Best way to Use SEO To Rank Your Site

Best way to Use SEO To Rank Your Site

The Basic Strategy To Search Engine Optimization

For internet marketers, the importance of SEO cannot be underestimated. Knowledge of SEO can be the difference between success and failure.

SEO helps to make your web site to rank high on search engine result pages, such that you get large volumes of traffic directed to your website by the search engines. The process of SEO involves choosing the best keywords for your website content.

A good grasp of SEO will help us implement strategies and tactics for our website to rank high on SERPs (search engine results pages). A properly optimized website can rank on the first page of the search engines, thereby attracting huge volumes of search traffic.

In a previous post, we have considered the big picture, i.e. SEO consists of on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

In this post, the key steps to optimize your website for Google and other search engines are outlined:

• Your keyword research for your niche should enable you to come up with a list of desirable keywords to be used when writing the content for your website. Relevancy is very important, so that visitors can find what they are looking for when they come to your site by searching on your chosen keywords.
• Follow reasonably strictly how you should place your keywords when you write your webpages. For example, have the keyword in the title tag, page name, header tags, etc.
• Make sure your content is of good quality, is unique and fresh. Avoid duplicate content as it will be a negative factor in Google’s algorithm when your site is spidered. Fresh content will get indexed better and also allows for better user experience for visitors to your site.
• Implement a good backlinking strategy (off-page optimization). Remember that good off-page optimization together with good on-page optimization makes a good overall SEO strategy.
• Update your website or blog with fresh content regularly. This will not only attract the spiders but will also more importantly keep your visitors coming back.

The above steps are a summary of what a good SEO strategy is. With this strategy, you can achieve high rankings for your website with commensurate good traffic.

Importance Of Good Keyword Research

As internet marketers, we need to start with good keyword research if we are to succeed in using SEO for generating an income online. By choosing the proper keywords right at the start, we can fight battles that we can win rather than going headlong into a guaranteed losing proposition.

For each keyword that you want to rank for, you are competing against many other pages. Regardless what keyword we want to rank for, we will have to compete. But we need to compete where the odds are in our favor. But how do we make sure that the odds are favorable?

Minimum Searches – First, there should be enough search volume to justify your efforts in doing SEO. Perhaps a minimum monthly exact search volume of 3000 searches would be a good start.

Backlink Competition – Then you need to consider whether the top rank pages for your chosen keyword have too many backlinks, making it too hard to compete against.

Monetization Value – Now you need to ask the question whether the keyword is worth the effort in terms of its monetization value. For example, for a particular keyword you choose, $1 CPC minimum may be good enough. For a keyword that does not have many searches, you may even have the minimum a bit higher, perhaps at least several dollars per click.

Keyword in Domain Name – Having the keyword in the domain name will immensely help your SEO, if such a name is still available. In any case, the keyword should still form part of a longer domain name. It is also desirable to have .com, .org or .net suffices.

Those are some of the factors that you need to consider when doing your keyword research right at the beginning before you even set up your site and perform any on-page and off-page optimization efforts. Choosing the wrong keyword at this stage will lead to a wasted SEO journey with no results to show for at the end. It is important to set the right foundation with a properly chosen keyword from proper keyword research.

Key Lessons of Google Panda

This year Google tweaked their algorithm several times with the so-called Google Panda update. By the way, the name Panda in this update is not the black and white furry animal from China, but apparently is the surname of an engineer in Google called Mr Panda.

As a result of this Google Panda update, around 10% of sites on the Internet suffered massive drops in their traffic of up to around 90%. Those sites took a massive hit.

The adversely affected sites were main content-farm sites such as article sites, and web 2.0 sites like Hubpages, plus a host of other sites that Google, according to the updated algorithm, deemed to provide poor quality content.

Those content-farm sites and web 2.0 sites were directly dealt to by Google, but in their wake, they negatively impacted on a lot of other sites due to the backlinks from these content-farm and web 2.0 sites.

For example, site owners have traditionally written articles on high PR (page rank) articles sites with backlinks back to their websites in order to get traffic and link juice. Consequently, when these article sites were dropped down the ranking by Google, the backlinks were devalued, leading to lower traffic and link juice to the owners’ websites.

What does the Google Panda update mean to how we should be doing SEO? Does it mean that on-page optimization and off-page optimization do not work anymore? Of course, the answer is no!

We still need to do proper on-page and off-page optimization but we now need to have proper content that truly provides good user experience for the searchers. In other words, we need to strive to provide the information that the searchers seek, so that they can go away satisfied.

Unique content is not enough. You can write unique articles on any subject, but if you don’t provide the information that the user is looking for, Google will penalize you when they detect negative factors such as high bounce rates.

Having lots of content does not necessarily help either, because a user can go through your site and not find anything useful if your information is irrelevant.

You also have to take care as to where you place your backlinks, because placing them in poor quality content farms is not going to help your cause.

The bottom line is this: as webmasters, we need to provide real content that users are looking for and thereby provide a good user experience — that’s what Google wants.

Google Ignores Keywords Meta Tag

Together with the Description meta tag, the Keywords meta tag has been in use for probably as long as websites and web pages have been around.

However, these days, Google does not use the Keywords meta tag for ranking a website anymore. In fact they have not been using it for over a decade.

In the old days, before off-page factors such as backlinking were taken into account, search engines used to use the Keywords meta tag heavily in determining how to rank a web page for keywords. Sadly, people began to stuff the keywords into the Keywords meta tag. As a result of this abuse of the tag, Google disregarded the Keywords meta tag.

But does that mean that Google ignores other meta tags? The short answer is no. For example, Google sometimes uses the Description meta tag to provide the text for search results snippets.

So how does the fact that Google ignores the Keywords meta tag impact our SEO efforts? Not much really, provided you provide good content with relevant keywords. Google now places high importance to the content of your web pages. Those web pages are where the relevant keywords should be found and ranked for.

In the (distant) past, spammers used to stuff keywords into the Keywords meta tag while the content of the page is irrelevant to the keywords being stuffed. These days, we are forced to have relevant keywords within the content of the web pages — and that is a good thing! We are to help Google improve user experience for the searchers.

So are we to discard the Keywords meta tag? Of course not. Other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing may still use the tag to help in their ranking algorithm. Besides, it is good SEO practice to have the relevant keywords in the tag so that we are focused and consistent with the content of the page.

How I Fixed Up My Printer With SEO

Today I did some repairs on my HP Laserjet 2600n color printer which had this problem whereby the right hand side of printer pages would come out wrinkled and smudged.

At first I decided that it was time to throw away the printer because it was well past the warranty period and sending it in for repairs would cost me the amount that I would pay for a new printer anyway. Yes, my mind was made up to junk the printer — it would not make sense to waste good money to get it repaired by the shop.

I know how to change printer cartridges, because everyone knows how to do that. The printer user manual tells me how to do that and I have changed printer cartridges for years.

But to fix a printer fault, well, there was no way I could do that myself. It was just too complicated. The user manual does not tell me how to fix a “wrinkled smudgy paper fault”.

I thought to myself, that if I had to buy a new printer, I should perhaps try fixing it even if I wrecked it — I was going to throw it away anyway.

First, I had to at least narrow down where within the printer the problem is located. I printed several pages, and after switching off the printer at different stages of printing. I noticed that the problem occurred after the paper had gone through the black, cyan, yellow and magenta cartridges but just before it came out onto the output tray.

Now that I had narrowed down the problem, where could I get the service manual?

Then a light-bulb lighted up in my head and I had a “Aha!” moment. What if I could just Google for the service manual. Perhaps it is somewhere on the Internet. So I googled “HP Laserjet 2600n service manual” and lo and behold, there was the manual in PDF listed multiple times on the first page of Google.

The manual was a detailed manual with clear step-by-step instructions accompanied by great photos.

From the manual, I figured out the relevant section was “Fuser Removal and Replacement”. Wow! I now learned that the part needed was a “fuser”.

I rang HP New Zealand and they helped locate the local parts reseller to buy the part from.

To cut the story short, when the part arrived via courier, I followed the clear instructions in the service manual and duly managed to remove and replace the fuser unit. Even my family was proud of what I had managed to repair the printer, when we had all accepted it was destined for the junkyard.

And it is all thanks to good old SEO! It also reminded me the well-known catch phrase, “Google Is Your Friend!”.

The Big Picture in SEO

To those new to SEO, it can seem rather complex and confusing. The seeming complexity and unpredictability of SEO are among the key factors why many new marketers jump into paid traffic where in theory you get traffic pretty much instantly. That’s why I have been using paid traffic since I started my serious journey in Internet Marketing around 2006.

But SEO is not actually that complicated, if you look at the big picture. Let me give you a brief overview of how the big picture in SEO looks like.

Basically, SEO consists of two broad components of Optimization:

1. On-page optimization — where you optimize the contents or pages on your website, so that the pages are tailored to the search engines and visitors alike. It involves things like good writing practices, where and how you place the keywords you want to rank for, how you format your pages, the density of the keywords in any page, etc.

2. Off-page optimization — that involves techniques outside of your website. Fundamentally it involves how searchers and search engines can find your pages among the millions of pages that may be related to your niche or keyword. It has to do with how popular your site is, at least in relation to what the search engines think. The technique of off-page optimization has to do largely, if not entirely, with the amount, quality and speed of backlinks that point back to your site and pages.

So, when considering SEO, those are the two components that make up effective SEO — on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

When you begin to think of the big picture as outlined above, SEO is not really that complicated. Based on the big picture, we can then break SEO down into manageable chunks. In future posts, we’ll be considering the particular details on how to achieve on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

Why I Am Into SEO – Search Engine Optimization

For years I have been making money online with affiliate marketing. That involves sending online traffic to affiliate offers from places like Clickbank or CPA networks.

However, the traffic I have been generating and sending is paid traffic. There are different ways where you can pay for traffic including PPC and PPV that I have been mainly involved in. PPC stands for Paid Per Click and includes Google Adwords and Microsoft and Yahoo ppc platforms. PPV is Pay Per View (strictly speaking should be CPV — cost per view) — it involves buying traffic from providers such as Media Traffic, Traffic Vance and Lead Impact.

Fundamentally, you pay for the traffic and in order to make a profit, the income from affiliate offers must exceed the cost. To measure how profitable a campaign is, usually we look at the ROI, return on investment. If we spend $100 and make $200, the ROI is 100%. An ad spend of $100 with a $100 revenue means that the campaign is breakeven, i.e. ROI is zero. When you make a loss, the ROI is negative.

To be profitable, there is a lot of testing and monitoring involved. First of all, there is no guarantee that any campaign you set up will be profitable. That means a lot of testing of campaigns are needed to find profitable ones. Once you have a portfolio of successful campaigns, you are into the money.

But, you need to monitor the campaigns continously so that you can drop those that lose money. Yes, campaigns can turn from being profitable into loss making ones. It is essential that losses are cut before they bleed you account dry. PPC and PPV are fast moving platforms and you can lose a lot of money quickly if you do not keep a close eye on your campaigns.

As you drop campaigns, you also have to continously test and set up new winning campaigns. So, you see paid traffic is not the auto-pilot set-and-forget money making system that many gurus have been touting.

That brings me to the main reason why I am interested in SEO. In SEO, you firstly set up a website to promote products and services. Then using SEO and Backlinking, we can get the website to rank for the chosen keywords. The idea is that once the keywords are ranking on Google first page, the website is on auto-pilot generating online revenue.

Sure, there may still be maintenance needed to ensure the rankings continue to be high up. But compared to the maintenance required for paid traffic campaigns, maintenance for SEO should be rather minimal.

Once a website is setup, ranking properly and making money, it will always be online and left as it is. This is unlike paid traffic where you have to drop any losing campaigns. Therefore, with niche websites that have been SEO’ed, you can build a collection of money earning websites over time and not have to worry about them much anymore.

Anyway, the bottom line is getting natural traffic via SEO is much better than paid traffic in terms of hands-free auto-pilot online income.