28 SEO Steps to Win Search Engine Rankings

Search Engines are built to help the searchers. Search Engines strive to put the best fit/standard websites on top rankings so that searchers get their required info within few clicks.

How do Search Engines know a website’s standard and its relevance with searched keywords? What are the steps you should follow for a complete SEO to improve your website’s rankings?

This article covers Search Engine Optimization in two levels - the first is On-page optimization, and the next is Off-Page Optimization. An effective On-page optimization together with good Off-page optimization will improve your Search Engine Rankings.

On-Page Optimization

1.Define your Business& Target Audience

The first step in any business starts with analysis. Determine what kind of services your website is to provide and what kind of audience you want for your website?

2.Don’t Purchase a New Domain

If you already have a good domain name don’t try to purchase a new one, as some search engines look for the age of the website as a ranking factor.

3.Choosing your Domain Name

If you are planning for a new website, try to get a domain name with keywords included. If you target regional customers, you can have your domain based on the region, say for example .uk or .au or .in

4.Make your Website look Clean & Simple

Now you have a domain name and you know whom you want to target. Website design is the key factor which keeps your visitor to stay for a while in your website and navigate your services. Make sure your website design has a good feel & look, clean and simple.

5.Evaluate your Website

If you have an existing website, and now you want to do SEO for it, then evaluate your website:
Navigation structure - think in a visitor’s point of view - Can someone navigate and reach the product/services they are looking for? Make your navigation user friendly, no visitor should leave your website due to confused navigation.
Check for W3 compatibility of your website.
Check for any broken links in your website and fix if any.
Your website should load fast so that it doesn’t check on your visitors’ patience.

6.Observe your competitor

Find your competitor websites. Analyze and gain knowledge on their tactics, the keywords they use, the techniques applied. With the help of this analysis you will learn what is working and what is not working, which will help in your SEO process.

7.Research on Keywords

List the Keywords your target audience would search for and the ones used by your competitors. Make use of keyword research tools like Overture to know more on your related search terms. Now refine your list and make your final list of target keywords.

8.Structure File name

If you have control over your file names - modify file names with your keywords included.

9.Search Engine Friendly Sitemap

A well structured search engine friendly sitemap can help Search Engines to index all your pages. With good anchor text for your navigation links you can improve your rankings

10.Write an Attractive Title

Why is your web page title so important? The web page title is displayed in SERPs which in turn help in attracting your visitors. Web searchers do their search with a term and look for titles in the result pages that best fit their search. Hence make your title attractive, with targeted keywords included. Try to incorporate related keywords too. For example you target for Montessori School, you can write title as ‘Montessori School, the Preschool for your Children’. (in this way you add 2 related terms).

11.Meta Description Tag

Description tag is also displayed in snippets of any SERPs. This description helps to motivate searchers to visit your website. Make an effective and optimized description tag. Snippets are also taken from surrounding text of the searched keyword. You may need to edit your content a little to make your description look good.

12.Meta Keyword Tag

Though there is saying that Search Engines like Google doesn’t look for Meta keyword tag, there are some smaller search engines, which still follow the conventional way and spider the keywords tag. So there is no harm in making of the Meta keyword tags. Your meta keyword should contain keywords that appears in your body text.

13.Have Robot tags

If you don’t want any of your files of your website to be indexed, say an image or a text file, you can write your robot file insisting the search engines not to crawl those pages.

14.Alt Tags for images

As the name infers it acts as an alternate text for any image. This tag is both user friendly and search engine friendly. Search engines cannot read images; instead it indexes the alt tag given for any image and assumes it as the description for the image. This alt tag is not so important by Search Engines, as many spammers try to put irrelevant alt tag for the images to improve their rankings. However for an image link with a proper alt tag (keywords included) will work as great internal anchor link.

15.H1 & H2 heading format

Though no one is sure on whether this helps in rankings, try applying the header options, as this practice is good for any web development

16.Improve Keyword Prominence, Density & Proximity

Keyword prominence will increase if you have your keyword at the beginning of text part of your webpage. Keyword density refers to the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total text content of the page. Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. And this is yet another factor which has not much proven records but still exist in SEO practice.

17.Make Content look rich

As many SEO experts say content is the king. Optimized content with keywords included, along with other SEO factors working well the website can rank well in Search Engines

18.Keyword Rich Anchor Text

Anchor text for both internal links and external links is powerful element for Search Engine rankings. You can notice websites which doesn’t have the keyword in their web pages rank well which is all because of their anchor text of their inbound links.
Here a good article on Link Anchor Text and Search Engine Optimization to understand the importance of anchor text in Search Engine Optimization

19.Make Flash files work for you

Its better to avoid including flash files into your website. But under compelling circumstances, you can try adding keyword rich text somewhere in your file, since Search Engines like Google can index the text part of flash files

20.Bring your PDF files on SERPs

PDF file is a good source for keyword rich content. Most Search Engines can read & index PDF files and a few search engines shows PDF files in SERPs too. Make sure you have a good title and file name for your PDF file
Have a look Google guidelines for Webmasters
Have a look at Your Practice Online Official Website http://www.yourpracticeonline.com.au & Learn how all these steps worked for them.

Off-Page Optimization

Why Search Engines give so much of importance for inbound links?
It is easy for any website owner to optimize their website with good content, navigation, title, etc. But does that mean it’s a good website and people would love to check it out?
Search Engines try to know and evaluate the standard of a website through many factors and the most significant of them is incoming/inbound links. When a website receives inbound links from related & standard websites, it obviously means that it is worth looking at.
Search Engines learn about your website through inbound links and to be precise it’s through anchor text.
So natural linking with different & targeted keyword rich anchor text works great for any website.
Here are a few ways to increase your inbound links/ backlinks.

21.Search Engines

Submit your website manually to search engines including regional search engines.

22.Directories

There are many directories available online for free submission. Submit your website into the category that best fits your services, most importantly with good anchor text. Try submitting in your own regional directories to improve your local business.

23.Forums

Participate in your industry related forums & discussion boards. Post your comments, thoughts and also provide a link to your website (without spam).

24.Blogs

Having your own official blog helps to post your company’s updates, product release, etc., and also inbound links. There are directories for submitting blogs. Submit your blog with proper keyword tags which helps in your blog listing.

25.Articles

Write keyword & content rich articles on your own and post in article junctions available online. There are article junctions which accept articles in HTML format, so you can include your links with good anchor text. Write fresh articles on your topic, post and see your traffic increasing.

26.Press Releases

You can post Press Releases, which also works like Article junctions & directories; however it should look more like a Press Release and not like an article.

27.Bookmarks

Social book marking - it serves two purposes: It gets you incoming links and it popularizes your website in your community. Make sure you put keyword rich tags for your bookmarks.

28.Classifieds

You can see some websites displaying free classifieds. You can put your advertisements there with link to your website.
Source: Aranupam

BASICS OF SEO…

1. The Basics - Building the Perfect Page - Part I

Building the Perfect Page is a series of topics discussing the basics of web page development.

2. Title Element - Building the Perfect Page - Part II

Building the Perfect Page is a series of topics discussing the basics of web page development. This page discusses the importance of the Title Element.

* Title Element - Page Titles
Every html document must have a Title Element in the head section. Some refer to the <title> element as a meta tag (title tag) when it is not. Here is a working example of the title element.

3. META Description - Building the Perfect Page - Part III

Building the Perfect Page is a series of topics discussing the basics of web page development. This page discusses the importance of the META Description Tag.

4. Robots Text File - robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a set of instructions for visiting robots (spiders) that index the content of your web site pages. For those spiders that obey the file, it provides a map for what they can, and cannot index.

* robots.txt Validation
You should validate your robots.txt file. Enter the full URI to the robots.txt file on your server. The robots.txt file always resides at the root level of your web.

5. META Tags - Metadata Elements

The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.

* META Description Tag
Some search engines will index the META Description Tag found in the <head></head> section of your web pages.

* META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you’ve targeted for that specific page.

* META Language Tag
In HTML elements, the language attribute specifies the natural language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents.

* META Link Relationship Tag
It is helpful for search results to reference the beginning of the collection of documents in addition to the page hit by the search. You may help search engines by using the link element with rel=”start” along with the title attribute.

* rel=”no follow” - Link Relationship Attribute
By adding rel=”no follow” to a hyper link, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines).

6. Robots META Tag

The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and services.

* Googlebot Robots META Tag
The Robots META Tag for Google bot is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of Google’s indexes and services.

* MSNBot Robots META Tag
The Robots META Tag for MSNBot is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of MSN’s indexes and services.

7. META Tags Abuse and Misuse - Metadata Structuring and Standards

The SEO Consultants Directory Administrator and Directory Editors were involved in a discussion via email where our interpretation of the Meta data standards are being challenged.

8. Revisit-After META Tag

The revisit-after META tag is not supported by any major search engines, it never was supported and probably never will be. It was developed for, and supported by, Vancouver Webpages and their local search engine searchBC.

9. HTML Comments Tag - HTML Mark-up

There has been a myth that has perpetuated over the years where keywords and keyword phrases listed inside HTML comments tags would add a boost to the overall relevancy of the page. This is not true based on numerous tests we’ve performed during the years 2002 and 2003.

10. DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Meta data Initiative

The Dublin Core Meta data Initiative (DCMI) is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online meta data standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models.

Best SEO Tips for your website..

1. Add content

Add content, add content, and add content. Before you even register your domain, you should have enough ideas to build 100 pages on your site. Start brainstorming and see what you can come up with in 10 minutes. If that’s not enough to fill 50 pages, consider not building the site at all. Having lots of content is important.

2. A simple design is better

Text content should outweigh the html content. Stay away from heavy flash, java, JavaScript, etc. Don’t add to much stuff like ‘best viewed with’… Your website should be viewable with any browser. Keep it clean and professional.

3. Keep the pages small

Smaller is better. Keep it under 15k if you can. Your site should be fast loading, or people will leave. Speed is everything. Next to content, that is. Keep it under 10k or 5k if you can. Difficult, but people love fast sites. Throw away all the trash on your pages.

4. Content length

Put a new page online every day of about 200 to 500 words. Go to the overture keyword suggester to find ideas of what to write about. Spell checks your content. Search engines can do it, and so should you. If you have a blog, go for article-like posts as opposed to the personal diary kinds of posts.

5. Use keywords

Use your keywords in the following places: title, description tag, heading, url, once bold, once italic and once high on the page.

6. Link to other sites

Put 2 links to other, high ranking pages on your site. They should be relevant to the content of that page and use keywords as your link. Don’t add every link that’s requested. Check their relevance first.

7. Link to your own site

Put links from one page to other relevant pages on your own site. Again: use keywords as your link.

8. Submit your site

Submit your site to Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, Msn, Hotbot, etc. Then forget about that for 6 months. Also submit it to every single directory you can find. Do a check after 6 months and resubmit if you’re not listed.

9. Log and track

Most hosts provide these. Don’t use a lame graphic counter. Check where your visitors are coming from to find out what traffic methods work best for your site.

10. Write for people

People are not coming to your site for your content. They are coming for their content. Try to write as if you are writing to one specific person, such as a friend of yours who’s interested in the same topic. Don’t try to write for ‘all of your visitors’.

11. Stay ahead

If you know that something big will come out in a few months, build a page about it now. It gives search engines time to index that page so they can feed it to the growing anticipating crowd.

12. Add more content

This is so important: keep adding content. Do this for a year and your site will be a top ranking website within one year. You could’ve been there now, if you started last year. So start now, so you’ll be there next year. You’ll thank yourself (and me) later.

Success does not happen in Isolation

There was a farmer who grew superior quality and award-winning corn. Each
year he entered his corn in the state fair where it won honour and prizes.
One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learnt something
interesting about how he grew it.

The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his
neighbors’.

“How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbors when
they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter
asked.

“Why sir, “said the farmer, “didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from
the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbours grow inferior,
sub-standard and poor quality corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn.
If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbours grow good corn.”

The farmer gave a superb insight into the connectedness of life. His corn
cannot improve unless his neighbor’s corn also improves.

So it is in the other dimensions! Those who choose to be at harmony must
help their neighbours and colleagues to be at peace. Those who choose to
live well must help others to live well.

The value of a life is measured by the lives it touches.

SUCCESS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN ISOLATION. IT IS VERY OFTEN A PARTICIPATIVE AND COLLECTIVE PROCESS.

So share the good practices, ideas, new learning’s with your family, friends, team members, neighbors… ….

What is Link Baiting….

This is a topic that’s been around for a while but I don’t think a lot of people know what it is, or how to use it to their advantage. I think the name “Link Baiting” could be considered a black hat technique which is why most people wouldn’t consider it as a legitimate organic tactic.

Link baiting is the latest trend in the Search Engine Marketing World. However link baiting is just link building with a twist: Rather than looking for out links, you are getting the links to you through unique and popular site content. Link Baiting is just like as fishing. You publish a new page on a topic and place it free on the web. With a bit of luck others pick up on the content as fresh and interesting and link to it. The article is the bait, and the link is the catch. Usually, links are tough to get, but with this latest technique (link baiting), you “bait” your content and sit back and wait.

Loads of articles have been written on Link Bait that are naturally attracting back links, in this you just create something or we can say a list of unreachable resources, any extraordinary report or any thing that naturally grab the interest of people and attract backlink for your page by getting people to discussing on it, talk about it, posting it on social networking websites, blogging about it and linking to it from their website. It also attracts good quality traffic.

The term link baiting is a one that seems to have surfaced over the past 12 or so months and that is used by webmasters to describe a variety of practices - all of which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites.

It is actually a difficult term to be definitive about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs (we’ll run through more link baiting techniques in one of my next posts in this series).

There are some rules you should to follow when you start building links.

[1] Use anchor text of your website.
[2] Include different Keywords in title.
[3] Link site from different class C - IPs (Important factor for SERP.)
[4] Not get all links from newer sites, and try to get links from older (and trusted) sites as well.
[5] Try to get links from relevant content/industry.
[6] Try to get authority links, like links from news sites… etc.
[7] Do not try to build hundreds of links quickly.

source: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/09/19/an-introduction-to-linkbaiting/

What is pinging?

What is pinging?
A ‘Ping’ is a basic Internet program that lets you verify that a particular Internet address exists and can accept requests. The verb ping means the act of using the ping utility or command.

Pinging in the blog world means different, but still similar. There are certain services that scans blog regulary for updates and publishes the recently updated blogs (for an example). So once you’ve updated your blog, you should let such a service know that you have your blog has peen updated. for this, you send a PING to the service. Most of the blog software have the ability to ping on their own. But pinging a dozen such services could be time consuming.

A blog ping is just a piece of text, in simple words. It’ll contain your blog name and the url. It is usually prepared in the XML format. The servers that accept ping have special programs for accepting and processing these ‘XML pings’.

If you want more information please click here

Why are Deep Links Important?

Google and the other search engines have improved their algorithms over the years and now use hundreds of criteria to rate the worthiness of a website. Unusual patterns raise sp,e doubt about the worthiness of a site. For example, a quality site, with naturally gained links would not normally have most incoming links to their homepage. Naturally obtained links tend to point to a wide range of internal pages along with home pages.

Lets face it, you probably have enough home page links already. Deep directory links will help make your link building efforts appear more natural. DeepLink.us provides listings of internal web pages only. Our goal is to have a directory with listings and unique descriptions.

You cannot and should not have your homepage optimized for more than a couple of keywordphrases. Ideally, your SEO efforts should included internal pages optimized for different keywords. Internal directory links will help your search engine rankings.

Before showing the importance of deep linking, perhaps an understanding of its nature will help us our quest.

Deep linking refers to links pointing to other places than the index page itself. Let’s take an example: a link to somesite.com will direct to the index page, while a link to somesite.com/somestuff/morestuff/neverknewthispageexisted.htm would be considered a deep page and linking to it would be considered deep linking.

With the example fresh in our minds, you must understand that Google’s PageRank does not apply to the website as a whole but to each individual page. So when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization) and you focus only on the main page alone, you will potentially lose traffic. Another reason to pursue deep linking is also SEO related. It makes sense to optimize a page for only a few keywords, so you can more effectively build your own SEO campaign. This means that each page on your website would be targeting different keywords and each page would require a linking campaign.

Deep linking does not come without controversy though. This is especially true for large, popular websites. An online newspaper will frown upon on this practice, as it would potentially lose money from the ads posted on the front page. There are even a few lawsuits going on, on this topic. A darker version of deep linking is that associated with hacking. Many websites have a rather low security and many e-commerce that offer downloadable products only require knowing the link in order to download the e-book, mp3 or database. Obviously this comes as a result of faulty programming and bad security practices.

From the search engine point of view the situation stays slightly different. Google for example does not have any official policy, which left the SEO experts doing a lot of educated guessing. Among the most optimistic views is the one that sustains that deep linking actually builds the credibility of the website as a whole and thus creates a better SERP, the skeptics on the other hand think that deep linking is no more important for search engines than plain linking.

No matter of which side you think it’s right it only makes sense to develop deep linking even if for remote, long term goals. A good link remains a good link no matter if it points to a deep page or the index page.

keywords: deep links,deep link,deep links directory,deep link directory,deep c links,deep link directories,eff deep links,free deep links,deep links directories,deep links submissions,deep link ratio, how to deep link,what is a deep link,free deep link

Get Your Website Indexed in All Major Search Engines…

The major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, allow direct free submission of websites to their search directories for indexing, but even after submission sometimes your website takes several weeks or months to get fully indexed.

Search Engine submission is not the only way to get your website indexed. There are some simple and quicker avenues of getting your site indexed in all major search engines even without submitting your site in search engines.

Following are some useful steps to get your website indexed in all major search engines -

1. Submit your website thematic link in free link submission directories which have PR 3 or above.

2. Submit your website into appropriate category of free directories to get indexed and get targeted traffic.

3. Use keyword rich anchor text link for submission, rather than your website name.

4. Submit articles with proper anchor text in free articles submission sites like http://www.ezinearticles.com.

5. Use unique and keyword rich Meta Tags for your website pages.

6. Create 5–6 content rich blogs with proper anchor text link for your website. Update content & ping your blogs, after regular intervals for fast indexing.

We need to implement search engine friendly website navigation for better inner pages indexing. Always add content rich text with keyword specific anchor text link in your website sitemap for fast indexing of all pages. Avoid using iframes in your website pages for better indexing results. However, if sometimes you have to use iframe always call iframes through functions and define them before the end of body tag in webpage code.

If your site is one of those websites where only a few pages seem to be indexed by the search engines, this article is for you. It describes how you can provide the major search engines with a list of the all the pages on your website, thus allowing them to learn of the existence of pages which they may have missed in the past.

How do you Find Out which Pages of your Website is Indexed?

One way is to use “site:domain-name” to search for your site. This works with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live, although not with Ask.
For example, if your domain is example.com, type “site:example.com” (without the quotes) into the search field of the search engine. From the results list, you should be able to see all the pages which the search engine knows about.

Samples of your pages in Google

Operator	Description	Result
site:	Indexed pages in your site	site:rvshanker.wordpress.com
link:	Pages that link to your site’s front page	link:rvshanker.wordpress.com
cache:	The current cache of your site	cache:rvshanker.wordpress.com
info:	Information we have about your site	info:rvshanker.wordpress.com
related:	Pages that are similar to your site	related:rvshanker.wordpress.com

Effective Ways To Build Backlinks…

Any website owner would love to have their site ranked high on search engines. One important step that should be taken to gain a high ranking is to develop backlinks. A backlink is basically a link, on another site, that points to your site. Besides improve your page ranking, backlinks can increase the traffic your site receives.

Submit Your Site To Directories

The first step to generating quality backlinks is to submit your site to directories. Submitting your site to directories takes time and resources but the benefits are high. You will develop reciprocal links, one way links, that search engines will love. You will receive traffic from these driectories which is always good. Another benefit is that submitting your site to directories is free unless you submit to paid directories.

When submitting your site, make sure you look for the highly ranked directories. Also make sure you submit your site to directories that are related to your site.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Next, I would use social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com, Del.icio.us, and furl.net, to generate backlinks. You can really build up some good backlinks by simply submitting content to these sites. Not to mention, this will bring a lot of traffic to your site.

Link Exchange

Some people believe that link exchanging is useless and that people should just build reciprocal links to your site, but I still believe that link exchange has some benefits. Link exchanging allows your site to appear on other sites, bringing in traffic to your site. It will also give you another link that search engines will use in determining your page rank.

When you participate in link exchanges, look for other sites that are similar to yours. Be careful not to partake in too many exchanges, it may hurt your site rather than help.

Blogs and Forums

Use blogs and forums to your advantage. Use forums and blogs to get your site name out there. Also make sure to include you url in your forum signature and in blog comments.

Good Content

Good content is the key to any site and you should concentrate most of your resources on this. If you have good content on your site, it is more likely that other sites will link to your site and reference it. Here are a few tips to writing good content.

While making content make sure you concentrate on a few things.

1. Visitors tend to scan pages, so use headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists
2. Keep your content focussed. There should be only one topic per page.
3. Make sure your content is well researched and accurate. Nothing is worse than misleading information
4. Make sure you have current content on your site
5. Have someone, who is fluent in english, check over your content for spelling and grammar errors

Quick Summary

To increase backlinks you should concentrate on directory submissions, submitting to social bookmarking sites, partipating in link exchanges, use blogs and forums to your advantage, and build good content. If you work on all these and perfect them, you shouldn’t have any problems

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