Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Google analytics is one of the free tools from Google and it also one of the most important tools for webmasters who would like to constantly work on their website’s SEO and improve its online performance. Google Analytics tool gives a number of reporting options that we can use to understand the nature of our website’s traffic.

It is not possible to get continual improvement on our website’s online performance without understanding our website’s current performance. We will be able to conduct an in depth analysis of our site’s traffic using Google analytics. We can get reports on a number of useful factors from the simplest to complex reporting statistics. We will be able to find out how our website’s visitors found our website, the keywords that they have used to come to our website, the number of pages that they visited in our website, the navigation path of the visitors, the most popular entry page, the most popular exit page and so on.

You will be able to set goals for your traffic and see how your website traffic fits your goals. Your SEO efforts can be modified to help you achieve your search engine goals. When we talk of SEO goals, it is not just about getting good traffic into our website but it is more about leading the visitors to the selling page and making them by your products or hire your services. This would then include not only having the website listed in Google but design your landing pages in such a way that your visitors will navigate in your website in a way that you would want them to be.

Google analytics will help you elevate your simplistic SEO approaches to more sophisticated and powerful strategies. You will be able to achieve your success in a focused way, as Google analytics will make your efforts more coherent towards achieving the desired required goals.

You will be able to find out the amount of time spent by the visitors in each page using Google analytics. This will give you a great insight into your website’s performance and also about your website’s visitors and what attracts them the most. You will be able to find how many clicks your website visitors have to make to reach to the selling page as of the current performance of your website online. You will be able to decide whether your you need to put them through all the pages or optimize your website in such a way so that they can enter the sales page directly or with a fewer number of clicks. You have nothing to lose in trying out how Google analytics works as it is a completely free tool. By far, it is the safest tool and you will not have to worry about injecting malware and spyware into your website.

Everyone has a formula for writing the best articles. Do formulas work, though?

The answer is – it depends. There are at least seven different styles of article, and dozens of ‘optimization formulas’ to work with. Some say to have a certain keyword density, to include the keywords in the first so many words of the article, the title, the closing, each paragraph, etc. The real way to make sure you get conversions, however, is to make sure your content does attract attention, but is more focused on being HELPFUL and RELEVANT.

How To – ‘How to —’ articles are good for SEO because people search using the term ‘how to—’ and also becasue the articles or very helpful and hands on. Include a source for more info, or to other articles you’ve written on the topic. Use your knowledge to set yourself up as an online expert in your field!

Lists – People love lists, so think of top ten lists or best whatever lists or 20 ways to such and such lists. Start with a short introduction, do your list, and wrap up with a comment. Put the numerals in the title.

Straw Men – Play devil’s advocate by setting up a premise – then demolish it in order to show your own, better way of approaching the question or problem at hand. This is a great way to address controversial practices or methods, and can begin with a question – Does —- Really Work?The you can ‘debunk’ the premise, and offer your own solution.

Examples – You can answer questions with examples – such as ‘Should I Outsource My SEO Work? and inform your audience by telling a few short success stories then offer your help. Use stats to give your piece authority.

Interview – Interview an expert for an article, and interject your own points you want to cover. Youca n style it as a traditional article with heavy use of quotes, or as a Q&A.

Trends – Keep up on fads and do quick press release style articles tying in relevant trends or news to your own topic or field. These have a chance of being picked up if you do a good job!

Reports - Tell people about the ‘release’ of a new completed study or survey. You can base a whole article on the results of case studies, and they add authority to your piece. They also make you more newsworthy.

Worry more about how the article reaches your audience and convinces them to convert to a customer. Keyword optimization is importnat, but not at the cost of user appreciation.

Many of us have problems in hiring SEO companies and working with them. Unlike the other services, when you hire an SEO company you do not get your product or results right away. This leads to lot of problems in having good relationship with the SEO company. Again, unlike other services, SEO requires even the customer to be well informed to have a successful relationship with the SEO company.

If you are new to the internet and new to the SEO industry, you will not know the type of questions to ask your SEO service provider. All that you will know and want is that your website’s top 10 ranking. Many webmasters surprisingly are under the impression that SEO is like a switch that will get them instant rankings. They are surprised if not shocked to learn that it will take minimum of three months to start seeing the results of SEO efforts made by your SEO company. So before you set out to hire an SEO company, try to read around a bit about how SEO companies work and how search engines work, nothing too deep, just the basic information. You will find plenty of information online that will help you understand the industry and what you can achieve through SEO.

Secondly, try to understand the competition within your industry so that you can set realistic goals for your website’s online performance. Your expectations from your SEO service provider will also be reasonable. The success and the time consumed to get good ranking for your website depends a great deal on the competition level involved.

By getting to know the basics of SEO, you can become a good SEO customer. Moreover, your SEO service provider will not be able to take you for a ride because you will be a well informed customer. This will also help you identify the best SEO service provider.

Therefore, the first step in becoming a good SEO customer involves educating yourself about the basics of SEO. Secondly, select a good SEO service provider. Only a good customer will spend time in identifying the best SEO service provider on the other hand a poor customer will pick the company that they come first come across or just pick a company with the lowest price tags. Thirdly, good SEO customer will know that it will take a considerable amount of time in getting the site its rank. They will plan carefully on how to utilize the waiting period and how to generate traffic to their website during this period. Good SEO customer will also set aside a decent budget for their site’s SEO as soon as they plan to launch their website.

Our hard work will certainly bring good rankings in the search engines both in terms of boost in search results and PR. When we achieve the desired results or at least show improvement, the normal tendency is to relax a bit after the long haul. Actually only after achieving our PR boost we need to work all the more harder to get to the next stage. Now the demands will be much higher to both retain our ranking as well as improve it.

It is good to rejoice with our results but it should not stop us from making continued efforts. The progress will slow down as we go up the ladder because search engines will not just give away PR or search engine positions. Moreover, if you have achieved your #1 position in Google, then you should know that your competitors are working all the more harder to reach their. They can out do you very easily unless you continue to reinforce your website to maintain the gap between your website and your competitors’ websites.

The next time you see your PR increase or your position in search results page changes for the better, remind yourself that it is not the end and it is going to take greater efforts from you.

One of the areas that you should continue to concentrate is your link building efforts. Secondly, try to keep your website’s content fresh. You can now get more focused with your efforts. Few things that you can do to keep the fire burning include, social bookmarking and blog posting. Blogs will keep your site’s content fresh. So regularly make a post or two; make sure that your posts are interesting and just not copied content from some other blogs. If you keep your blogs unique, you are bound to attract more traffic to your website. You can bookmark your site as well as the blog posts. This will increase your link count as well as take care of your website’s content needs.

You should now try to get links from social bookmarking sites that have high PR value this will bolster your efforts and minimize the amount of work required to keep yourself on top. You should also revisit your SEO budget to ensure that it is a justified budget.

Many webmasters once they see the green grow, tend to reduce their budget, this again is a very wrong approach. You should be encouraged to set aside a decent budget, as the results that you are getting are a clear indicator that you are in the right track. So you would make use of this trend of your website to take to further heights.

…or somewhere in that ballpark.

Images are where the new frontier of search is at right now, so learning how to optimize your site with photos and especially videos can really increase your visibility. Many webmasters  don’t understand just how valuable a resource photos and videos can be! They serve as teasers to get people into your site, and can be powerful link generators producing high quality links which are much more likely to be picked up organically by others. Result? A lot more natural backlinks for you!

Pictures are fairly easy to come by, and you can find free use or attribute ones without too much trouble.  Duplicate content is not to be worried too much about – spiders crawl the text surrounding the photos and videos, so all you have to do is provide fresh text for each sample and they will list it with that information. Tagging your photos and videos is paramount!  Make sure you search engine optimize ALL your content in order to drive more traffic – and this includes putting keywords in the text accompanying any images you use on or off site.

If my website needs more links and publicity, I implement photos of my products being used in real life situations and issue notices on Twitter – ‘Look at my dog wearing his new xxxx’  or make a funny video and post it in a lot of different places where I will get extra visibility. There are a lot of joke sites where funny pictures and videos get huge amounts of attention, and many people pick up and forward these so having an embedded link can really help you! Include a pet being silly – for some reaons people LOVE animal videos, for example Ninja Cat is STILL one fo the most Dugg videos of all time.

You can also spread content through photo contests. Locate a category you can do a photo for, and ensure you have keyword rich text surrounding your photos and videos. This will help you get the appropriate traffic from these types of links.

You can also get into different venues by using what always pulls in the male demographic – hot chicks! Anything is better if you ‘put a girl in it’ as the saying goes – so add a gal in a bikini to jazz up your grill or scooter or whatever it is you are selling.

What this all adds up to is that people LOVE visual aids. They share them, link to them and pass the word – ‘You HAVE to see this video…’ and you can get much more feedback than from text alone, making this type of content a powerful tool to utilize when it comes to deeper SEO tactics.

Double check the information in the text around your photos and videos before you post them in directories, You want to make sure your URL, meta description and H1 tags contain your optimum performance keywords. If possible, also encode your video with Meta data; when the spiders pay a visit, this will help them index faster and more specifically.

Learn how to take advantage of visual content to optimize your site, and you will always have fresh stuff to post – plus you will be able to watch the links come pouring in as your videos attract more attention!! Don’t forget to post on sharing sites, and even allow other people to ‘buy’ the right to re-post with a link back to your website.

 Subscribe in a reader

• Email Subscription by Feedburner