SEO TIPS for Sites and Blogs

SEO TIPS for Sites and Blogs

If you read SEO forums often you hear many posts about a San Diego real estate agent no longer ranking for a generic term such as real estate. Since the term is too generic for most of his target market (and his service would not be fitting for most people searching for that term) it makes sense that the search engines would not want to show his site in those search results. As search continues to evolve, it will get better at filtering out untargeted or inappropriate sites.

I spoke with a search engine product manager who stated that misspellings can flag pages for relevancy reviews and usually misspellings for SEO are not recommended for most websites.

You also can further target your competition estimation by searching Google for allintitle: keyword allinanchor: keyword. Pages which have your keyword phrases in their title may be optimized, and pages which have them in their inbound links stand a good chance of being fairly well optimized.

The Meta keywords tag is not supported by many major search engines. While it is important to choose the correct keywords for your page, the Meta keywords tag itself is not used by many top SEO experts. If you have products in different sizes and colors then other than small differences it is likely you could generate lots of duplicate content which will prevent search engines from wanting to fully index your sites.

Each page should have its own title. Since different algorithms match for different things there is no such thing as a perfect title. Your target keyword phrase should be at or near the beginning of your page title.

Most major search algorithms place far greater weight on the page title than on page content.

Adding unique page titles to a site that did not have them can easily double search traffic.Some directory editors will run a link checker on your site in the background while they review the content. The internet is dynamic and ever changing, and some of your links may break from month to month. I recommend checking your site for broken links before submitting it to any of the major directories.

Place Your Keywords! Where it Makes Sense:

• Place keywords in the paragraphs.
• Place keywords in the heading tags.
• Place keywords in img alt tags.
• When the word is part of a small statement making a specific point, you may bold it or italicize it.
• You may also want to include your keywords a few times in bulleted lists.
• When possible place the keywords in links, and don't forget navigation.
• The key focus of the page should be on readability. If the page does not make sense to human eyes then it is no good for a search engine and it will not make sales. You want to use keywords often, but not to the point

Where to Get Links:

Creating an extremely useful web based tool or paying a programmer to create one for you is one of the most effective ways to build content which will help you build a linking campaign. Writing articles will also help you build up your link popularity.

Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other websites can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit articles to other sites you may also want to have a longer or slightly different version of the article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate content issues when others syndicate your articles.

Writing press releases can give you inbound links.

People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you asking. You can participate in forums which provide signature links.

Participate in communities and leave relevant useful comments then eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you. Since forums change rapidly they often get indexed frequently. This will help your site get indexed quickly if you ask a few questions at a few of the various SEO forums.

Google Sandbox:

Many new sites or sites which have not been significantly developed have a hard time ranking right away on Google. Many well known SEOs have stated that a good way to get around this problem is to place a site on a sub domain of a developed site and after the site is developed and well indexed 301 redirect the site to the new location

Anchor text: (inbound link text) is the single most important element in Google’s current algorithm and is worth far more than Page Rank alone. Good anchor text combined with on topic links will eventually yield strong search engine rankings.

Since Google began delaying the effect of inbound links to new sites it can take up to 3 months from when your inbound links begin to age for it to pay off in the Google search results for competitive terms. With Google you want to build linkage data over time to minimize the chances of it appearing unnatural. If Google believes your site to be a trusted authority the delay time is not as noticeable and may not even exist.

Yahoo! usually lists a site within about a month. The best way to get your site submitted is by building a strong linking campaign. If you need to get your site indexed quickly Yahoo! does have a paid inclusion program which I generally do not recommend using for most websites.

Page Optimization

• Use your keywords in your page title. Place the most important keyword phrase at the beginning of the page title. Do not put your site title on every page of your site unless you are really trying to brand that name. In that scenario it still is usually best to place the site name at the end of the pages.
• Shorter site titles are usually better than really long ones. Often times I overlap keyword phrases in the page title.
• Overlapping keyword phrases in the page title can help you pick up multiple search phrases. For example, “Professional search engine marketing services” helps me obtain good rankings for:
  
• search engine marketing
  
• professional search engine marketing
  
• search engine marketing services
  
• & professional search engine marketing services
• Meta tags are not extremely important but they can help some. The Meta description should be a few sentences to a paragraph describing the page contents. The Meta description tag can be seen in some search results so you want to write it for human eyes. The Meta keywords tag should contain misspellings and synonyms. Each keyword phrase in the keywords tag should be comma separated.
• Target your most competitive keyword phrase with the home page.
• Link to your home page from every page of your site. Include your home page’s primary keyword phrase in the text links pointing at it.
• Link to the major theme pages from your home page.

Link Building

• Link building is the single most important part of achieving a high ranking website.
• When possible try to get your keywords in the links pointing at your pages.
• Trade links with topical hubs and related sites.
• Look for free links from related sites and directories.
• If you have some good internal content try to get direct links to your inner pages.
• Write articles and get them syndicated at other sites.
• Participate in forums which provide signature text links with your posts. If you are knowledgeable enough and a good communicator you can make many friends in the forums who will link to you free.
• Issue press releases with links into your site.
• Leave super glowing testimonials for people and products you really like. Often times when they post them they will include a link back to your site.
• Leave relevant comments in blogs that do not send their comments through redirects.
• Sponsor charities, blogs, or websites related to your site.
• Consider renting links through a link broker if you are in an extremely competitive industry. Adult, gaming, credit, or pharmacy categories will likely require link rentals and / or building topical link networks.
• Mix your link text up. Adding words like “buy” or “store” to the keywords in your some of your link text can make it look like more natural linkage data and help you rank well for many targeted secondary phrases.

When Changes Occur

Your rankings will improve. They will also get worse. Many people rush off to change things right away when the algorithms change. Sometimes they role in new algorithms more aggressively than they need to and then later roll them back.

If you are unsure of what just happened then you may not want to start changing things until you have analyzed what happened. Sometimes when algorithms are rolled back or made less aggressive many sites still do not rank well because their webmasters changed things that were helping them. Nobody is owed a good rank, and just because a ranking temporarily changes it does not mean that a site has been penalized. It is far more likely that the ranking criteria have shifted and the site may not match the new ranking criteria as well as it matched the old ranking criteria.