A complicated as well as an in-depth process, SEO requires plenty of experience, understanding and comprehension of the very core factors that drive the process. A dynamically changing industry, keeping up with the latest trends in SEO can be overwhelming. Which is why, I have compiled a list of SEO best practice for you all. You must remember to treat these as a general guideline and not a complete or comprehensive listing.
NOTE: When talking about SEO, it is incorrect to assume that your site’s ranking on search engines will automatically improve without the need to make changes to your website. Beware of any SEO firm that lays claim to the fact that they can make your website perform better without any modifications!

I am merely listing down the best practices in SEO in a straightforward manner so that you can derive your own meaning based on your requirements and essentials. Let’s get started:

Come Up With An Eye-Catching Title for Your Content Page or Copy or Post
• If you already have a brand, use it in the title tag. Using a branded title tag can be a powerful SEO technique.
• Keep the length of your titles to a minimum of 20 characters and a maximum of 65 characters, including spaces. A longer than 65 characters title has lower chances of being index properly by search engines. It also means wastage of space.
• Since, content is king with SEO, it becomes vital for you to include the valuable keyword (s) in the title of your page or post. You are likely to get better results in searches if you include your primary keywords in the page’s title as well as subtitles.
• Something that you must always remember is to think like a common internet searcher when you work on a title. Take time to compose the best title and bear in mind the search terms your visitors are most likely to use to find your website.
• Use the primary keyword in the heading of the page. This becomes the main headline of your page on the search engines’ indexes.
Come Up With The Best Meta Description For Your Content Page or Copy or Post
• Be honest with your content. Never use a misleading Meta description, as it can damage your website traffic from search engines in the long run.
• The Meta description should not be longer than 160 characters and must be descriptive in style.
Create the Best URL / Permalink
• A URL structure that includes the title of your page and describes your content will help increase targeted traffic to your website.
• KISS. Keep it short and simple, as far as URLs are concerned. Long urls must be avoided.
• Try to use descriptions rather than numbers. Keywords are much more effective than numbers.

These SEO best practices have been discovered as part of our experience over the years. So don’t forget to subscribe to our website!

WordPress software comes with plenty of in-built features that aid SEO. It also have specific SEO tools, besides the ability to use ‘.htaccess’ to make static URLs or permalinks. Some other features include blog rolling, pinging, several 3rd party plugins, hacks etc that can be used for better SEO.

Once you customize WordPress for your use, it is possible that you hurt the search engine friendly features. Therefore, it is important for you to ensure that optimal performance of your WordPress is maintained to attract the spiders. Here’s how:

Keep A Good, Clean Code – Ensure the code is error free and validated by search engines.

Content Speaks Aloud – Did you know search engines don’t ‘SEE,’ rather ‘READ’ a site, any site? Yes! It doesn’t matter if you have the prettiest website on the Internet. What matters is only your content. The content on your website should be informative, interesting, error free, clean, and educative (if possible). Use proper keywords where necessary. Good content SCORES very high on search engines.

Searchers-Oriented Content – Whenever you write content for your WordPress website, make sure you write it keeping in mind your end user – the searcher. Think about the keywords he/she can use to search for you. Use these keywords or key phrases in your Page title, the heading, subheadings and sprinkle them lightly through the content as well. Research the various search engines to understand how your content is scanned and try to fashion your content in the same manner to find favor with search engines.

Content Is King – Even when using WordPress, you must understand that search engines plough through your content and pretty much, ignore the styles and CSS. That’s why most of the WP themes have been designed keeping in mind that the text stays as close to the very top of your unstyled WP page as possible, while sidebars and footers are kept at the bottom.

Tip: Most search engines just scan the top third part of the page before moving on to the next one.

Adding Keywords, Links, and Titles To The Content – By using keywords, links, and appropriate titles to your content you increase your chances of attracting search engine spiders. Your Meta tags, page titles, and image labels should all be keyword driven.

Link Popularity – Solid links to your site are worth their weight in gold with search engines. It’s all about whom else is linked to you and blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks are some of the in-built features of WordPress that help you achieve this. Type link: www.yoursite.com into Google to check the exact number of incoming links your website has received via Google.

As a last word – WordPress is one of the most Search Engine friendly program and you must take full advantage of its built-in SEO features.

SIgn up for SEOintelligence and optimize your Word Press installation to its fullest potential!

But, then again a 301, 302, or even a 307 redirect can be search engine friendly. While many of you may find this post a tad boring, I suggest you still stay tuned for my explanation on everything related to 3XX series redirections. Once you are done, digg, stumble, reddit, this post before you get to something more interesting! And, thanks in advance…

Redirects are typically a part of the HTTP protocol rather than a part of SEO or search engine practices. In order to clearly understand this aspect of the HTTP protocol, you need to first understand the ground basics of HTTP. There is truth in the fact that search engines have a different take on some of the redirects but if you must use the server sided redirects, you must learn to use them in a way that is beneficial for you.

HTTP 1.0 is pretty much outdated and its time for HTTP 1.1. A 3xx series redirect should be looked upon as a forwarding request. Let me explain that with an example. If you have sent a mail to a friend who may have shifted to a new address, chances are that your mail will either comeback to your address undelivered or then be abandoned by the US mail department. But when you type in a URL for a site that has changed to a new location, you are redirected to the new location by the server.

These type of redirects – 301, 302, 307 etc – instruct the user agent on the manner in which yours and future requests similar to yours need to be performed. But what you must remember here is that, since search engine spiders try to imitate the mannerisms of human traffic with the content requests, you must choose the right type of redirect request for them as well as the end users.

In any case, I am not propounding on the fact that 301 redirect is the best choice here. So let’s take a look at the individual values of these 3xx series redirections as are stipulated for HTTP 1.1.
Note: The reasons listed below are only some of the common recommendations — you CAN change them by the local equivalents in such a way that the protocol doesn’t get changed. Simply said you can translate these reasons as well as rephrase them.
• 300: Multiple Choices
• 301: Moved Permanently
• 302: Found (Elsewhere)
• 303: See Other
• 304: Not Modified
• 305: Use Proxy
• 307: Temporary Redirect

Now coming back to the importance of these redirects in SEO, it must be said that 301 and 302 are important. The 307 redirect that was introduced around the same time as HTTP 1.1 can still confuse search engines, even the likes of Google!

If you want to know more about SEO benefits of server redirects try our 14-day FREE trial by clicking here.

The quantity and quality of incoming links to your website is very important. A website that has more incoming links is considered popular by search engines, and therefore, an important website. Back linking is also one of the all important factors that search engines use to determine the ranking of your website on their result pages.
Additionally, you must remember that not every incoming link to your website is important. Only a link that has more incoming links than yours will bear greater weight age than the one with a lower link count.

On the other hand, despite having a text ad link from a website that has a larger count of incoming links, you still may be at a SEO disadvantage. Why? Because websites are typically categorized as good or bad. Bad sites include: free for all sites and link exchange websites, while other sites are good sites and valued more by SEs such as Google.

Text links are also called anchor texts. Defined as a text found inside a link, anchor text looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.yoursiteonly.com/>Text Ad Links</a>

The term Text Ad Links is an anchor text. Anchor text link is important as most people who link to your website would use your website’s keywords to describe your site. An anchor text points to your website and helps SEs determine the keywords your website should be pageranked for.

Now that I have explained about text ad links, you may be curious to know where you can find them. Honestly, there are many ways that you can use to find suitable text ad links for your website. To start with you can directly contact the website owners or the webmasters of the sites you are interested in. While this is a significantly time consuming method, it can also lead to some disappointment unless you have great convincing power!
The other method is to create a resource like feature that draws other webmasters to link to your website. This is not a very effective method and may or may not solicit much response.
The third way to obtain text ad links is to buy them. Yes, an easy but resource driven method, purchasing text ad links allows you to have complete control over the quality of links on your website for long term. Buying text ads increases your chances of being noticed by SEs manifold.
But remember, text ad links are not for all. Use them only if they are part of your long term SEO strategy!
For more such resources and information, subscribe to our 14-day free trial of SEOintelligence.com by clicking here.

The general rules of taxonomy design, as we apply it to a fictitious website showcasing art forms from all over the world:

1) Unless the site has a vocabulary that all anticipated users are well versed, it should also be in alphabetical order. You need to try and keep the number of vocab terms to around 30-40 characters max.

2) If the vocabulary has something a ‘parent-child’ structure then you need to think of dividing it into different segments, as it can become quite big to handle and will end up making your site look poorly structured to the search engine spiders/users.

Example: If you have an online arts shop focusing on Traditional Arts then under the Europe segment, you can have (I didn’t chose these, did I? Long night…):

• Lapp
• Celtic
• Sami
• Australia
(I know weird huh?)
The above representation depicts the way in which your internet shop has classified different art items.

Taxonomy has a multiple usage in language options, hence one gets the opportunity to use two different vocabularies instead of one. You can use one vocabulary for the Regions and the other for Cultures within different regions.

3) Several Terms: A perfect taxonomy will be too complex (encompassing every combination possible) therefore we will need to make it more manageable and cut it down to the basic elements into layers. You can use multiple taxonomy terms and start building context that can be captured with the help of ‘views’ or ’segments’. In reality, there are only a handful of web sites that need to show around 3-4 filters to their users even if they have more filters. All this can lead to a defined structure with many layers.

For example: If you have a website that needs to showcase small towns in a particular region or country like the US, your basic taxonomy structure ’segments’ or ‘views’ could look like:

1. Top level - States with 50 items
2. Each State with Counties
3. Each County with settlements

Now you can click a particular settlement and what you will actually get is a “views” screen that has filters for different terms within that settlement like Culture, News, Announcements, sports etc.

4) Expertise: Taxonomy is basically considered to be a user communications categorization issue. If you have a specific budget for your website then you can hire a taxonomy specialist or consultant to re-organize the content of your website. But please be careful regarding who you employ, it is always advisable to have at least one face-to-face meeting with the taxonomy expert. This will help you to understand if the expert has understood your requirement.

5) Legacy issues: Taxonomies always will create a legacy issue (I can speak to this from experience at Overture/Yahoo!). If you have uploaded ‘tagged’ data then it will be extremely difficult to make any changes to your taxonomy structure except for adding new terms. Most of the changes will be forward looking and clean up the newly produced pages to the new specs…and simply augment the historical content as best possible.

Why spend sleepless nights understanding the Taxonomy details? Try SEO Intelligence’s 14-day free trial and say goodbye to SEO Taxonomy nightmares!

Promoting a blog is not rocket science, but does require some basic knowledge and understanding of the scope of work involved and the various methods for promotion at your disposal. Typically, you can promote your blog in tow ways.

A) Promote your entire website and/or

B) Promote just some particular blog posts or articles

Though both forms work in almost the same way, there are some differences.

A) PROMOTING YOUR BLOG SITE

Some of the best ways to promote your blog site are:

Submit your blog site through pings: Submit to search engines and website directories. Submit is what everyone will tell you. Well not us, because we don’t believe in clichés.

Nowadays, most blogs work on WordPress, which has a built-in functionality that allows your blog to be introduced to most of the big and popular search engines and more. WordPress pings your post even before you publish it and says ‘hello’’ to search engines and other tagging services across the virtual world thereby, getting your message across to everyone, quite effectively. Adding effective and SEO content is the only thing you need to do now!

Since your aim is to penetrate the many layers of the SEO world, you could take the initiative and submit your blogs/blog posts to other search engines and link directories outside the purview of Google and Yahoo.

If you have some budget for your website/blog promotion, you can use the services of easy-to-use Self-Promotion Website service that allows webmaster and website managers like you to promote your website for very little money or for free. Using this service you can promote your interest to hundred of search engines, directories, not just in your country but even to foreign language SEs and link directories.

Another great way for self-promoting your website/blog is to become as visible as possible by being active. Posting interesting posts, at least 3 times per week, interacting with the people who comment on your blog, putting comments on other people’s blogs, and generally, getting involved around the Blogosphere will help you get noticed.

B) PROMOTING IMPORTANT BLOG POSTS

Think you have written a very important post that has also become very popular? Time to promote it! By submitting the post to various search engines and link directories, you can attract attention to both the post and the blog!

Comment on other people’s blogs. This does several favorable things for your own blog. People can trace back to your own blog site, and the links you get back to your blog, the more favor you’ll find with search engines, and higher your rankings.

Remember the more you participate, the more visible your blog will become; for if you want to get noticed you have to make your self noticed!

So, if you are ready to be recognized, sign up for the free 14-day trial account with SEOintelligence and take advantage of our cutting edge SEO tools.

TrustRank is basically a ‘enhanced’ set of link analysis techniques that was first penned/described in a paper by Yahoo! research staff and Stanford University researchers. According to the paper, “TrustRank is used for semi-automatic separation of useful web sites from those that are spam”.

Most ’spam pages’ are created solely with the intention to mislead different search engines and gain rank disingenuously. These spam pages are created mainly for commercial (mainly affiliate) reasons and use different types of SEO and SEM techniques to achieve high rankings on the Top 3 Search Engines or SERPS. Although it is fairly easy for experts to identify spam technically, it is a extremely time consuming and expensive process to manually evaluate each and every page.

One of the most popular methods of improving page rankings on any of the search engines is by artificially increasing the perceived importance of any web document via complex linking tools. Even Google’s PageRank uses similar ways to determine the actual relative importance of any and all web documents that might have been subjected to different types of manipulation.

The TrustRank Algorithm

The TrustRank algorithm is a specific formula used for rating the overall quality of different websites. The TrustRank algorithm was initially published by Gyongyi, Garcia-Molina and Pedersen in 2004. The important idea behind the TrustRank algorithm is quite similar to that of the PageRank algorithm which is, to take the linking structure into account for generating a measure for the type of quality a particular webpage has. This algorithm is considered by many experts as a further development on the existing PageRank algorithm.

The starting point of the TrustRank algorithm lies in the selection of trusted web pages manually. The entire process of trusting pages works on the same lines as in PageRank. The inverse PageRank or negative measure propagates backwards and is the measure for spam or bad pages. For the TrustRank algorithm either of the measures can be taken into account. Here’s the mathematical translation of the TrustRank algorithm:

TrustRank = M-1 * X

Where the matrix M is given by:

M = 1 – d T with

Tij = 1 / Cj (if page j is linking to page i)

Tij = 0 (otherwise)

d is a damping factor and X the source vector of the trust.

The inverse PageRank is given by

Minv-1 * Xinv with

Minv = 1 – dinv Tinv

The inverse transition matrix Tinv is definied by

Tij = 1 / nj (if page i is linking to page j)
Tij = 0 (otherwise)

dinv is again another damping factor while Xinv is considered to be the source vector for the bad or spam pages and nj represents the number of incoming links on page j.

Of course, if you are creating a website then you will not have to worry too much about the TrustRank algorithm. In fact, you can visit http://www.seointelligence.com/ for a Free trial account for implementing strategies which will help in keeping your webpage higher in PageRank and TrustRank.

office.com
www.office.com
office.com/index.html
www.office.com/index.html
https://office.com/index.html
https://office.com

Now there are some servers that use the mod_dir, which is capable of creating additional issues through redirecting a domain without using the trailing slash to a domain using a trailing slash. Hence office.com will be redirected to office.com/. This is quite a rare occurrence but still it can become an important issue. Most experts would say that you need to always make it a point to add trailing slash in any link that you want to use for the purpose of link building. In fact, this is also the right way of linking to a website.

Canonical stands for Authoritative Path and this is how the search engines are able to understand that the pages belong to your website. Since most of the times, you will be dealing with robots hence, you have to take some extra precautions because robots aren’t programmed to think and so, can’t think at all.

If one of the robots notices a page that has anywhere from 2 to 5 different paths then it will mark them as additional pages and not the main page. There is a high probability that the search engine spider might get confused seeing so many paths and hence might even duplicate all your pages and in the process place importance on an unimportant webpage. The fact of the matter is that it will end up putting priority on the index.html page instead of your domain. This is exactly the reason why you need to have a proper home page link like “http://www.office.com/” or even “/” but never use something like /index.xxx.

Canonical issues exist in different forms and create problems although these problems are not a regular occurrence thanks to different sitemap programs as well as the increase in awareness factor.

Duplicate Content Issues

This is another major issue and is related to Canonical issues. If you use the same contact form with several dynamic variables then duplicate pages will be created. So your form might look like contact.asp?id=New York or even as contact.asp?id=Florida. This basically means that Google will see the page in different ways and might end up treating it as spam.

There is a simple fix for the duplicate content issue and it can be done by… using a rel=”nofollow” tag or even by banning any contact.php wildcards within the file robots.txt. Off late, this has become quite a common task on most of the dynamic sites. This fix is required because without the fix, there can be a canonical trigger since the paths become duplicated. Another option is to add a SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate to your site. These are some of the ways of removing the potential threat of canonical issues as well as that of duplicate content problems

To understand different duplicate content issues and to have a error free website, you can get the SEOi free trial account and take the product tour.

Get to Know SEO: The technique of writing keyword rich content, fixing the website code, adding META tags, etc that make your website search engine friendly is known as SEO. Search engine optimization is implemented to make your website or blog site accessible to all search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo!, and MSN among others. These search engines store your website information in their vast databases and help the internet users to look for information/services/products related to your website.

Implementing DIY SEO techniques: The DIY SEO techniques are easy to implement and can be used in all the webpages of your website/blog site; they can resolve many design and content issues as well. That being said, it’s best to start with one page of your website, clean up all the basic optimization issues, and move on to the next page and so on. So, we’ll start at this point. Look for consistent as well as redundant issues and fix them in all the webpages/blog pages. This assures you and search engine robots/crawlers to scan your website content and collect information and stack it on their databases.

Checklist to become a SE favorite: Following the below mentioned checklist will bring you recognition and success as you land on the first couple of search engine page results. I followed the check list and reaped rich rewards, you can do the same and here’s what you need to do.

1. Remove any or all roadblocks/obstacles that may prevent the search engine crawlers from reaching your website. Test, test, test, and test your website before you go live. Remember, an error ridden website is also an unfriendly website for search engine crawlers.

2. Open all doors (read all webpages), wide open for the SE crawlers allowing them to examine each and every web page of your website or blog site. Categorize, maintain, and keep your website clean. Remove/delete any or all broken or orphan posts/links etc.

3. Maintain keyword density to a maximum of between 2-4% only. Use key phrases that categorize your web content efficiently. A crucial clue for search engine crawlers, keywords are all important. Spread keywords through the content on every page for better identification. Content is the KING!!

4. Your META tags should be labeled, categorized, and well-recognized so that they can be correctly tagged by the web crawlers.

5. Take full advantage of the pinging services.

Of course, I may let on that I have not included anything that is related to advertising your website. For me, SEO is about making a website completely accessible to all search engines and not about the amount of money it can make for you!

If you are interested in making your website search engine optimized then you can sign up for the free 14-day trial account with SEOintelligence and take advantage of our cutting edge SEO tools.

If you suffer from the “Google Syndrome,” I don’t really blame you. Sleepless nights, stressed days and plenty of headaches, all to figure out how to rank well on Google…that’s Google Syndrome! Can’t really blame you for behaving the way you do, after all Google Search accounts for more than 50% of all Internet search traffic.

Desperation can make you use wrong ways to accomplish top page rankings, but you’ll soon be found out and banned. The best way is to use the right technique or White Hat as opposed to the wrong technique or Black Hat technique to achieve higher page rankings.

Get to know White hat and Black hat Links Better?
A throw back to the good old westerns, where the good guys wore ‘white hats’ and the baddies wore ‘black hats,’ SEO’s hats are no different in meaning and connotation. White hat SEO Techniques is the recognized way to optimize website for Search Engines. Google especially bans sites that employ Black hat links to pull in traffic. With relatively no or only short-term benefits, Black hat links that bring you initial rewards, die a slow and terrible death. No more will your website show up on Google Search, nor will you be able to run a business over the Internet. And all the money and time invested will be an utter and complete waste.

Black hat links and SEO doesn’t promise you a prosperous and recognized tomorrow like White hat does. Nor do Black hat SEO techniques work for a long period.

What’s Google’s Secret Method to Determine How Websites Rank On Its Pages?
Linking. Yes, that the single most important word, perhaps, after keyword. Google suggests that in order to rank higher on its search results, you must have links pointing to your website. Core concept of Link Popularity, linking is one of the main ingredients of the Google Search mechanism.

People who search Google must know the quality of your webpage and this is done by means of voting (links). This has prompted the SEO experts to manipulate the Link Popularity mechanism for Google by any means for the benefit of there customers. So, Google came back strongly and ensures an honest assessment of your websites pages only if you have used White hat Links.

No more keyword stuffing! It’s time for ‘fishing’ Links!
Two suggestions have been made on how you should build links to your website; these methods are: Link Baiting and Article Marketing. Coming directly from Matt Cutts, Google’s mouthpiece, the Link Baiting concept suggests that content should be written in such a way that other web owners should like to set up links to your website. Simply put, it means if your articles or content shows up on other directors and websites and blogs, chances are your content is good and liked by the virtual world members.

Because, Google knows the worth of an article if it shows up on other websites besides the numerous Article Directors! And this is good news for you, the webmaster.