SEO - Link Building

Link building is the SEO practice of obtaining links from external websites to your own to improve both direct referrals (i.e., people clicking on the links), and search engine ranking. Link building is all about increasing your site link popularity.

Website Crawler goes to a site again and again whose ranking in a search engine is high. You can verify this fact by putting your site on a high-rank site. If your site link is available on a high-rank website, then you have 99.99% chances that your site is indexed within 24Hrs.

How to Increase Link Popularity?

There are various ways of increasing your website link popularity. You can follow the tips given below, which are easily doable.

• Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Do not go for automated submission.
• Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org, yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories gives a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
• Provide high quality content so that anyone would naturally link to your site if you are featuring what they want, and that is not available anywhere else.
• Leverage your personal relations with other webmasters. Put your site link on their sites. One-way links often count for more than reciprocal links.
• Participate in Link Exchange Programs. Find top 20 sites doing the same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the search engine.
• If you are subscribed in a forum and the forum does not have any restriction to keep your site link as your signature, then it can help you to increase your site popularity.
• Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG and Slashdot. Before submitting, please go through their spam policy.
• Write good articles in blogging sites and give a few references of your links within that article.
• Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep them busy on your site. If possible create forums, newsletters, blogs, etc.

There are other ways, but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternatives.

• Buy a place on high-rank website where you can put your link.
• Subscribe for Google's AdWords program to drive traffic towards your site.
• You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the number of hits on your site, which can result in your site link popularity.

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SEO - Hiring an Expert

Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. If you are really serious about SEO and you are not getting expected result, then it would be better to hire an SEO expert.

SEO experts perform the are following tasks:

• Code validation and clean up - Ensure that the code is search engine friendly and standards compliant.
• Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure URLs are spider friendly.
• On-Page optimization - Page Title, copy writing, Call-to-action, etc.
• Quality link building - Securing one way links from relevant sites.
• Keyword research - Building a list of key phrases relevant to your business.
• Creating Quality Content - Building optimized pages around terms discovered through keyword research.
• Off-Page Optimization - Managing Blogs, Press Releases, Article Submissions.

If you are confident that you have the required skills, then you can take care of all the above activities; otherwise it is worth taking help from SEO Companies or to hire any SEO specialist.

Choosing an SEO Expert or Company

It is very difficult to choose a correct SEO expert or SEO company. However the following guidelines can help you in this activity:

• Start searching through your friends and business partners.
• Post your queries in SEO Forums to get feedback from the community.
• Check other sites rank which they already have optimized.
• Do not go for SEO companies doing automated submission.
• Do not go for SEO companies doing Black Hat tricks.
• Do not look for cheap SEO. But take care, high price also does not guarantee high quality.
• Take guarantee if possible for a particular rank and any particular search engine.
• User SEO Expert or Company name in Google to find more information about them.
• Do not go just because of their fancy site and availability of good articles on their site.
• Do not get fascinated by the testimonials available on their sites.

We can not list out all the factors here because there may be different situations and different views. You should be smart enough to think what's bad and what's good.

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SEO - Verifying Web Site

You design and develop a website but how would you know if you have put all the HTML syntax in a correct way. Most browsers do not complain against your wrong syntax, but wrong is wrong.

There are many SEO experts who claim that SEO is not dependent on site HTML/XHTML verification. But we will discuss various reasons why your site should be W3C Compliance.

Why HTML/XHTML Verification is Required?

There are various reasons to verify your website before hosting it over the internet.

• Any webpage quality depends on how well you have written your webpage.It should be syntactically correct and should pass all the Quality Gates.
• When any search engine does indexing for your web page content, it might get confused if the HTML tags are not written properly, and much of the web page content might not be indexed properly.
• There might be many HTML tags, which you are using in your webpage but then have been depreciated and many of the search engines do not support them.
• Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always appreciated by good webmasters.

What is W3C Compliance?

W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and since 1994, the W3C has provided the guidelines by which, websites and webpages should be structured and created. Here are the links to validate your web pages:

• Validate HTML/XHTML File against W3C Standard HTML/XHTML Validator.
• Validate CSS File against W3C Standard CSS Validator.

While verification, you may get errors along with appropriate reasons. All the validations will be done using XHTML DTD, which is a refined version of HTML.

Rules for W3C Compliance

There following rules, are to be following while developing a webpage.

• Use XHTML declaration statements to start every XHTML page:

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC 
  "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

• Every tag must be closed.
• The head and body tags are now mandatory.
• Empty tags get a terminating slash. An empty tag is a tag that doesn't require an end tag. Examples include <br> and <hr>.

  <BR> is now <br />.
  <HR> is now <hr />.
  <IMG SRC="--"> is now <img src="--" />

• All tags must be lower-case. This does not apply to attributes, only tags. For example, both of these formats are acceptable under the XHTML DTD:

  <FONT color="#ffffcc"> is invalid
  <font color="#ffffcc"> is valid
  <font color="#FFFFCC"> is also valid

• All the attribute values should be put with in double quotes.
• Tags may not be nested.

  <b><i>Text</b></i> This is invalid
  <b><i>Text</i></b> This is valid

• The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big, small, sub, or sup.
• One <form> tag cannot be inside another <form> tag.
• If your code contains a &, it must be written as &amp;.
• Any use of CSS should use all lower-case letter.

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SEO - Content is the King

Content basically includes what you see on the site: the text, graphics, and even links to other websites. You should not use excessive graphics because they are not Search Engine Friendly plus heavy graphics normally put the users out when they get downloaded, especially over a slow network.

Thousands of articles, books, and forum entries are available on how to make your website search engine friendly, but ultimately, one rule stands above the rest: Unique, high-quality, unduplicated content is the king.

Superior the quality of your content, the higher the ranking you achieve, larger the traffic you gain and greater the popularity of your website. Search engines prefer good quality sites in their index and search results.

Relevant, fresh, and timely content is crucial in attracting visitors to your website. It helps you both draw traffic from search engines and create audience loyalty.

Unique, High-Quality Content

When people visit a website for information, they want your unique spin on a topic. How is your material or content unique? Is that uniqueness obvious, and easy to find and to understand? Visitors want unique, high-quality site content. It is not only your home page content, but also all the linked pages should have useful and easy-to-understand content.

Now-a-days, search engines have become very smart and they are able to understand complete grammar and complete phrase. Hence while ranking a page against other, the content available on a page matters.

Sites with duplicated, syndicated, or free content are get given red flags by the search engines.

SEO Content Writing (Copy Writing)

SEO Content Writing (also referred as SEO Copy writing), involves the process of integrating keywords and informative phrases which make up the actual content of your website.

While writing your webpage content, the following tips may help you in keeping it better than others.

• The content should be directed for the specified target audience.
• Keyword density is strictly adhered as per search engine guidelines.
• Titles should always be eye-catching, compelling your visitors to read on and want to know what you offer in your website.
• Do not use confusing, ambiguous, and complex language. Use small statements to make your content more understandable.
• Keep your web pages short.
• Organize and distribute the content on the webpages.
• Divide your web page content also into short paragraphs.

Other Advantages of Having Great Content

It is not only SEO you need to think about. Many factors contribute to make your site popular.

• If your site is having something really unique, then people like to suggest it to their friends.
• Other webmasters like to create a link of your site on their sites.
• Your site visitors start trusting on your site and they look forward for the next content update and keep coming again and again.
• Although you are listed out by search engine, a but net surfer will click only that page whose content snippet looks more unique and interesting.

Conclusion

Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. But in the end, the golden rule of SEO is that Content is the King. It is not because of a search engine, but it is for your site visitors. A page that is read by people is better than a page that is read by bots.

So, write your content after a serious thought. Keep your title, keywords, link text, metatags up-to-date, unique, and interesting.

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SEO - Optimized Anchor

Use descriptive anchor text for all your text links. Most search engines consider anchor text of incoming links when ranking pages. Here is an example of anchor:

<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">Anchor Text</a>

Listed below are some of the important points to note about anchors:

• The Anchor Title plays a very important role and is seen by most of the search engines. The anchor title should have appropriate keywords. Anchor title helps the site visitors using a balloon, and displaying written text.
• The Anchor Text is another important part, which should be selected very carefully because this text is used not only for search engines but also for navigation purpose. You should try to use the best keywords in your anchor text.
• The otherpage.htm is the link to another webpage. This link could be to an external site. Here, you need to ensure that the linked page does exist; otherwise it is called a broken link, which gives a bad impression to search engines as well as to site visitors.

Another example of an anchor could be as follows:

<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">
   <img src="image.gif" alt="keywords" />
</a>

In this case, Anchor Text has been replaced by an image. So, while using an image in place of an anchor text, it should be checked that you have put alt tag properly. An image alt tag should have appropriate keywords.

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SEO - Title Optimization

An HTML TITLE tag is put inside the head tag. The page title (not to be confused with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window, and is also what is displayed when you bookmark a page or add it to your browser Favorites.

This is the one place on a webpage where your keywords MUST be present. Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your website is extremely important to Google - particularly for the homepage. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, remember to do this!

Here are some considerations while designing the title of a webpage:

• The title shouldn't consist of more than about 9 words or 60 characters.
• Use keywords at the very beginning of the title.
• Do not include your company name in the title unless your company name is very well known.

Improper or nonexistent use of titles in webpages keeps more websites out of top rankings on Google than any other factor except perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page or a lack of quality links from other websites that point to your site.

Best Practices for Creating Titles

Here are some best practices you should follow for creating titles on pages:

• Each page should have a unique title.
• If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in every title of every page.
• Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases.
• Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase on your specific product, service, or content pages.
• If you must include your company name, put it at the end of the title.
• Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords based on what WordTracker says is searched on more often.
• Do not overdo it - do not repeat your keywords more than 2 to 3 times in the title.
• Make sure the <title> tag is the first element in the <head> section of your page - this makes it easier for Google to find the page.

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SEO - Optimized Metatags

There are two important meta tags:

• Meta description tags
• Meta keyword tags

Some search engines may display the meta description as a part of the search results, but the meta keyword tags should not appear in search results.

The general consensus among SEO experts is that metatags are dead. Even so, many of these same experts continue to use metatags in their own sites.

For Google, adding the description meta tag does not result in a boost in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for your SERP listings in Google.

Yahoo! says, they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. Hence it makes sense to add one for Yahoo! and any other minor search engines that still use.

What Do the Metatags Look Like?

You can add the following in the head section of the web page:

<meta name="keywords" 
         content="KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2 KEYPHRASE1 etc. 
         about 30 to 40 unique words">

<meta name="description" 
         content="An accurate, keyword-rich description 
         about 150 characters">

Meta Description Tag Tips

Important tips for good Meta description tags:

• Use keywords in your meta description tag.
• Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use multiple syntaxes of your key words.
• There should not be more than 150 characters in a description metatag of a single web page.
• Use a different meta description tag for each page, as each page is different and stands a better chance of being found if you place a good title and description on it.

Meta Keywords Tag Tips

Please refer to the previous chapter for identifying good keywords. Use the following tips for preparing good meta keywords tags.

• Use synonyms.
• Use unique keywords.
• No need to repeat any given phrase.
• You can repeat a word any number of time, as long as each time it is part of a different phrase.

Robots Meta Tag

The important metatag that you may need sometime is the Robots Metatag which looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

Using the above metatag, you can tell a spider or a robot that you do not want some of your pages indexed, or that you do not want your links followed.

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