Best SEO Company | "Top SEO’s Secrets To Social Media"

Source       : affiliatehelp.info
By             : JON RHODES
Category   : Best SEO Company
Posted By : Best Orlando SEO Company

Top SEO’s Secrets To Social Media

Find out what social networks top SEO’s use, and how they generate traffic from them. I think most affiliate marketers could do with some social networking advice. This is because it now seems that link building is not as important as it once was, and social interaction is growing rapidly in importance. For good website and blog promotion you simply have to up your social game. Great content and good effective social interactions seem to be the order of the day. These days social media tips are priceless!

I know quite a bit about social media as I am active on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. However I wouldn’t say I am an expert, not the best in the world anyway! So I thought, how can I produce a great piece on social media for my precious readers? I know, I will ask some of the top SEO people in the world, and get THEM to contribute. All these experts are surely going to know more between them than any one person in the world?!

I asked several top SEO professionals to write about what is the best social network. Which social networks do they have the most success with, and to share any tricks or tactics they use for getting more traffic from them. These contributions make for fascinating reading, as there are so many different ideas that work differently for different people. However they all work. This is not textbook stuff, this is tried and tested methods to gain social attention. These are great social media tips. There is a lot you can learn from these contributions, so take your time and enjoy! I would suggest that you don’t try and do everything here. Think about what tactics will probably work best for you and do one or two of them really well, rather than spread yourself too thinly.

Best SEO Company | "10 SEO Techniques All Top Web Sites Should Use"

Source         : Social.razoo.com/
By                : Gisele Navarro Mendez
Category     : Best SEO Company
Posted By    : Best Orlando SEO Company

Best SEO Company

SEO is such a hot topic these days. How do you get your web site within the first page or two of the search engines? How do you increase your Google page rank? There are companies who dedicate themselves full time to doing SEO at a pretty penny. Something a lot of people can’t necessarily afford to pay for or spend the time on. However, there are some simple things you can do when building your site that will help increase your chances of having good results. In no particular order, below are 10 of these items…

1. Title Tag

Near the very top of a web site’s source code you’ll find various meta tags — the standard ones being the Title, Description and Keyword tags. The title tag is technically not a meta tag, though it is commonly associated with them. The title tag plays such a large role in the indexing of your web site, that it is considered the most important of the three. A page title is the first thing a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing. It’s important to include a keyword or two in the title tag — but don’t go overboard – you don’t want to do what’s known as “keyword stuffing” which does nothing but make your web site look like spam. Most people will include either the company name, or title of the particular page here, as well.

2. Meta Tags

There are two primary meta tags in terms of SEO — the description and the keyword tag. It’s debatable whether the search engines use the description tag as far as ranking your results. However it is one of the more important tags because it is listed in your search result — it is what users read when your link comes up and what makes them decide whether or not to click on your link. Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don’t stuff it with keywords either. The description tag should read like a sentence — not a keyword list. Due to “keyword stuffing” many search engines now completely disregard the keyword tag. It is no longer nearly as important as it was years ago, however it doesn’t hurt to include them in your source code. When creating your keyword list, you’ll want to think of the specific terms people will type in when searching for a site like yours. Just don’t go overboard — too many duplicates are not a good thing (as in “web designer” “web designers” “custom web designer” “html web designer” “your state here web designer” – you get the idea). Those are all basically the same, so pick one or two variations at the most and move onto the next keyword.

3. Proper Use of Heading Tags

This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are. Your main page title should use the <h1> tag — this shows what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as <h2> and <h3> are equally important by helping to break down your copy. For one, you’ll see a visual break in the text. But as far as the search engines are concerned, it will automatically know what your topics are on a page. The various heading tags give a priority to the content and help index your site properly.

4. Alt Attributes on Images

Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings. In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader. They can’t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is.

5. Title Attributes on Links

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That’s the little “tool tip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links. As a note, you should use descriptive text for your links. “Click here” doesn’t really tell a person – or more importantly, the search engines — what the link is. At the very least put a title tag that will explain that “Click Here” really means “Web Design Portfolio” for example. Better yet – make the main link text something like “View my web design portfolio” — this will give some value to the link showing that the resulting page is relevant to searches for portfolio’s.

6. XML Sitemap

My last post referenced the sitemaps used by web visitors to help them navigate through your site themselves. However, there’s another version — XML sitemaps — that are used by the search engines in order to index through your site, as well. This list of ALL pages / posts / etc. of your site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what you feel the most important pages of your sites are. All elements that help the search engines properly find and link to all content of your site.

7. Relevant Content

Having content relevant to your main page or site topic is perhaps the most important SEO aspect of a page. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags and alt image tags, etc — but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt. While it is important to include as many keywords in your page copy as possible, it is equally as important for it to read well and make sense. I’m sure we’ve all seen keyword stuffed pages written by SEO companies that honestly don’t make much sense from the reader’s point of view. When creating your site copy, just write naturally, explaining whatever information you’re discussing. The key is to make it relevant, and to have it make sense to the reader. Even if you trick the search engines into thinking your page is great — when a potential customer arrives at the site and can’t make heads or tails of your information and it just feels spammy to them — you can bet they’ll be clicking on the next web site within a matter of seconds.

8. Link Building

We’ve probably all heard of Google Page Rank — it seems to be every web site owner’s dream to have as high a page rank as possible. While the algorithm for determining page rank encompasses many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your web site. Now, you’ll want to steer clear of link farms and other spammy attempts at getting links to your site. However there are many reputable and niche directory sites that you can use to submit your web site, or specific blog articles to. With genuine content — especially if you have a blog — you’ll be able to generate links with other web sites and blogs, as well. It’s somewhat of a give and take, in that if you link out to other sites, you’ll find sites linking back to you — and hopefully see your page rank going up, as well!

9. Social Media

Although technically not SEO, Social Media is such a growing factor in getting your web site noticed, that it’s an important element to include in your plan. Social media ranges from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more. There is a lot of relationship building involved, but as you build your own networks and build quality content on your web site or blog, you’ll see traffic to your web site increasing, as well. As with any relationship, it is a give and take. Don’t just expect to join a site like Twitter for the pure sake of pushing your content. That just won’t fly — your true intentions will stick out like a sore thumb and do nothing but turn people off. Even if you are on the site purely for networking reasons, the key is to make friends. Help out members of your network if they ask for a “retweet” or Digg, give helpful advice if asked, etc. You’ll see the same in return. If you write a great post and have built meaningful relationships with peers in your niche, you’ll often find that friends will submit your posts and give you votes on the social bookmarking sites. The more votes you receive, the more likely your post is to be noticed by others and shared around, often resulting in additional link backs from other blogs, etc.

10. A Few SEO Don’ts — Flash and Splash

Along with any list of Do’s come the Don’ts. As far as SEO is concerned, two of these items are splash pages (often consisting of a flash animation) and all flash web sites. Yes, flash is pretty! Full flash web sites can actually be amazing to look at — their own bit of interactive artwork. But unfortunately the search engines don’t get along well with Flash. Although there is talk of possible advancement in this area, for the most part the search engines cannot read Flash. All that great content that you wrote for your site will not be seen by the search engines if it’s embedded into a Flash web site. As far as the search engines are concerned, your all flash web site might as well be invisible. And if the search engines can’t see your site content, a good chunk of potential customers will miss out on what you have to offer, too. Equally as “pointless” are splash pages. Once very popular, the splash page should no longer be an important feature of any site. While splash pages used to serve as an introduction into a web site (often with a flash animation), it is no longer seen as helpful, and often times might actually annoy visitors. For one — it’s an extra click to get into your content. Worse is when you don’t give a “skip intro” option or set of links into your main site content — because you’re essentially forcing your visitors to sit through the full animation. If you’re lucky, this will only annoy them… if not — they’ll just leave without giving your main web site a shot. And without an html link pointing into your site, the search engines have no way to continue either (unless you made use of a sitemap.xml file — but still…)

A good alternative to both issues is to make use of a flash header. There’s no problem to include a flash animation at the top of your main site, or as a feature within the content area, etc. Because this is an addition to your web site, as opposed to a full separate element.

Small Business SEO Florida | "Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses"

Source        : onepagerapp.com
By              : One-Pager
Category    : Local Search Engine Optimization
Posted By  : Small Business SEO Florida

Small Business SEO Florida

What is SEO?

In the broadest sense, Search Engine Optimization is a series of steps that a website owner uses to ensure their site appears in search results for specific terms. For example, if you are a California real estate agent and you manage your own site, you might choose to optimize for terms like "San Francisco Real Estate" or "Marin County New Homes." Choosing what terms to optimize for is an important step in the process, which we'll get to later.

This guide discusses SEO techniques in two ways, actions you can take On-Site or Off-Site. On-Site actions are steps you can take to improve the optimization of your own pages and the content they contain. Off-Site actions are done elsewhere on the internet with the goal of driving additional traffic to your site. Both of these are very important to consider when implementing your SEO strategy.

What isn't SEO?

SEO isn't about searching for your company name and having your website appear. If your website doesn't appear on a direct search for your business's name, you likely have much larger optimization problems. SEO is about attracting unsolicited traffic to your site. These should be people who are interested in doing business with someone in your field but not necessarily you. Of course, when your site appears in their search results, the goal is for them to want to work with you after being successfully sold through the content in your website.

What is SEM?

SEO is not Search Engine Marketing (SEM), or ad-buying. All SEO techniques can be done for free or extremely low cost. SEM can become very expensive depending on your implementation. Never should SEM or SEO be used as a substitute for each other. Using them in conjunction is the best approach and many people do fine without using SEM at all.

With that said, SEM is useful in many situations. Since SEO techniques can take as much as a few months to fully grab hold with search engines, SEM can be used as a bridge to the higher levels of traffic that successful SEO tactics provide. SEM is also great if you'd like additional traffic beyond what your SEO strategy has earned you.

Why should I worry about SEO?

SEO is an effective and inexpensive way to attract new customers. Before the internet, attracting customers was much more difficult. Sending postcards, purchasing newspaper ads, and running radio ads can be useful, but the problem is they are blanket approaches. There is no way to know the person you're advertising towards has any interest in the service you're offering.

SEO allows you to be in a great position to be noticed by a person that wants to business with you because they are searching for the terms you've optimized for. For as low as the cost of maintaining a website, your business can benefit from SEO and get those motivated customers.

How does SEO work?

Since their algorithms are trade secrets, no one knows exactly how Google, Yahoo and Bing score websites in terms of SEO. That means there is no way to know exactly how your SEO strategy will impact your ranking across their results. But, there are several general practices that will lead to a higher rank, even though you can't know exactly how those changes will impact your rank.

Relevant Keyword Usage (On-Page)

Selecting and using keywords that support your SEO strategy is the technique used within your actual site pages.

Site Trustworthiness (Off-Page)

The credibility of your site is a big determining factor in how it ranks in results.

Site Popularity/Backlinks (Off-Page)

This includes links back to your site from other sites. The more prominent the sites that link to you, the better.

Traffic and Social Graph (Off-Page)

Your site's traffic and connectedness within people's social graph are less significant, but are becoming more relevant and are worth considering.

On-Page Factors

There are several things you can do today to start to improve your search engine rankings. Your website is the foundation of your SEO strategy, but it's been estimated that your actual site only accounts for less than 20% of your search engine rank.

Why is that? It turns out that the fact that there has been so much "gaming" of the search engine results in the past, Google/Yahoo/Bing have been forced to rely more and more on off-page factors to determine the usefulness of a given site.

With that said, neglecting your on-page factors isn't wise either. A good analogy is your on-page factors are sort of like the foundation of your house. You don't show guests the concrete sitting under your house, but it's important, and your house wouldn't stand too well without it.

The good news is that building a strong foundation isn't hard, you just need to know where to start.

Understandable Content, For the content on your site to be understandable by a search engine robot, it needs to be written in code. This means keeping content in images or Flash to an absolute minimum. Expect content in images/Flash to not be readable by the robots.

Create the Site for Users, not Robots

Legitimate SEO experts have long argued that if you create your site in an effort to maximize its impact with search engine robots and not actual users (humans!), you run a serious risk of losing site trustworthiness. In the past, site creators have created extremely keyword dense content that is hidden from users but presented to robots. This and other "blackhat" SEO tactics are a good way to get your business website excluded from search results if you're caught. Don't try to game the system!

Standards Compliance

Building your site in compliance with W3C standards (they are the people who make sure the internet has guidelines everyone can follow) is a great idea for many reasons. It ensures people with disabilities can view your site as well as people using a variety of browsers on different devices. But, it's also important from an SEO perspective.

By complying with standards, you are reducing the quantity of the code that makes up your webpages, which in turn puts more weight on the keywords you want to be crawled and indexed by robots. Compliance also helps robots be able to more quickly index your site and minimizes any confusion with how your site is structured.

HTML5 vs. Flash

Ever since Steve Jobs and Apple announced the iPhone and iPad would not be supporting Flash, the online world has been touting the glory of HTML5 and the impending doom of Flash. Flash will likely be around for some time, but our philosophy is to avoid it whenever possible due to its standards compliance and SEO deficiencies.

Despite some advancements from Google over the years to attempt to index Flash content, it is still challenging and Flash-based sites consistently rank lower than HTML-based ones. With the advent of HTML5, many of the dynamic animation, video, and audio capabilities that Flash made accessible are now doable in HTML. The takeaway here is that HTML5 can do much of what Flash does, but in a far more SEO friendly way. Use HTML5, not Flash.

Choosing Keywords

While some aspects of SEO are more scientific, choosing which keywords to optimize for could be considered more of an art. If you are a lawyer in New York, you would have a hard time optimizing for a search term like "lawyer" or "legal advice". Sure, you could do everything right, both on-page and off-page, but the competition for terms like that is so high, it'll be hard to see results. SEO is about appearing on the first page of results and extremely general terms aren't usually worth chasing after.

Instead, that lawyer could choose to optimize for something like "New York divorce lawyer," "Upper West Side lawyer" or something else more specific. Optimizing for those sorts of terms will be less competitive and you'd like be getting traffic more interested in your business than if you were getting lots of random traffic for a general set of keywords.

But how do you decide which keywords to shoot for? Thankfully the Google Adwords Keyword Tool makes the art of choosing keywords a little more informed. SEOMoz has assembled a great guide for how to do effective keyword research and selection.

Keyword Frequency

Now that you've chosen your keywords you'd like to optimize for, the next step is to enter them into your site. There are many places you should take a look at when deciding where to plug them in.

Page Title

The title of each of your pages is important for search engine robots to get a general sense of what your page is about. Your keywords should definitely have some sort of presence in your page titles.

Aside from the content of your page titles, it's important to think about how you structure your page titles. Since SEO isn't about a user doing a direct search for your company name, it makes sense to put your company in a secondary position to what the content of the actual page is. So, if you're building a site for a new restaurant called Taco Tree, it might be a good idea to format the homepage title tag like this:

Springfield NJ's Favorite Mexican Restaurant: Taco Tree

Or if your keywords are more focused, this could work well:

Springfield's Best Tacos at The Taco Tree 07081

Aside from getting keywords into your title tags, it's important to know another role of title tags: they are your site's salesperson! When a user does a search, the two pieces of your site that are returned to them are the page title and meta description. If your page ranks highly, those two elements are what will convince the user to click or to move on to a next result. Be sure to consider what a user might think when only seeing those small pieces of your site.

Headers

Your page header is typically contained in the <h1> tags in your HTML. This should contain the content you most want the search engine robots to index. It can be your company name, but consider having it be more keyword focused as <h1> is important in SEO.

There are other header tags used in HTML (<h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc.) and while they are important, they become less important in determining your rank as their number goes up. Be sure to place your keywords in the higher ones for more effectiveness.

Body

The body area of your web pages is the area where most of your content is entered. It's important that the keywords you're optimizing for appear here multiple times and with multiple variations. Of course, you don't want to repeat the keywords excessively, but they should be used and should appear natural to the reader.

URL

Using keywords in the URL (www.mywebsite.com) of your site is a powerful tactic for SEO. If it doesn't make sense (or it's too late) to use a keyword in the main part of the URL (the domain), then consider using them in any directories you can (www.mywebsite.com/directory-name/) and in page file names (www.mywebsite.com/page-name.html).

Alt Tags

Since the contents of images can't be crawled, alt tags are used to describe them to the robots. Make sure you use alt tags and include any relevant keywords.It's also important that image file names should describe the image and use keywords whenever appropriate.

Meta Description

Every page should have a meta description, which is a short entry (about 150 characters) that describes the content of the page. Meta descriptions are not viewable within the site to the user, but they are indexed by robots and appear in search results, directly under the page title. So, like page titles, it's a good way to sell the content of your web page and important to get right.

Using keywords here is a good idea, but since meta descriptions aren't weighted heavily in determining your page ranking, there's no need to be excessive.

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are similar to meta descriptions since they aren't viewable by the user within the page. Instead of a sentence or two, meta keywords are actually keywords or phrases, separated by commas (metaword 1, metaword 2, etc.). In the late 90's, meta keywords were important in determining page ranking, but thanks to keyword spamming, they are no longer significantly weighted. Still, experts say they do carry some significance, so it's worthwhile to include some meta keywords in every page within your site.

Optimized Markup

Whenever building a new webpage, using optimized markup, or the least code possible, is encouraged for SEO purposes. SEO professionals use a term called content to code ratio, which is useful when thinking about your markup. For SEO purposes, you always want more emphasis on the content since that is what will earn you a higher ranking. Extraneous code just waters down the makeup of your pages.

Throughout the internet there is still a significant number of sites that use old, out-dated markup that hurts their page rankings. Be sure that you or your developer are using the latest coding techniques (HTML5, non-inline CSS, etc.) and are mindful of the concept of content to code ratio.

Sitemap.xml

All of the major search engines support the use of a sitemap.xml file for websites. This file is just a list containing the URLs of every page you'd like indexed within your site. Using a sitemap.xml file doesn't ensure a page will be crawled and indexed, but it is helpful for robots when they arrive on your site. Why doesn't a sitemap.xml ensure indexing? Search engines put more weight on other sites linking to your pages than what you have to say about your own. Still, sitemap.xml is an important item to take care of with any 

SEO strategy.

Schema.org

Recently, the major search engines have thrown their weight behind a new standard that is designed to further improve search results. From Schema.org's homepage: "Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data."

An example is an easier way to understand what schema.org does. When you see the word "bass", you might think the musical instrument or the fish. Up until the introduction of schema.org, there was no consistent way to specify if you meant the guitar or the aquatic animal.

Although it's early on in schema.org's implementation, it's important to consider where to use it in your SEO strategy.

Things to Avoid

Any well-meaning website manager can inadvertently do things that wind up hurting their page rankings more than helping them. Here are some common issues that you should avoid if possible.

Duplicate Content

Using the same content on one site that's used on another is a big no-no. Plagiarism can get students kicked out of college and search engines feel the same way about using another site's content on your own. Not taking another site's content is probably common sense. The thing that can be more difficult is if you re-purpose content you've written for one site for another. Search engines don't know that you are technically the same author, but since it's duplicate content, they may hold that against you. Be careful whenever you're in this sort of situation.

Overuse of Keywords

Commonly called "keyword stuffing", using specific keywords too heavily can get your site penalized by search engines. Experts say that your targeted keywords should be between 1% and 3% of your site's content. You should never create content that is purposely hidden from the user (extremely small type, white text on a white background, etc.). Those are good ways to get penalized for keyword stuffing and shouldn't ever be part of your SEO strategy.

The thing to remember here is to write your content for the user, not the search engines. If you read your content and it sounds extremely keyword heavy, then you might be getting over that 3% threshold.

Misuse of Keywords

Using inaccurate keywords to describe images or other content in your site will just dilute the effectiveness of the keywords you are targeting. It will also be frustrating for users that come to your site looking for one thing, then see a totally different thing upon arrival. Be honest and accurate. Your visitors will appreciate it.

Excessive Site Downtime

Search engine robots are constantly crawling both new sites and ones that have been up for years. If your site is down for any period of time longer than a few hours, it might be crawled and identified as inactive. Search engines aren't interested in sending their users to sites that are sporadically inactive, or even worse, permanently down. Make sure you have a hosting provider with a good track record of consistent uptime.

How Onepager Can Help

Wow! That was a lot of information to digest. SEO isn't rocket science, and can be accomplished by anyone with patience and persistence, regardless of where you build and host your site.

At Onepager, we like to make things as easy as possible for small business owners that want to use the internet to build their businesses. We do a variety of these best practices to put your site on a good foundation for search engine success. Be sure to check out Onepager if you need a simple site and would like to take advantage of our SEO capabilities.

Off-Page Factors

It seems counter intuitive that your SEO success is largely based on what happens in the world outside of your site but it's true. Search engines have been increasing the importance of off page factors more and more over time because it's an easier way to determine the true value of a page.

When you think about it, it makes a good deal of sense for the search engines to take this approach. If several trustworthy sites say your page features a specific type of content, then that is much more credible than your own site saying the same thing.

The heavy usage of off page factors in determining page rankings is great for search engine users trying to find relevant content. But for a young website, it can be a serious snag on the path to SEO success. On page factors can be set up within a single day. Getting your off page factors to the level you'd like will take far longer. But don't worry, with some perseverance, you can achieve a well-earned page ranking by addressing the following factors.

Backlinks and Inbound Traffic

Backlinks are heavily weighted in search engine algorithms because they indicate credibility for your site. Any opportunity you have to be linked from a credible site should be taken.

When your site is linked to, there are a couple of factors search engines take into consideration:

Relevance of Linked Text

The text that the link is attached to is important. Some content creators link text such as "click here" or "learn more here". Using this sort of vague text as links doesn't help your SEO as much as having the link on a word or phrase that actually describes what is being linked to.

Say you have a page about how to care for large dogs. Here are two ways of linking to that page:

Click here to learn more about feeding and taking care of large dogs.

Taking care of large dogs can be a challenge.

Whenever possible, make an effort to ensure people are linking to you in the most effective way possible. Your page ranking will thank you.

Age of Link

Links that exist for a long period of time are weighted more heavily than new links. Search engines consider links older than 3 months to be more credible than new ones.

Things you can do

There are lots of ways to increase the number of inbound links to your site. Some are very easy, others take a bit more effort.

Build Your Profiles

Links from profile pages you've set up on social networks and directories are a great place to start when building backlinks. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google Places are all must-haves.

There is a handy tool called namechk.com that allows you to search for your preferred username across a variety of social networks and directories. Use it and register as many as you feel are relevant.

Depending on your industry, there are likely several directories that may be worth your attention. Some are paid like Angie's List. Others are free to get a listing, but might require an email to the moderator of the list.

Blogging

Running a blog effectively is a significant amount of effort. Aside from writing unique and interesting blog posts, actually getting people to read them and link to you is a challenge! Still, an effective blogging strategy is a great way to increase inbound links and continuously improve your SEO "juice".

Another useful blogging tactic is to write guest posts for other blogs in your industry. Many blogs are always looking for new people to contribute quality content and plugging your business is generally accepted when writing a guest post. Just be sure to link back to your site in a way that supports your SEO strategy.

Press

Getting press is another effective way to get quality backlinks. Connect with people at your local newspaper. Connect with people at any relevant industry publications. People in the press are often very interested in new, meaningful concepts for stories. The art of getting press is to present them with ideas that they believe their readers will want to learn about, all while tying in your business.

Assume you own a pet store. You could pitch a story to the local paper about any noteworthy changes in the number of animals up for adoption and how that relates to current economic situations. Read your publications of interest and see what sort of stories qualify as news for them and think about how to position your story at a similar level of importance.

Things to Avoid

When working hard to build a series of backlinks, an easy solution might appear to be to buy them. This is something called linkfarming, which is considered to be a way to game the search engine algorithms. By doing this, you risk getting penalized by the search engines. Keep in mind that linkfarming is different from doing search engine marketing, which is a legitimate way to purchase links to your site.

Measuring Your Progress

As with anything you'd like to improve, it's critical to measure your progress. Thankfully, that's easy to do with a powerful analytics solution like Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free, so it's available to anyone on any budget. Other platforms include their own analytics package, which work great as well. How you collect the data isn't as important as collecting it and monitoring it.

What You Should See

If you've successfully implemented several of the areas of focus earlier in this guide, there are several things you should start to see in your analytics reports.

Increased Keyword Inbound Traffic

Your analytics report should start to show more traffic coming to your site through the terms you optimized for. If several weeks have passed and you aren't seeing a noticeable improvement, you may need to reassess your SEO strategy. Maybe you haven't used the keywords effectively in your site, maybe you've chosen keywords that are too highly competitive, or maybe you need to work to increase your backlinks.

Increased Traffic

Your total site visits should increase both from inbound traffic from keyword searches and also from backlink traffic.

Lower Bounce Rate

The number of users that come to your site and leave it immediately helps determine the bounce rate. With a properly implemented SEO strategy, your users are more likely to be interested in your site's content. A lower bounce rate is important to be able to complete the next step: more customers

More Customers

This is what SEO is all about for small businesses. It's why you build a website and spend time optimizing it for search engines. Be sure to ask customers (or track them through analytics) to get a sense of how they found you. There is nothing more amazing than the feeling of people becoming customers all because of finding you through a search engine. Those customers have intent and were relatively inexpensive to market to!

Don't Give Up

If you don't see success right away, don't fret too much. Search engine optimization takes effort and can take tweaking to get to your maximum potential. The key it to keep going and recognize your successes when your tactics work, even at a small level. Keep learning and working and the big wins are sure to come.

Best Orlando SEO Company | "How To Optimize Your Web Pages And Keep Google Happy"

Source      : wordtracker.com
By             : Julie McNamee
Category  : Search Engine Optimization SEO
Posted By : Best Orlando SEO Company

Best Orlando SEO Company

Optimizing your website properly is crucial to getting your site seen, searched and approved by the search engines and the public. This article shows just how you can do that using Word-Tracker's updated Keywords tool.

The Mad Hatter Is Definitely Rather Loony is a memorable little acronym to help remember the basics of what needs to be done to help Google and your potential viewers find your site, and improve your search engine rankings into the bargain.

T: Title tag

M: Meta description and keywords tag

H: Header tags: H1, H2, H3

I: Image file names and alt tags

D: Diverse keywords

R: Relevancy

L: Reputable links

Let's go through those topics and discover how Wordtracker is in an even better position (with recent improvements to the Keywords tool) to help you do it. First things first you need the keywords with which to optimize your site:

First choose your keywords

The new, improved Keywords tool helps you find the keywords that will get traffic to your site and beat your competitors. The aim of this article isn't to tell you how to do your keyword research, however. You'll find a lot more information on that in Finding keywords and Keyword mapping, or by registering for one of Wordtracker's regular keyword research webinars

Let's assume you have your keywords.

How do you use them on your web page?

Title tag

<title>My Page Title</title>

The title tag for the first item in the search engine results in the picture below is "Burlesque London | Wam Bam Club | Comedy, Magic, Music and Burlesque".

This tag, as well as being of great interest to Google, appears at the top of your browser and acts in much the same way as the title of a book to your prospective customers. Have you ever bought a book largely based on how the cover looks? Yes? (Good for you if you haven't ...)

Title tag key points

Make your title compelling to increase clickthroughs. Focus on a primary keyword and if you can work one in, use a second or third keyword. Place the primary keyword right at the beginning. But don't stuff with keywords - a long list of keywords looks suspicious to both Google and your human visitors. Make sure your primary keyword is relevant to the content on your page. You'll lose ranking if there's no relevance and people won't stay on your site. Restrict your title tags to 69 characters - anything over this Google will cut off and you'll lose a whole word even if you're only one character over. Use a unique title tag for every page so that Google doesn't see you as duplicate content. 

Use the | symbol or dash - anything else detracts from your message.

How can Wordtracker help?

Look for the Title & Description wizard in the Keywords tool. It's accessed from a Niche in your Keyword Map (remember, that each Niche represents a web page). This is what it looks like:

Type in your title tag text, incorporating your chosen keywords (you'll be including those in the content on your page as well). As each keyword is added to your text in the wizard, it is ticked (checked) off your target list to the right. Any keywords left over are underlined.

The Title & Description wizard also tells you how many characters you have left, to save you the trouble of counting them and ensuring you don't go over your 69.

The Site Audit within the Keywords tool will point out if your title is too long, too short, missing altogether, or a duplicate - there's much more information on this useful tool on the Site Audit errors page.

Meta description tag

<meta name="description" content="My description" />

Below you'll see the description tag used on Wordtracker's SEO Blogger page (circled in red):

The description should serve as a short and to the point summary of what your web page is about, with a bit more detail about what the content will be than can be gleaned from your title. Try including a strong call to action to spur your prospective customers into action: "Click here to learn more," for example.

Meta description tag key points

The description should make sense to your reader. It should reinforce your title tag - confusion will reign if your description is saying something that has nothing to do with your title tag, and the searcher will pass you over. Again, place your primary keyword near the beginning and don't use too many keywords. Try combining keywords (there are some great examples of that in Rand Fishkin's article on Tactical SEO)

The character limit for your description tag is 160. Include your brand to increase brand awareness and help show trustworthiness.

How can Wordtracker help?

The Title & Description wizard includes a section for your Description - it provides a character count which will prevent key information being chopped off at the end, after your 160 character allowance is used up.The Site Audit within the Keywords tool will point out if your description is too long or too short as well. For information on carrying out the audit and prioritizing the work that may be necessary, have a look at How to perform a site audit

Meta keywords tag

Meta keywords aren't as important these days as they used to be. Google, for instance, has said that they don't use them at all in web rankings these days.

So don't worry about them.

H: Header tags: H1, H2, H3

<h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc (up to 6)

You should only have one H1 tag per page and this is your headline: it's the text that should make your readers want to read on. So concentrate on making it hook in your visitors.

Do try to use your target keywords in your header tags if you can, and although these carry less ranking weight than previously, they are still assessed, and Google places more weight on the H1 tag than the others. They can help increase your ranking simply by way of making your text easier to read, thereby increasing clickthroughs, and hopefully improving your bounce rate (the rate at which your visitors leave your site.)

How can Wordtracker help?

The Site Audit tells you when you have missing headings, when you have multiple H1 tags, and when no keywords have been detected.

I: Image file names and alt tags

<img src="my-lovely-pic.gif" alt="My lovely picture" />

Always give your images an alt tag (alternative text tag). As well as helping to inform the search engines what your page is about, they're essential for accessibility. Specialist software used by people with visual impairment reads them out, so you should have them describe what the image is about. They also appear in place of a picture if a reader has images switched off. Of course, also make the image alt tags and file names keyword rich so that the search engines see them as another piece of keyword rich content on your site.

How can Wordtracker help? The Site Audit helpfully advises if you have missing alt tags.

D: Diversity

Do use your primary and secondary keywords in your text, but also use lots of other on-topic words so that it does not appear that your text is stuffed full of keywords. Make your content readable, interesting, knowledgeable and make it long - the more you know and can advise on any given subject, the more authoritative and trustworthy you will look to to the search engines and your audience.

How can Wordtracker help?

Use our new Keywords tool to find relevant and popular search terms, but above all write great content (or pay someone to write great content for you!) And the Keywords ranking tool will keep you up to date on how you're ranking for your keywords.

R: Relevancy

The search engines expect to see relevant content on a page, and visitors will also: they'll bounce straight off if they arrive at a page about cats when they expected it to be about home improvements, for example.

And as Google is looking ever closer at customer engagement, the bounce rate is become increasingly important.

L: Reputable links

One of the debates at the 2012 LinkLove London conference was whether links are going to be as important in ranking in future, with weight of rankings increasingly being given over to social media signals (by Google and Bing, at the very least). At the moment, linking is still the biggest ranking factor, and everything you've done above will help to make your site more linkworthy.

Good quality, relevant, keyword rich content is imperative if you're to get noticed and get linked to by reputable sites, and these sites will be able to find you that much more easily if you follow these guidelines. If they see that you are a trustworthy, authoritative brand, links will follow.

Search Engine Optimization SEO | "6 Steps to Optimize Your Org’s Facebook Page"

Source        : clickz.com
By               : Chad Hill
Category    : Search Engine Optimization SEO
Posted By   : Local SEO Services

 

Search Engine Optimization SEO

If you’ve been following Razoo’s blog for long enough, you probably know by now that social media can do wonders for your nonprofit. In addition to opening doors to social interaction and relationship building, your social media presence is also helping search engines identify authority, trust, relevance and popularity associated to your organization.

According to a June 2012 study from Searchmetrics, “social signals from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are frequently associated with good rankings in Google’s index.” This means that the strength of your online presence, the number of social shares and the quality of your interactions correlate well with achieving high rankings and earning links, while directing traffic on their own.

Imagine how much more you could achieve by having your social networking profiles ranking on the search results with your main keywords! Follow these simple steps and optimize your nonprofit’s Facebook Page, Twitter profile and Google+ Page for SEO:

Facebook Page

1. Choose the name of your Facebook Page wisely
Try not to use long phrases filled with keywords because you will appear too spammy, and you don’t want to be portrayed as an untrustworthy organization. It’s advisable to name your Page after your nonprofit, ensuring that people will be able to find you with little-to-no confusion.

>> Pro Tip: After your fan page has 25 Likes, Facebook will grant you a unique URL (or “vanity URL”). Your vanity URL will usually be something like “facebook.com/YourNonprofitName” and you’ll be able to configure it by visiting http://www.facebook.com/username.

2. Make the best out of your About section

The first 165 characters or so will be shown at the top of your Facebook Page, so ensure that the description is short, punchy and keyword-rich. Make sure you’re also including your website URL!

3. Link your website and existing social profiles to your Facebook Page

You probably have a Facebook button or a badge connecting your site to your Facebook, but in terms of SEO the best way in which you can integrate your nonprofit’s website with Facebook is by linking to Facebook with the brand name as the anchor text. Follow this example:

    <a href= “http://www.facebook.com/RazooGiving” target=”_blank” >Razoo Giving on Facebook</a>

>> Pro Tip: Don’t forget to include a link to your Page from your other social profiles and even as part of your BIO when guest blogging on other blogs. Remember that the more inbound links pointing to your Facebook Page, the more authoritative your Page becomes, meaning that you will be ranked higher in search engine results.

4. Use your keywords wisely

If you want your Facebook Page to rank within search results along with your website, your content must include your target keywords. Of course, this doesn’t mean you need to start stuffing your updates with search terms you want to rank with!

>> Pro Tip: Just keep in mind that the message you include when sharing an image, a video or a link, will serve the meta description. So, take advantage of this space, especially the first 155 characters, as they will be appear on search engine results!

5. Don’t forget to optimize your Facebook Page for local searches

To optimize your Page for local searches, you will need to include your address, city, state, and zip. In addition to this, and as Nathan Latka mentioned on this post, “Google places higher importance on pages with specific information like your business’s phone number and address.”

6. Drive Facebook Likes and Shares

Embed the “Like” icon on relevant pages of your site, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, your blog and press releases. Make it easier for your visitors to share the content on your site by adding a Share button to blog posts, event invitations and landing pages.

Local SEO Services | "Choosing The Best Local SEO Services"

Source        : webdesign.org
By               : RickyCharles
Category    : Search Engine Optimization SEO
Posted By   : Local SEO Services

Local SEO Services

Anyone who has a website or blog wants to see it on the top ranks of the search results of various search engines. However, this is not a very easy work. Even if you have a very good website and it has very nice content, the search engines will just not pick it up like that. You need to make a lot of extra efforts to ensure that your website or blog is Search Engine friendly. You cannot expect your blog or website to become popular in a short period of time without making any effort.

If you are trying to make your website popular with search engines then you might have heard about Search Engine Optimization. This is not a new term for anyone who is in to the business of websites or blogs. Every year, people spend a lot of money in getting SEO services for their websites and blogs. Local Seo Services can be availed easily by anyone these days. As there is a high demand for SEO services, a lot of SEO companieshave sprung up in different parts of the world. In order to know more about Local Seo Services in your area, you can take the help of internet.

Anyone who has invested his money in his website or blog wants it to get popular because only then he can make some profit out of it. You would not be able to make your website popular until and unless you get SEO work done for it. Search Engine Optimisation London is famous for offering excellent SEO services to all its clients. Whether you have a personal blog or a full fledged online store; you can make it popular and attract a lot of traffic towards it by getting SEO services from Search Engine Optimisation London.

SEO companies provide complete SEO solutions these days. You just need to tell them about your exact requirements and goals. Once they are clear about your motives, they will try to get your work done within your budget. It is very important to clearly tell the SEO service provider about your budget because you would not want to spend more than what you have for SEO. It is also not a good idea to compromise quality for money. You need to strike a balance between the money you spend and the results you will be getting.

Anyone who stays in London knows that SEO London companies provide excellent SEO services. SEO London has achieved popularity among a large number of people in a short span of time. If you stay in London and wish to find a reliable SEO company then you can find one very easily. As a customer, you have a lot of choice when it comes to selecting a SEO service provider in London. You can compare the cost and benefits associated with different SEO companies and then choose the one which is most beneficial for you. Choose the best SEO Company and make your website a success.

Local Search Engine Optimization | "Tips For Better Local SEO"

Source       : nfib.com
By             : National Federation of Independent Business
Category   : Local SEO Company
Posted By : Best Orlando SEO Company

Local SEO Company

Do you want your business to show up in Google better than your local competitiors? Experts in local search engine optimization (SEO), led by Darren Shaw, founder of Edmonton web design and SEO company White Spark, shared their best local SEO tips during a recent Twitter chat. Here are their suggestions for getting your company to the top of the search engines when customers are looking for a local provider.
How do you find great keywords for local SEO?

If you want to out-rank your local competitors, your website needs to include the phrases that locals use. Try the following to find such keywords:

•     Google Suggest exampleCheck local newspapers and town-specific blogs for terms that the local natives prefer, such as neighborhood nicknames.
•     Segment your analytics data by geography
•     Use Google Webmaster Tools to see which local terms your site currently ranks for
•     Use keyword tool workhorses such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Related and Google Suggest (the recommended phrases that Google shows when you start typing -- see example to right)
•     Review Darren Shaw's informal draft of "Guide to Identifying Keywords with Local Intent" (zipped Microsoft Word file)

What is the most valuable tactic you can do in a local SEO campaign for local rankings?

Links are like votes -- the more sites that link to your business, the more the search engines will view you as a top candidate to include in their results. These suggestions for getting links came up in the discussion:


    Get links from local organizations such as Better Business Bureuas and local rotary clubs. Provide information for their blogs and to local news organizations.
    
    Review SEER Interactive's 35 Local Link Opportunities You Missed
    
    Make sure your business name, address and phone number (NAP) is consistent across everywhere you are listed online. (See the handouts from NFIB's webinar on local search for more details.)

Darren elaborated on steps for identifying and correcting any inconsistencies in how your NAP is displayed online.

1.     Search for your business name on Factual.com. This example shows the depth of the data available.
2.     Check if your primary business telephone number is consistently used. If variations are present, use Local Citation Finder to find all occurences of your phone numbers.
3.     List those URLs that show any alternative phone numbers in a spreadsheet.
4.     Repeat the process to find any variations in how your street address is listed. If different addresses are listed, check Google to find which sites are showing a variation.
5.     Add these sites to your spreadsheet from step #3.
6.     Go through your spreadsheet and ask the site owners to make a change so you have the same name, address and phone number across all mentions of your business online.

If there are too many citations to handle yourself, some businesses use Yext.com to promote consistency. GetListed.org was also suggested as a helpful resources.
What is citation building and how does it impact Local SEO?

Your business will rank better locally if you get links to your site from niche websites and blogs that discuss your industry and specific geographic location. Examples include review sites, local newspapers and local government sites. Darren recommended the following resources:

1.     "One-Page Handout for Getting Easy 'Google Reviews' from Customers"  from      LocalVisibilitySystem.com
2.     "Getting Your Business Reviewed" from SmallBusinessShift.com
3.     "Why Citations Are Important to Your Local Business Listings" from GetListed.org

The bottom line? Get more links for your business and make sure to use a consistent business name, address and phone number wherever your company is listed online.

Local SEO | "Top 10 Tips to Improve Your Local SEO"

Source       : flowtown.com
By             : Ethan Bloch
Category   : Local SEO Company
Posted By : Best Orlando SEO Company
 

Local SEO

To survive in the business world, you must have an online presence. And for small businesses that thrive on local business, ranking highly in search engines is even more vital to your success.

According to research from Webvisible and Nielsen, 63 percent of consumers and small business owners turn to the Internet first for information about local companies. However, 39 percent report frequently not being able to locate a particular known business. This means implementing successful search engine optimization (beyond just a few keywords) to make your company visible to potential customers should be a top priority. The good news: Just a few tweaks can increase your presence and send online customers your way. Follow these 10 tips to improve your Local SEO.

1. Get Links From Local Sources

Sites that link to you help bolster your presence in search rankings, and sites associated with your location that link to you will help connect your business in search engine algorithms. Case Ernsting of Search Engine Journal recommends submitting your business info to local directories, community databases, and even your hometown’s Wikipedia page to get encourage links to your site.

2. Work Under One Domain Name

Sure you want to be recognized and use different online outlets for different thing, but having multiple websites for different services or aspects of your business can confuse the consumer—and reduce your overall search engine pull, says the Small Business Administration. It’s wiser to keep all online activity under one name.

3. Encourage Reviews

Though many small business owners shy away from reviews for fear of a bad one, search engines factor online reviews into your ranking. Think of it this way: The more people are talking about you, the more popular you are. Ask friends and customers to review you on sites like Yelp.

4. Add Content to Your Site

Whether it’s a blog, industry news, announcements, or event recaps, adding new content your site is imperative. This creates new pages that can be optimized with new keywords, expanding your company’s reach in the eyes of search engines. You can then encourage links to that content from other sites.

5. Include Content Links on Your Social Media Sites

Post links to your site on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. As Search Engine Land notes, search engines are starting to crawl and track these links back to your site.

6. Title All Web Pages

Many SEO rookies forget to make a separate title for each web page, losing an opportunity to give search engines more content to review. SEO Expert Andrew Shotland recommends putting the most important keywords at the beginning of the title and adding your city name to the titles to hone in on local searches.

7. Make All Titles SEO-Friendly

Whether a blog post headline, URL, or file name, use keywords in all titling. Rich Hargrave of Local Search Source notes, however, that a URL with more than three hyphens can look like spam. Keep naming conventions simple but relevant.

8. Add Text to Audio and Visuals

Search engines scan text to determine relevancy. If your fancy website is heavy on audio, video, or pictures, it may be visually appealing, but search engines won’t recognize anything. Make sure to include text in the form of captions or transcripts with any of this type of content.

9. Input Correct Keywords

Keywords are the lifeblood of your site’s SEO, so make sure yours are accurate and relevant to the type of consumer you want to attract. You can review Google’s Keyword Tool to find applicable terms. Also take the time to target keywords for individual pages on your site. The SBA recommends three targeted keywords per page.

10. Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free analytics software package that offers data about your website traffic and how it’s performing in search engine rankings. Periodic review of this can clue you in to trends or areas you can improve

Best SEO Company | "Resources to Give Your Clueless SEO Clients"

Source       : mvestormedia.com
By             : Ian Rogers
Category   : Best SEO Company
Posted By : Best Orlando SEO Company

Best Orlando SEO Company

Many times, we will take on new clients where they are completely lost in the world of SEO and online marketing. All they can understand is their bottom line: rankings, traffic, and conversion = more money. As a marketer, you’ve already done a good job selling yourself and your services, however, it is possible that clients will hire you without any background knowledge of how SEO works. It is to both of your advantages that you educate your client on this process.

This article provides 5 hand-picked resources that you should give to your clients who are completely new to online marketing.

1. Webmaster Academy: How Search Works

How Search Works by Matt CuttsIn this video on the Google and Your Business Blog, Matt Cutts shows how Google’s search engine works at the very core. Spiders, crawling, indexing, and SERP results and calcluation are clearly lined out for a beginner. Cutts also shows the difference between

2. SEOmoz: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO

SEOmoz recently updated their Beginner’s Guide to SEO with today’s best practices. This guide goes in-depth with 10 chapters from the basics of search engines all the way to measuring and tracking success. One notable chapter 9 covers myths and misconceptions of search engines.

3. Portent: How to Hire an SEO Company

Angry SEOIan Lurie wrote a very good post specifically for those wanting to hire an SEO company. This one might be tricky to give your clients up front (because they might think you cheated and memorized the answers), but if you can sneak it in (through a third party or some other way), you can get them to ask you these questions. With the right answers, you’ll get major brownie points. They will also learn which aspects of an online marketing campaign will be the most important.

PRO Tip: Let this questionnaire and point system be a standard for you as an SEO or agency. If you’re answering these questions incorrectly, you might want to go back to the drawing board on your SEO strategy.

4. GetListed: Local Search Ecosystem

For local SEO clients with Google+ Local accounts, give them this resource so that they can understand the importance of local citations. If you are creating citations for them on their behalf, use this PDF to show them how in-depth the process can be. Also, be sure to teach your SEO clients the importance of NAP consistency.

5. Search Engine Land: Search Engine Violations and Penalties

Link SpamThere is nothing worse than watching your client’s ranking drop due to their own actions. Search Engine Land’s infamous Period Table of SEO offers a great section on Spam and Violations. Go through this section with your client to ensure that they understand a site can be penalized by using shady / black-hat tactics.

Small Business SEO | "On-Page SEO Factors You Need to Consider"

Source      : sitepronews.com

By             : Jamie D. Fraleigh

Category   : Small Business SEO

Posted By : Best SEO Company

On-Page SEO - Small Business SEO

On-page optimization for your websites is often overlooked and is also the easiest way to rank for keywords in search engines completely free. These are the top ten factors that you should be considering when writing content and constructing an optimized layout for all of your websites. Do not feel the need to check off all of these factors but be sure that you take them into consideration. Don’t sacrifice readability and appearance for the sake of optimization because it will affect the visitor’s experience and that is what really matters in the end. Proper on-page SEO will get you ranking for very low competition keywords without the aid of any off-page work.

1. Meta Content

Title & Description – Provide intriguing descriptions of your content! This will not only help your rankings in search engines but will additionally help increase click through from the search engine results pages.

2. Optimized URLs

Don’t use URLS that look like this: website.com?p=123 (as an example). We are looking for URLs that look like this:

website.com/product-name
website.com/category-name/product-name

This is easier for your visitors to read and will help search engines identify what your content is really about.

3. No Duplicate Content

Try and customize whatever framework you are using as much as possible whether it is WordPress, Joomla or any of the other many standard frameworks. You can usually get away with merely customizing the theme that you are using in conjunction with the framework. It is a lot of work to create unique content, but it is absolutely worth it in the long term. Duplicate content is quickly figured out and penalized leading to short-term results that won’t endure the test of time. Duplicate content “can” rank, but it is not a good strategy because it doesn’t tend to last long. This is speculation based on a number of case studies that I have performed and observed.

4. Content on Pages

Add lots of content – as much as possible wherever you can. Google and search engines love long content and it gives them more to work with. You can think of it this way: the more content you have on your page, the more keywords Google (and others) can associate your content with. Simply put you will show up for more long-tail searches.

Unique content – don’t copy and paste from other sources of the product if your reselling (i.e. Amazon). It’s easy to do but will not give you good results. I already mentioned this but I cannot emphasize it enough.

5. Use Rich Snippets

Learn more about implementing them in wherever you can. The code aspect of these is out of the scope of this article, but there are numerous guides online that you can look at. If you still haven’t found a theme, try and find one that supports these by default. Google is weighing these factors more all of the time.

Rich snippets include (but are not limited to):
Reviews – (1-5 stars)
Picture (author, product)
Video thumbnails and music

6. Get People to Leave Comments

If you have a comment section on your posts or website be sure to get people to leave comments. This will add to the content on your page and will have you showing up for even more search terms. Provocative content really helps create conversation. You can even start it yourself by posting the first comment.

7. Try and Improve Website Performance

Use plugins that help with caching to help reduce load on your server and decrease wait times for visitors. Optimize CSS by compiling all of your CSS files into one. There are usually plugins that can help with this, depending on your framework. Compress images as much as possible. Don’t sacrifice quality too much but be aware that images use up a lot of bandwidth for your server and usually affect page download times the most. Reduce the use of javascript wherever possible. If you are including unnecessary javascript libraries then remove them. Also, a javascript-heavy page can be difficult for search engines to comprehend and can create a slow experience for visitors who do not have a strong computer. I am not saying don’t use javascript, just don’t use overuse it. It is debatable whether improving page speed actually helps rank your websites better in search engines, but it most likely does and will also result in increased conversions and visitor confidence. Nobody likes a slow website.

8. Create Sitemaps for Your Website

Sitemaps (often in XML format) help search engines crawl your website. You can submit your sitemap to Google through Webmaster Tools – sign up if you haven’t already, it takes 5 minutes. There are many plugins that will automatically generate a sitemap for you every time you update your content. For example, WordPress has a great free plugin called “Yoast SEO Plugin” that will make this process automated. Be sure to include pictures and videos in the sitemap.

9. Put Products and/or Categories on the Homepage

This helps share authority with product pages and trickles down the authority of your homepage to your other pages. This specific example only really applies to e-commerce websites, but you should be linking to your other pages from your homepage regardless of what type of website you are creating.

10. Interlink pages

Put related content on posts and pages. These include recommended products, popular content, etc. This will not only help share the “link juice” around all of your pages, but it will also help keep visitors engaged. Offering related and popular content on your website has been proven in many case studies to increase the number of page views per visitor. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me by visiting my website and using the contact form. I am always happy to offer a helping hand.