Popularity Checker page. Additional helpful tools are available for free use and for download in the SEO Tools section of this web site

What is Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization it means that your site will be analyzed and then improved to make it possible for Search Engines to index and rank it. If your web site does not rank well, optimization helps that your web site will be found in the first upcoming pages of the search results. This can vary from ranking very high in Google to good in Yahoo and excellent in MSN. We cannot predict in which Search Engine the best ranking will take place because they work in different ways.
What has to be done to achieve good search engine ranking?
It is our job to check if Crawlers as Google, Yahoo or MSN can identify all the hyperlinks in the pages and can add them to the list of URL's to visit. The same importance has the content that is reflecting the category your web site belongs too. Additionally the architecture and programming of the web site is of significance because pages have to be readable and accessible for these software agents. Some code is just as "hard to read" for Search Engines, as it is for anyone who is not a programmer. Another aspect we take care of is, that you do not want all your pages to turn up on the internet, or do you? To know how to handle this aspect is just as important as the firewall on your workstation.
When will I see the results?
This is the most asked question. People nowadays expect instant results. This is not applicable when you get engaged in Search Engine optimization. Facing a competition counted in millions and finally out-rank them cannot be achieved with a magic wand. Indexing a fraction of the web can take the Search Engines a long time; this is usually measured in weeks or months. This is also the reason why it still makes sense that we submit your web site to those Directories where also Google and friends (well, rather competitors) feed on. Patience and an ongoing monitoring and modifications are necessary to get the web site into the first search result pages and refreshing content regularly and building up backlinks to keep it there.
What are costs for SEO services?
SEO WATCH designed attractive Web Promotion packages to provide examples what the approximate costs are for optimization and what you receive in return. On the other hand, we provide so much insider knowledge on these pages, that you could actually start with SEO yourself, after having studied our content.

Our SEO projects are as follows:

1. www.matexinternational.com for following keywords are top ten in Google, Yahoo & MSN.
1. India shirt exporters
2. India t shirt exporters
3. Shirt exporters
4. T shirt exporters
5. Bavarian Shirts
6. Cotton lycra shirts
7. German lent house shirts
8. Classic Casual shirts
2. www.angelbroking.com for following keywords are top ten in Google, Yahoo & MSN.

1. Angel broking
2. Online share trading
3. Online share trading in india
4. Online share trading india
5. Online trading in india
6. Share broking
7. Ebroking
8. Ebroking in india
9. Stock broking
10. Stock broking in india
11. Stock brokers in india
12. Share trading tips
13. Broking
14. Broking in equities
15. Latest news on share trading news
16. Share trading tips & news
17. Pms
18. Portfolio Management Service
19. Angel
20. Investment advisory
2. www.pali-beach-resort.com for following keywords are top ten in Google, Yahoo & MSN.

1. Mumbai resorts
2. Picnic mumbai
3. One day picnic in mumbai
4. One day picnic
5. Beach resort in mumbai
6. Resort in mumbai
7. Resorts in mumbai
8. Mumbai resort
3. www.jingashoes.com for following keywords are top ten in Google, Yahoo & MSN.

1. Jinga
2. Jingas
3. Jinga shoes
4. Buy jinga
4. www.angelmf.com following keywords are top ten in Google, Yahoo & MSN.

1. Mutual Funds Schemes
2. Buy mutual funds
3. Indian mutual funds
4. Mutual funds in india
5. SIP calculator
6. Best sip to buy
7. Mutual funds India nav
8. Best sip schemes in India
9. Top performing mutual funds in India
10. MF India
5. www.angelcommodities.com following keywords are top ten in Google, Yahoo & MSN.

1. Trading on MCX
2. Trading on NCDEX
3. Commodity future trading
4. NCDEX Top Gainers
5. NCDEX Top losers
6. NCDEX Top Values
7. NCDEX Top Volume
8. MCX Top Gainers
9. MCX Top Losers
10. MCX Top Volume
11. MCX Top Values
12. NCDEX commodity
13. NCDEX commodities
14. NCDEX online
15. MCX commodity
16. MCX commodities
17. MCX online
18. NCDEX
19. MCX & NCDEX
20. MCX Trading
21. NCDEX Trading
22. NCDEX live quotes

6. www.angelsecurelife.com following keywords are top ten in Google, Yahoo & MSN.
1. Best insurance plans in India
2. Top life insurance in India
3. Best life insurance policies in India
4. Top life insurance in India

Content Optimization

Good copy equals conversions.

This is probably the hardest selling point to get across to a client when seo speak begins. Sure people know they need to get ranked in Google, and they know you need to build an online presence, and of course, they all know that they need to get traffic to their site.

But site copy? Anytime that topic is brought up, most clients proudly boast that they have already posted their brochure's information on their site and that works just fine.

Well, it doesn't. Content optimization is a skill that few people possess. Words sell, images don't. You need to get the user to take action! So, in that spirit, here is a list of things to do and ones to avoid:

Things to do:

1. Use the main keyphrase you are targeting on every page, except for the home page.
2. Use keyphrases in your hyperlinks.
3. Create a page title that is intriguing and eye catching. Remember words sell, graphics don't.
4. Limit your keyword usage to 2 or 3 keywords per page. Otherwise, you may get tagged for keyword spamming.
5. Create supplemental content like FAQ pages, how-to pages, industry glossary and related articles about the product.
6. Use the description meta tag. Google refers to this when it can't find content or a listing in DMOZ.
7. Always keep an eye on competitors and how they rank for the same keywords.
8. Focus on the the pages that have your best conversion rates.
9. Think like a reporter, asking the five W questions (who, what, when, where, why).
10. Display your location. Studies indicate that people look for local vendors, even when online.
    

Things to avoid:

1. Inserting keywords into copyrighted material.
2. Forgetting what your audience is looking for.
3. Leaving the title of your page as "Untitled".
4. Using too many graphics.

Waiting to implement copy changes for expected seasonal sales. You need 6-months when optimizing seasonal content to give the engines time to adjust to your alterations.

Content optimization is a continual process of monitoring and updating. By staying true to this course, you'll see the results in your sales.