How to Do On Page Optimization in SEO?

If you are SEO or know little bit about SEO that there are two part in SEO, 1. On page Optimization and 2. Off Page Optimization. Both are play vital role to optimized a web page or site. On Page Optimization is a technique by means of which your web page gets a high ranking on various Search engines like yahoo, Google MCN etc. You can read my previous post On page and Off Page Factors.

Features of On Page Optimization:

Title Tag : Make 70 characters long title tag. Every page of site have Title according to your target keywords. Make good and meaningful title, so that can attract visitors.

Meta Tag Description : Make 150 characters long meta tag description according to Google. If you have more keywords and you could not use in Title then you can use it in description. Description show on SERP, So, make attractive description so that visitor can make click on your website.

Meta Tag Keywords : If you are targeting 5 - 7 keywords for one web page and you have used in Title and Description then You can add more then 10 keywords in meta tag keywords.

Heading Tags : Use keywords in heading tag. Use only one time H1 and can use H2 and H3 how much you want.

ALT Tags : Search engine don't read image, if you will add ALT tag then search engine read, so, you must add ALT tag in every image of your site with your targeted keywords.

Title Tags in Anchor Text : Make anchor text in page where your keywords has been used in content but don't forget to add Title tag in every Anchor text.

Keyword in Image File Name : If you add image in your site so, keep keywords of image. like site logo image name should be your targeted your or your brand name.

Keyword in Page URL : If you could not register domain with your main keyword name even if with your regional extension then When you create page, use your targeted keywords in page, example, your keyword is Online Marketing Blog, create page like www.yoursitename.com/online-marketing-blog. 

Sitemap HTML/XML : Create HTMl and XML site map and upload it on root directory.

Robot.txt File : If you want to block any page of your site and if you use duplicate content and don't wanna index by search engine then you can block it using robot.txt file. After create this file upload it on your root directory.

10 Things You Should Have Done to Make Your Google Business Listing Great

With over 80% of people using search engines to find local information, it is impossible to imagine a brick and mortar business that couldn’t benefit immensely from local search. On the other hand, having no local search presence could potentially end a local business.

According to comScore/TMP, Google grew their local search market share from 15% in June 2008 to 26% in June 2009.

What is your share of that traffic and potential leads ?

If you read and apply these 10 tips your Google Maps traffic will have no where to go but up.

1. Business information on the web must be consistent accurate, accurate and up-to-date

Without consistency of your business information across the Web, your Google business listing will never fulfill its potential. Simply put, that is because Google relies on information it finds on the Internet to improve the relevancy of their results. Customer reviews and mentions of your business information on the web play a big role in how Google ranks listings — it is important that Google associates them with your business. Inconsistencies in how your local business is presented online can make this impossible, which in turn can significantly reduce your local search visibility.

Right after you claim and verify your business in Google local business center, make sure that your business info is correct with Google’s trusted data providers like InfoUSA, Acxiom, Localize, or Yellow Pages. Check those first, because they supply data to a very large number of business directories.

Risk factors that can trigger inconsistencies are change of address, phone number or business name.  At the end of the day you want to get rid of all inconsistencies.

2. Claiming and Verifying Your Listing.

It’s clear that most listings in existence have not yet been claimed, which means that you get an upper hand just by claiming and verifying your listing.

Since Google is placing a lot of trust on information they get from the business owner via GLBC ( Google Local Business Center ), don’t forget to be as accurate as possible when filling in your business information.

3. Consolidate your presence on Google Maps

Some local businesses will have more than one Google local listing even though they have only one physical location. This usually happens without the fault of their own and most of the time even without their knowledge as result of the listing creation and verification processes.

At the same time, it’s against Google’s guidelines to have more than one listing if you have one physical location because you are not representing your business as it appears in the offline world. To avoid any problems that might arise from this, you have to consolidate your local listings. Essentially, this is done by claiming all your listings, moving all enhanced content in the listing you wish to keep and then deleting the rest.

4. Categorize like a champ

I can’t emphasize enough how important is proper categorization in Google Maps. It can make a difference between a poor listing and a great one. Google will suggest categories as you type and you will have to use one of those predefined categories to classify your business.

Choose a more general category that accurately describes what your business does as the mandatory one. You can choose more predefined categories if it makes sense for you. But reserve a few fields for custom categories because Google doesn’t always come up with the most specific categories

To make your categorizing more effective try to:

• Keep categorizing consistently across the web.
• When choosing custom categories think about how would a user that wants a specific type of service you offer search for it.
• Be specific when necessary
• Keep categories from overlapping

5. Description

Description field should be used to emphasize what is unique about your business and to inspire trust. All that in less then 200 characters. Having something remarkable about the business in the description is a must. Maybe you have the oldest company in your town, or a patent for something.

6. Pictures and Videos

Images and videos are ideal tools for making listings compelling and bringing their conversion rates up. Google allows 10 images and 5 videos to be added to your listing. Some types of images that would help your listing in many ways are:

• Your Logo
• Brands Carried
• Pictures of your establishment
• Logos of associations you belong to (like the Better Business Bureau)
• Your Video Commercials or Interviews, etc…

7. Details (Hours of operation, payment options, additional details)

• If you offer financing for your service why not say so?
• If you’re open late, you should let people know
• Use additional details fields to be ultra specific about what makes your business unique

8.Coupons

Coupons have always been a great way to promote products and services, however in Google Maps they are possibly the only reliable way to track business generated by your Google listing that couldn’t be tracked otherwise ( by call tracking, or web analytics software).

9. Spread the word

Even Google recommends this one. Your local business information should be found on many:

• IYP sites
• Niche directory sites
• Local Business directories
• Any trusted site possible

Google claims that they rely on mentions of your business information on the web to improve the quality of search results. That means the more mentions of your business on the web Google associates with your listing more certain they are that your business is real, in operation, and important. Google rewards this with greater local search visibility.

10. Get Reviewed

Reviews and Web citations (mentions of your business) are extremely important for similar reasons.

Encourage reviews and make it easy for people to review you. Make it a part of your routine to ask for reviews from happy customers and point them in the right direction.

Google Mobile Instant Is Globally Available After Just 35 Days

Google is good at unleashing products quickly when it wants to, and it has certainly tried to focus more and more on a global market, but even with those precedents their recent announcement is impressive. In a display of surprising speed, Google has created versions of Instant Mobile for all twenty-eight languages spoken in countries where Google Mobile is available.

In their December 9th announcement on the Google Mobile Blog, the company declared that they’d finished unrolling this new product globally. While it was expected that global availability was on its way, no one expected that the search engine giant would fulfill its promise so soon after the initial product version was released. The original Google statement read “We’re working to support additional countries and languages and more devices in the coming months” — phrasing that didn’t indicate full support in just over one month.

The Google Instant Mobile update was initially released on November 4th, allowing English language users to access the instant search features released for the web earlier this year from their mobile devices. The thirty-five day globalization of the product added twenty-seven languages, and access from more than thirty new countries.

The roll-out also includes the AJAX and HTML5 features designed to speed up the searches themselves — which is especially important for the dynamically displayed results. As with the English-language version, the updates allow users to get dynamic search results more quickly than they previously completed static search queries, and those who simply prefer static search results can turn the feature off with a single click.

The update is automatically integrated into Google search features that are accessed via any Android web browser, and is available for Android OS version 2.2 and up. It has also been released for the iOS4 (Apple’s latest iPhone operating system).

Google’s Gmail 2.3.2 Released for Android

In September of this year, Google separated its Gmail application from its core Android OS, allowing it to update the program without relying on a full system. Now, it has released its first independent application update with version 2.3.2.

According to the Google Mobile Blog, this program was released on the Android market on December 9, 2010. Dependent on the application settings of the user, a re-login to the marketplace or a manual update may be necessary. The prominent updates include: inline message composition, a new interface for selecting message type and recipients, the option to send mail from non-Gmail addresses, and a priority inbox view.

Inline message composition, or the ability to write messages interspersed between the quoted text of a message, was not available on previous Gmail versions. As of 2.3.2, however, it can be activated just by clicking on a single “respond inline” button in the compose window. With similar simplicity, you can now change from the default “reply” to either “reply to all” or “forward” from the compose window itself.

Another highly requested feature, that of being able to send from alternate email addresses, has also been integrated. While you will have to set up the custom “from” address in your Gmail desktop client, any address added in this way can be used from your mobile device.

And finally, Google’s priority inbox, a feature that did well in the standard web-mail version of Gmail but lacked deep functionality in the mobile client, has been revamped. It is now easier both to label messages as important (which can be done by clicking on a new double-arrow marker) and view all the priority messages in your inbox. Integrated with this, users can also alter their phone settings so they only receive an alert when a new priority message is received.

How Google Hotpot Is Different from Places

While initial versions of Hotpot were released in mid-November, Google’s heir to Places is only now starting to see a ramp up in popularity. It’s unsurprising, since we have reached both the phase where users have experienced and explored the Hotpot features, and where Google has launched additional marketing campaigns. But how, exactly, is Hotpot different from Google Places?

As reported by Mashable at the early release stage of Hotpot, the primary updates are in how information is presented, how reviews are collected, the Hotpot “recommendation” feature, and the social aspect of the site.

The interface of the site itself is much more visually-oriented, with the location map playing only a minor feature and the business details coming in second to images of local businesses.

While Google places and Maps both allowed users to rate and review local businesses, the majority of the information came in through review feeds from major review websites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, PriceLine, etc.). Google has certainly not indicated that they’re halting the import of reviews, but they’re definitely pushing to make this Google site itself a more popular place to go when writing reviews. It encourages users to write reviews by the recommendation feature and social aspects of the site, as well as by tracking your number of reviews directly in the interface.

The “recommendation” feature of Hotpot allows users to get improved feedback from Google based on what businesses have already been well (or poorly) rated. The more businesses reviewed, the better the recommendations, Google claims. Additionally, since Hotpot is attached to your Google ID, you can expect these improved results to show up in Maps, standard search, and mobile searches as well.

And finally, the social features of the site allow you to send recommendations to friends, see their reviews, and compete on the Hotpot leader boards to see who can review the most local businesses.

Six Pieces of the Smart Marketing Puzzle

Marketing may sound boring to some, I mean… who cares about facts, figures, data and trends. It’s a business, however, much like any other business – except maybe more cutthroat in today’s online presence. Marketing plans are at the front-line of a very competitive war. Only, in this war no one gets to surrender.

In a world of hostile takeovers, buyouts, plain mismanagement and potential anti-trust issues, there are no survivors. If you’re not eating, you’re being eaten. You don’t want to be someone else’s snack. Instead, you need to pay attention to the smart way to market.

You need a detailed picture of your business, including problems and opportunities it’s facing. A good marking plan will give you this image, lays out what you think are essential objectives and ways to meet those objectives. It helps you lay out strategic and tactical approaches, and then carefully evaluate those approaches with sound judgment.

Everyone in your company who sees the finished marketing plan will have no doubt what the objectives are. They’ll have marketing, sales, expense and profit information. It’s written down; they can even look back and verify the information.

So how do you build this fantastic marketing puzzle? Where are the pieces?

#1 State the Facts

Note that the heading says “facts” not “things I want to be true but may not be”. When you note the state of your business in the plan, you have to be as unbiased and objective as possible. You need a clear understanding of any fact related to your marketing efforts, such as:

• Evaluations of your product line
• Sales history
• Competitive situation
• Pricing
• Expenditures
• Target market wants/needs
• Business relationship analysis

#2 Identify Problems vs. Opportunities

Problems are generally considered obstacles. However, most problems can be turned into opportunities. For example, maybe your sales support materials are lacking in umph. This can be a problem, but it also gives you an opportunity to tighten the sales material, which, in turn, can raise conversions.

Recognize when you have a problem. Then, in true optimistic style, look for the buried opportunity.

#3 Identify your Objectives

For a great marketing plan, objectives need to be specific. At the same point in time, your objectives should also be conservative enough to be attainable. After all, a long enough list of failed objectives can make anyone want to give up. As well, it can be downright detrimental to your bottom line.

Therefore, when identifying your objectives, don’t stick to wide topics like “I’m going to increase sales”. Instead, narrow the focus. For example, “increase overall company sales by 10% using tactics A, B and C.”

#4 Shortcoming Recommendations

No business is perfect, and if you objectively state the facts, you’ll most likely find some shortcomings. At least one or two may get in the way of your brilliant marketing strategy. Or… you could add another piece of the smart marketing puzzle.

A strong marketing plan also includes recommendations for correcting those shortcomings. Evaluate other strategies that could be taken – like a Plan A, Plan B and so on. Clearly outline the pros and cons of each plan, however.

#5 Recommended Budget

How much is this fantastic marketing strategic going to cost? Where is the money going? No guesswork, here, and no wild suppositions; do your homework. This information needs to be as clear-cut as everything else.

For example: “$1,000 allocated to PPC per month for [SERPs]. Estimated 6% increase in sales volume.”

#6 Profit/Loss Predictions

How much will have to be deducted from your gross profit? Do you have a conservative estimate for your attainable sales volumes? The final piece of the smart marketing plain should include profit/loss predictions (or forecast, if you will), based on theses numbers. What are the conservative amounts for gross profit vs estimated costs?

You have all six pieces for a smart marketing strategy. Now what? Well, if it works, everyone will agree it was a fantastic strategy – and then forget to reevaluate. Don’t just look at the plan every year… check your marketing strategy every six months. That way, you can tighten up potential issues before they become serious issues, and always stay on track. Nowthat’s smart marketing!

Top 10 Tips for Local Search Engine Optimisation

Punch Above your Weight Online - Localised search results have recently experienced a major overhaul within the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) which has resulted in a fantastic opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses.

Local search results were previously relegated to a small map, which would appear within the first page of results, but now they enjoy first page domination for local search terms.

The benefit of this to small businesses is that they can now appear above their much larger revivals who are relegated to the last few results on page one of Google.

Don't miss out on local search results; they're your next customers. Here's 10 tips to help you capture them:

1. Claim your Google Places listing - it's easy to do and if one doesn't exist for your business then you can quickly and simply create one. What is it? A Google Places listing is effectively a profile attached to Google's local search results. It is important because Google ranks these profiles above all others in their new first page local search results.

2. Add pictures to your Google Places listing. The effectiveness of your Google places listing is impacted by its completeness. Images will not only flesh out your listing, but when they appear in the search results, besides your Google Places listing, they are eye-catching and attractive which will increase clicks.

3. Gather citations - citations are instances on the web where your business is mentioned, Google uses the consistency of the information it finds and the authority of the referring site to boost your rank in local search engine results. The quality as well as volume of citations is an important factor in local search engine optimisation.

4. Include your locality in on-page optimisation - revisit your META and Title Tags to ensure your town is included wherever possible. Make sure your address appears on every page and that you have a contact page.

5. Submit your site to local directories including Yell.com, Qype.co.uk, Hotfrog.co.uk, local Chamber of Commerce and business directories. Local directories will have greater relevance in local search as it narrows your field of operation for Google to a localised area.

6. Manage your online exposure - make sure the information distributed across the web that pertains to your business is managed carefully. Trawl local directories and existing listings, double-check that your details are correct and that they match both your Google Places contact information as well as your websites contact page.

7. Get your reviews and testimonials on the web - no doubt you will already have testimonials collected from customers, these need to go online as well as in other marketing materials. Put a process in place of asking satisfied customers to review you online if at all possible. Pen a short email with instructions of where and how you would like the review left and send this to all satisfied customers.

8. Use a local phone number instead of a 0800, 0845 or 0870 - this again refines your location making it easier for search engines to place you within a specific region.

9. Target local keywords - when link building make sure you target some local variations on your keywords in the anchor text of your links.

10. Use your supply network - think about local search as being similar to networking. No doubt you will already have a network of local contacts, associates and suppliers who all allow your business to thrive. Simply transfer this network online by linking to each other.

Local search is set to dominate first page results for all local search terms. Small, local businesses should take advantage of this by implementing some or all of the tips above which will allow them to compete with much larger businesses who have until now monopolised the first page results by investing in aggressive SEO campaigns.

Google Goes Local: How to Use the Recent Changes to Google’s SERP to Your Advantage

Google claims that over 20 percent of all searches are for local businesses, places, etc.  With the changes Google has made to their SERP’s they are clearly favoring local search results.

The Changes

• Google Place pages now appear like full search results, with the Map moved to the far right.
• When Google determines the search term is definitely local, Place pages will dominate the results, often appearing above organic results (i.e. Pizza in Portland).
• When the term is likely local, the Pack 7 will appear among the results (i.e. pizza).

With Google placing their Place pages among organic results and in many cases, above organic results; your Place page ranking has become more important than ever. To improve your ranking you need to:

1. Optimize Your Google Places page
2. Optimize Your Website and Landing Pages For Local Searches
3. Leverage Citations
4. Get More Customer Reviews

1. How to Optimize Your Google Places Page

Claim Your Google Place Page

Google may have already generated a Place page for you. Just claiming your Place page can help improve your rank. And if you plan to do any optimization to try and out rank your competitors, you can’t start without first claiming your page.

Setup Service Area

If you’re a plumber that services Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond but your business address is in Redmond, you will not appear in searches for a “plumber in Seattle” or “plumber in Bellevue”. You’ll need to go into your Places page and select “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations” and then define your service area to include Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond.

Verify Address Is Correct

This has as much to do with customer service as it does with SEO. If you do have a physical address; like a restaurant or store, make sure Google Places has the address listed correctly. And don’t use a PO Box.

Always Show Address

Google Places gives you the option to hide your address. DO NOT hide your address! Though this may change in the future, hiding your address can have a negative impact on your ranking even for service areas.

Choose The Right Categories

Do some market research and find-out the most commonly used business categories, associated with your business. You can check out your competitions’ Place pages and Superpages for category ideas. Also be sure to use at least one of Google’s default categories.

Use Keywords In Place Page Description

Though you shouldn’t stuff your description with keywords, writing a full and complete description using keywords will help your ranking.

Add Photos And Video to Page

Including photos and/or video on your Place Page will contribute to your page’s completeness and improve your ranking, and also help your page stand out among the search results. Making your page more useful to customers will not only improve your click-through-rate but will also improve your conversion rate too.

List Phone Number with Local Area Code

Make sure that the phone number you list on your page has the same area code as your target market. If you don’t have a local number, get a free one using a service like Google Voice. You can even set it up so that when a customer calls your new local number it’ll send the call to the phone you’re currently using.

Things to Avoid

• Multiple Places Pages with the same phone number
• Multiple Places Pages with the same address (If you rent office space with many businesses in the same building, be sure to include your suite number.)
• Hiding Your Address
• Never use an 800 number

How to Optimize Your Linked Website and Landing Pages for Google Places

Having a company website can also help your Places Page ranking by adding to your company’s credibility. The links you list on your Places Page should point to area specific landing pages, which only contain information for a specific area (i.e. Link To Portland Landing Page, Link to Oregon City Landing Page).

• Include city and state in all of your website title tags – This will help both your organic and local rankings
• Include your full address on your landing pages – Make sure that the address you use is formatted correctly by typing it into Google Maps.
• Include your local area code phone number on your landing pages
• Include the location keyword in the anchor text of inbound links like this: plumber in Portland
• The URL’s should contain the location keyword: http://mycompany.com/Portland-Plumbing
• If you have multiple locations, create separate landing pages for each location

Things to Avoid

• Never list a PO Box on your website without including your physical address
• Never include 800 numbers – If you have an 800 number listed on your website and no local numbers, it can lower your ranking.

Leveraging Citations

Being listed on 3rd party sites like Superpages, Yelp, Citysearch, etc. helps to establish your credibility which improves your ranking. Here are the most important factors that will affect your page ranking.

Consistency – Make sure your business name, address, and phone number are the same for all directories and that it exactly matches the information on Google Places. 

Quantity of Citations – The more directories you’re listed in, the better.

Quality of Citations  – Being listed in the directories of well-known and trusted directors can really give your page ranking a boost, as can being listed in local directories.

Top 10 Citation Sites

1. Superpages
2. infoUSA
3. Yellowpages/CanPages
4. Niche Industry Sites (i.e. Urban Spoon)
5. Citysearch
6. Localeze
7. Yelp
8. Yahoo
9. Acxiom
10. InsiderPages

Additional site: Municipal Sites (Chamber of Commerce, Local Directories), Kudzu, DexKnows, Angie’s List, Merchant Circle.

Customer Reviews

Though Google has stated that positive (or negative) reviews do not affect Place page ranking, other review factors can have an impact on your rank.

Volume of Reviews – The impact that volume will have on your ranking will depend on the review volume of your competition. Try to have at least as many customer reviews as your competition.

Velocity of Reviews – If you get a ton of reviews all at once, it will look spammy to Google and you may get penalized. Ideally, you want a constant stream of reviews.

Reviews Left Directly On Google – Reviews left by Google accounts with a long account history are more likely to be trusted by Google, than those people that sign up for a Google account just prior to writing a review.

Location and Product Keywords in Reviews- Though you won’t have any direct control over what your customers write, you can suggest they mention your location and product or service when writing a review.

When it comes to customer reviews, being passive won’t cut it. You need to actively ask your customers to review you online. Reach out to the customers you’ve recently sold to and ask for their feedback. If you need to, offer your existing customers a discount on future purchases for writing up a review.

Top 10 Customer Review Sites

1. Yelp
2. Yahoo
3. Google
4. Citysearch
5. InsiderPages
6. Superpages
7. Niche Industry Sites (i.e. Urban Spoon)
8. Judysbook
9. Yellowpages/CanPages
10. TripAdvisor

Other sites: Bing, Kudzu, Qype, Local.com, MerchantCircle.

Differences between Google and its Local Competitors

Imagine if you could travel back to the days when Google was still a young upstart in the search engine game, when making your way to the top of the rankings was a comparatively quick and simple process. How would you take advantage of the chance to get in early with the global search superpower to-be?

The fact is that the same opportunities are available right now – in foreign language markets. The web is growing more multilingual with every day, and in many countries the search engine of choice isn’t Google, but a home-grown search behemoth or global Google competitor – for instance, Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia and Yahoo in Japan.

The reasons for these search engines’ local dominance are many and varied – from patriotism amongst users, to lax copyright enforcement, to their optimization for non-Latin scripts, or even just because the search engine established itself in the region before Google.

The key benefit for search engine marketers, though, is that your foreign language internet marketing efforts for Google’s competitors will show a better ROI than your internet marketing efforts in English, due simply to the fact that there is less content online overall in languages other than English, and therefore less keyword competition in these search engines.

This presents a massive opportunity for marketers to get in there before the crowds – the only thing you need to know is, how does SEM for these search engines differ from playing the game with Google?

Here’s a few tips to get you started with the most popular search engines in three of the biggest emerging/established eCommerce markets – China, Russia and Japan.

Baidu (China)

The best place to start with Baidu is with a Chinese domain name (com.cn or .cn), hosted in China or Hong Kong, to ensure your site is listed as locally relevant. Geotargeting your pages, as you would with Google, does not work – the site must be hosted locally to get priority.

Crucially, for back-linking, Baidu counts incoming links towards a site’s relevance, but it doesn’t weight them by the authority of the linking site, as Google does. Consequently, a link from a top 2000 Alexa site will in theory have the same weight as a link from a top 200,000 site.

While Google now largely ignores metadata, Baidu values meta data highly, including metatags, meta keywords and descriptions, when determining a site’s relevance. Baidu also actively censors its content to comply with Chinese government regulations.

Yandex (Russia)

Yandex takes local relevance into account for search results, based on your domain name, IP address and on-page content – but handily you can also set your location using their geotargeting tool.

Yandex’s algorithm shares many similarities with Google’s, so if you follow the same rules of localized keywords, authoritative and relevant back-links and original content then you should do well.

One main point of difference is Yandex’s Thematic Citation Index, similar to Google’s PageRank – it counts out-bound links to authoritative sites as well as in-bound, but doesn’t count any links in or out of web forums, un-moderated directories and other sites with no human controls on the posting of links. The message here is to keep your SEO linking organic, but step up your outbound linking to match your inbound linking efforts. Also, be sure to register your site by its theme in the Yandex Directory.

Yahoo (Japan)

The SEO rules for Yahoo Japan are the same as for Yahoo elsewhere (except obviously your site and content needs to be in Japanese!). Getting listed in the Yahoo Directory is very important, but the primary rule is that Yahoo loves keyword-optimized content above all other factors, including inbound and outbound links.

While Google prefers a keyword density of 2%, Yahoo likes up to 7 or 8% keyword density, and Yahoo also places emphasis on each page’s meta tags. Yahoo also loves regularly updated content, even more so than Google, so blogging keyword optimized content regularly is a good idea. Lastly, submit your sitemap to Yahoo, as its spider does not search as deeply as Google’s, and this will help them to index your site’s pages correctly.

As you can see, the differences between Google and its major local competitors are small but significant – with the help of a native speaking SEO expert, adapting your established Google SEO campaigns for any other search engine should be a breeze.

How to Spot Great SEO

SEO is truly a mindset a business or a person must realize that it is more than just search engine rankings. The companies and individuals that realize this are the ones that are really reaping the benefits of marketing themselves online in the search engine space. Great search engine optimization doesn’t just happen overnight or with some “tool” you found out there to make it happen quicker. Really good search engine optimization is a craft that takes time to acquire and the companies that are doing it right are visible in many areas.

Here are some ways to spot a great SEO program:

Overall Search Visibility: A company that really gets it and understands the concepts is visible in many different areas online. I still talk to business owners that are hung up on just ranking for a keyword or two thinking that is a successful marketing approach. A good search engine marketing approach is being visible in multiple areas. I’m even going to go as far as saying that pay per click, even though it is not SEO, shows that you clearly understand the concept of visibility. If it was called search engine visibility people might approach it slightly differently.

Social Communication: A company that understands the process and power of online communication with their audience will have a strong presence in the social media space. Social media has a very serious and strong overlap with SEO that many people don’t seem to understand sometimes. Social media is not a fad or some fly by night approach, social media is here to stay and it is starting to have a much stronger impact on search results. More and more Twitter posts and Facebook feeds are starting to find their way directly to organic search results and the companies that embrace it are the ones that understand it and are reaping the rewards.

Embrace The Cloud: Marketing a business on the cloud has a lot to offer and the entrepreneurs and business owners that use and open mind to market themselves understand that almost everything that goes online has some sort of search engine optimization value. Not everything is meant to increase rankings which some businesses don’t seem to understand. You are going to perform certain actions online that might generate visitors directly to your website from that action but will not necessarily increase your rankings which is fine. A visitor is a visitor regardless of how they make their way to your website. The cloud is full of traffic generating sources just waiting to be utilized. The only way you are going to benefit from it is if you have an open mind and realize it requires utilization of everything the search space has to offer.

Quality v.s. Quantity: Dumping 1,000 articles into a directory is not good SEO. Writing a few strategic articles and having them visible in locations where your visitors are hanging out is. A company that understands that good SEO requires strategy and quality and not an approach that includes “science” to gain visibility is on the right path.

Branding Importance: In my personal opinion the companies that hit the nail on the head are the ones that incorporate heavy branding and marketing while introducing hefty SEO elements to get the job done right. In today’s market place there is so much clutter and noise you don’t have a choice but to do something different in order to stand out as much as you can. Without a strong sense of branding you are going to get lost in the sea of noise that exists in almost every vertical and category now. I think some website owners seem to forget just how powerful the power of branding really is. Branding is sometimes much more powerful than rankings. Even great rankings don’t always work anymore if your website is not designed correctly.

Website Conversions: A company that truly understands their SEO knows that their search engine optimization is only as good as their website. If your traffic finds you and your website is set up horribly than nothing is going to convert. There is a series of efforts that are required to really put the pieces together and if they are not set up correctly your SEO efforts will hit bottle necks.

Great search engine optimization requires knowledge, an open mind and a big marketing hat. Without those you are never going to really flourish how you would like.

Off Page Optimization (SEO) Tips

Webmasters have far less control over the "off-page" optimization factors than they do the "on-page" optimization factors. Off-page optimization does, however, influence how a website ranks in search results, so it should not be ignored.

Use the following off-page optimization techniques to improve your website search engine ranking:

1. Keywords In Incoming Links

The anchor text used to link to the web page

should contain important keywords or keyword phrases. The linking text is viewed as "contextual" by search engines.

2. Quantity Of Incoming Links

Search Engines will often monitor the quantity of incoming links to a website. A large quantity of incoming links is an indicator of popularity or importance, and the search engines will favor sites with a larger number of backlinks. Search engines use the volume of incoming links to give better ranking to more popular 

3. Quality Of Incoming Links

While search engines value quantity, they value the quality of the links even more. Backlinks from trusted and related websites matter more than a large volume of links in general. Whenever possible, solicit backlinks from trusted authority websites.

4. Timing Of Incoming Links

The gradual acquisition of links appears far more natural to search engines, and will not give the appearance that a webmaster is attempting to manipulate the ranking by gathering a large number of links in a short time frame. Try to spread the number of links obtained over time, rather than getting them all at once.

5. Varied Linking Text

Vary the anchor text slightly when possible, so that the linking appears natural to the search engines. The text used to link to a webpage should be varied.

6. Blog Commenting

When commenting on blogs, use a keyword phrase in the "name" box. That will often result in a backlink for which you have control of the anchor text.

7. Forum Posting

When posting in forums, include your keywords or phrases as part of your forum signature, as another way of encouraging backlinks.

8. Press 

Submit any press or media announcements to increase exposure and backlinks. Each and every link back to your website can help the site rank better, so take the time to develop quality backlinks and optimize the anchor text to increase your search engine's ranking.

Meta Name Guidelines

To understand the guidelines of the meta name tags is most important for optimization of your website. Meta names play a major roll to rank well in search engines. The content and title tag is the most important factor when optimizing your website.. We try to cover all these different requirements, which is because of its diversity not easy.

There are so many different meta tag names and in fact most of them are not even used, as we can see when we check out the web pages on the Internet. In this section we will give you some input what they can do and how they can help us in ranking.

The most important is that your keyword which you want to rank for or search term is located inside your title tag. Best practice is, to place them in front of the title section, so the crawlers will spot them first. The position is not very important and you should play around with it to see what it does in search engines. Don't repeat the same keywords over and over again, this only will put your ranking down, keep it in balance with what the search engine will find in your content of the specific page.

You can also fill in the » Meta Name Description Tag in the head of your HTML code. Write here a short description of the web page related to its content on the page. Fill in for each page its very own description and title. Note that the description tag is not necessary and optional as search engines will extract a snipped of text automatically which will be displayed under your listing.

Abstract tag is similar as the description tag and not need to be added.

The keyword tag is of no importance at all, basically this tag is dead. All search engines ignore this tag because of massive spamming in the past. Not need to add it to your site, it's just a line of extra code which is useless.

How does a < Meta Name =" or tag look like? *

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Another tag is the "revisit-after", this belongs to the family of robot texts (revisit after 7 days) this tags is not recognized by bots and spiders. Adding them to your head content doesn't seem to help as crawlers come to your site automatically, the more you update the site the more frequently they will visit the site. Place the newest content with a link from your home page to make Google spot it easily and index those pages faster.

"Robots" content="index, follow" /> is another useless tag and not need to add this one either. Reason is simple, search engines will follow your site anyway you not need to tell them to do so. It would only make sense to block them for certain pages and use a "noindex, nofollow" for that page.

These are just a few examples, there are additional tags you can use, which are discussed in the following pages. Being always on top of new developments and changes is most important to achieve best results.

Title Tag

The title in the head of your code is the most important element of your website. This is the place, where to put your keywords or search terms. You enter those keywords the users will use, to find your kind of business or services, when searching the web. Also keep in mind that the title is displayed in the left top bar of the browser window and is visible to your visitors. If you use the right terms your website can get a boost in ranking in all major search engines.

Some companies simply put their company name here or even worse "contact us". This makes no sense because users will not search for your company name, unless you are a well known multinational or famous company. As long as you are just one of many companies and not listed as a top 50 global firm you should improve your title tag. Do not use words like "of, the, and" etc in your title.

Our SEO consultants have solid experience in all matters concerning title, description or robot text and follow up procedures to optimize those for best search engine ranking.


This is How Your Title Tag Should Look Like

Content Reflecting Title and Description Comes Here

Make sure that the keywords or search terms you use in the title return inside the content of the web page, this will help to get a better and faster ranking in search engines.

If you don't know which search term or phrase you should use you always can consult SEO-WATCH staff and they will advice you which words to use.

Description Tag

The description tag is one of the meta data. This tag has no effect on the ranking of your site in search engines. The search engine will read the description tag of the website and display it under the listing. It's recommended to use descriptive description about the services or products you provide to make the user click on your listing in the search results. The better the description the more visitors will click on it, off course your site also needs to rank well in search engines. You do not need to spam this tag full of keywords as it will not help and has only a negative effect.



This is How Your Description Tag Should Look Like

Content Reflecting Title and Description Comes Here

If you're using these guidelines we described above to optimize your website it will show an improvement on visitors and postion in the search engines.

Make sure that the keywords you are targeting come back in the content of your site, this will save you a lot of time on link building. If it doesn't, just try to add them to your content one or two times is enough depending on your backlinks, you do not need to repeat the keywords over and over.

Keyword Tag

In this section we will talk about the keyword meta tag that you insert into the of your HTML code.

How important is this tag? Most of the consultants in the SEO world say, that it has no impact on ranking results.

The cause of this is that many people misused this tag in the past to spam search engines with a large amount of keywords and stuffing them excessively inside this section of meta data. After search engines changed their algoritme to prevent this misbehavior.

Our SEO consultants have prove that this tag has died a long time ago and the search engine algoritme will never pick them up again. Yahoo also has dropped this tag a long time ago.

Not need to add it to your HTML code, it's just a line of useless code.

This is How Your Keyword Tag Should Look Like

Content Reflecting Title and Description Comes Here

Above is an example on how the keywords tag looks like in the past. Today still many Webmasters use it in their code unaware of that the tag is not valid anymore.

SEO-WATCH has removed this tag from the HTML code with the last redesign of this website.

All Meta Tags

If you would like to know about meta tags and which are available and advised to be present at any website you're at the right address. SEO-WATCH is up to date and well informed about what is new and what is old on the Internet.

The most important meta tags are listed below they should be present in your HTML code. This will provide valuable information to search engines and tell them how to categorize and handle your website. Apply them or at least get a good understanding, which meta tags are available and how any website can communicate with search engines in a transparent and comprehensible way.



All Meta Name Tags in The HTML Code


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Content Reflecting Title and Description Comes Here

Examples above show you which meta tags should be added to your site. You can just copy and paste the above into your website HTML code into the head section and then modify it for your specific needs.

SEO-WATCH recommends to have all above listed tags i between the opening and closing tag of your HTML code.

Robots Meta Tags

What are robot meta tags and how do they look like and how can you use them?
Webmasters and search engine optimization companies make standard use of this meta tag. The tag will tell search engines which pages they should index and which ones not.

You can place anywhere in between your meta data section, which is located inside the head section of your HTML code.



Important Robots Tags

	Follow all links and index everything
	Not index and follow all links
	Index everything and not follow all links
	Do not index and follow anything
	This tag is not valid
rel=<nofollow"> placed within	Do not follow the link

Rel="nofollow" Attribute
Meta tags can exclude all outgoing links on a page which is most used by tricky SEO companies which do link exchanges, but you can also command search engines not to follow individual text links by adding rel="nofollow" tag to a hyperlink.

When Googlebot sees the attribute rel="nofollow" for example on a text link, the link will not get any votes when Google ranks the websites and gives not any PageRank.

Example what SEO's do, if you would exchange links with SEO-WATCH and you would place a link like below to our site:

SEO Company

You could replace it with:

SEO Company.

In this way your site will not parse any PR to our site but the link exchange is done in a dishonest way and we will definitely check this and remove your link from our site.

Robot.txt File
The content of the robots Meta Tag contains directives separated by commas.

The currently defined directives are [NO]INDEX and [NO]FOLLOW.
The INDEX directive specifies if an indexing robot should index the page. The follow directive specifies if a robot is to follow links on the web page.

The defaults are INDEX and FOLLOW.
The values all and none set all directives on or off: ALL=INDEX,FOLLOW and NONE=NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW.

You can place as an alternative the robots text into the root of your server, to control which of your web pages will be listed in the search results of search engines and which directories are forbidden for the crawler or bot. Some stuff you do not want publicly displayed should be disallowed for bots, because when not restricting the robots it will be most likely public. You should save the text file as robots.txt and insert the examples listed below to forbid specific files and directories. The below record describes the default access policy for any robot symbolized by the *:

• User-agent:*

Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow
The value of this field specifies a partial URL that is not allowed o be visited. This can be a full path, or a partial path; any URL that starts with this value will not be retrieved.. For example:

• Disallow: /help

This disallows all files in this directory
whereas.

• Disallow: /help/

would disallow /help/index.html but allow /help.html
You do not need to allow specific files and directories as the robots are allowed to any files not declared as disallowed.
Do all bots follow up the robot.txt file? No! Some black hat bots will ignore all your efforts and you can only block them by the .htaccess file.