The Internet is big: we all know this. Everyone provides SEO services and every website owner is looking for cheap SEO services. So it’s a situation when 10,000 websites hire 10,000 SEO experts trying to be number 1 or at least on page 1 of Google. The obvious thing is that there will be 9,990 losers. There are only 10 places on the first page of Google.

So, this means that only 10 SEO experts are worth their payment? This is the narrow way to think about SEOs of many website owners. If you can’t get me to page one for this keyword then you’re nothing. Ok, suppose I take to page 1 and next week I’m paid to take another website on page 1. How long do you think you’ll last there? In my opinion, not too long.

That is why I think that SEOs need to change the way they think and the way they advertise themselves. We are victims of our own advertising message. Who said “hire me and I’ll get your website on the first page of Google in one week”? The answer: an SEO. Not the client.

But with what the Internet represents these days and with the direction in which it sales this simple way to think about SEO will not get you any far. That is why there are businesses that make money online and businesses that don’t. Because there are some people that understood that SEO is no magic formula and if you plan to always generate leads from your website is not sufficient to optimize for keyword X.

There are hundreds if not thousands of articles on the Internet that speak about the need of optimizing your website for hundreds of keywords and maybe thousands of long tail keywords. Developing a solid base for your website dictates the way it will grow. Too many people think that all you need to do is launch a website, put some content on it, pay $100 to be on the first page of Google for some keyword they think it’s the “source of success” and in 6 months they expect to see money pouring in.

Good SEO that is meant to last after you’ve done paying for it is not cheap is not easy to do and it will not happen overnight. You need at least 6 months to work on a website as an SEO. You need to perform lots of tasks, analyze the results, adjust and analyze the results again. You need to correct the existing content and add some more. You need to see changes in metrics. You need to receive e-mails from your client saying: “it’s great, my phone is ringing” or “why my phone isn’t ringing if I have 500 visits/day?”.

I’m trying to send a message about all the SEO providers that promise to take you to the moon and back for $100. If you believe that by just paying few hundreds of dollars you’ll make millions then you’ll wrong. If that would be the real price to do SEO for a business and generate thousands of dollars from sales do you think I would still do it for you? No.

Let me know what you think about this. Maybe there are some of you that paid almost nothing and now their online business is doing great thanks to that service.

There is an old saying: “I’m too poor to buy cheap things”.

I decided to write a longer article on SEO best practices and to incorporate more information that I hope you’ll find useful. Keeping all things together I think it’s better than forcing you to search through multiple articles and open different pages to find all the information you need. I also have the first article from this series that you can read it here: SEO best practices when developing new content.

Metatags best practices

The most important thing you have to know about metatags is that it doesn’t help with your rankings. This is something you have to keep in mind all the time. The second most important thing to know about metatags is that the only metatag that is worth spending time on it is description metatags. That’s it!

Even though the description metatags will not improve your rankings it might increase the click rate. This piece of information is shown by search engines right under the title of the page: if the information presented in the description metatag is interesting enough it might increase the click rate.

Also, consider using your keywords in the description metatag. The reason is because if a search engine finds it in there it will highlight it in bold: a reader might react to it. Google said that if they consider a piece of text from your page, other than the description metatag, more relevant to a particular search they’ll use that instead.

So, as a conclusion it’s best to have unique description metatags to each of your pages but if you don’t create them, then Google will generate one for you from the text present on the page.

There are some people that have a fixation with the keyword metatags. The keyword metatag is dead. It doesn’t matter to Google or other search engines. And even if other search engines (other than Google) didn’t exclude it entirely this is such a low factor that I suggest you to don’t think about it. Just like Matt Cutts said: I would not spend even a few seconds on the keyword metatags.

SEO best practices on internal linking architecture

Internal linking architecture is extremely important not only for search engines but also for visitors. Proper link architecture can offer search engines good crawling paths. In terms of SEO here is how internal links might help your rankings.

As you all know links are the way search engines crawl the web. And the more trust worthy links you have to your website the better you’ll rank. Although internal links don’t have the same weight as links coming from other websites it’s still a good practice to improve rankings: especially on keywords that have lower competition.

If you wonder how or what keywords to use to link internally, the answer is simple: search on Google for your desired keyword. Then scroll down and look at related searches for your term. Those terms are a best starting point to use in your anchor texts.

Another advice would be to link in a logical way. What I mean by that is to link only between related articles. Develop group of related articles and link them together. Keep in mind that once you place a link on a page that link will carry some weight from that page to the page that is linked. The weight is divided between the links from a page.

This technique will be useful when you want to increase rankings on terms that have lower competition and also are more like long tail keywords where a lot of weight in rankings is played by how well the keyword is used on the page.

Best practices on selecting keywords

The entire SEO is revolving around keywords and techniques to improve rankings on the keywords you selected. So, having a strategy on selecting keywords and using them on your pages makes sense. You don’t want to go after the big terms right from the start because you’ll have no results.

Good rankings that are there to stay come in time. My approach is first to dominate long tail keywords. This way I can still generate traffic and target the high competitive term without the pressure of ranking well for that keyword.

There are lots of keyword tools out there but I like to use the tools provided for free by Google. I think these tools are some of the best on the market, work well on every language and are free. A good place to start is to ask others to search for what you’re after: ask people that don’t know anything about that market and people that have a certain degree of knowledge about your subject.

You’ll find out that people that don’t know too much about the market you’re trying to dominate search in a very different way than those that are involved in it. Learn from the way these two categories search and build content that takes that into account. For example if you target a term that is used only by people that know the market well it might be a good thing to be more technical in your article and offer more detailed information.

On the other hand you might consider using a more relaxed vocabulary when it comes to keywords searched by people that don’t know anything or too few about your market. Sometimes this is also the first mistake people do when selecting keywords: they know the market too well and hence they select technical keywords that a regular person would not think about it.

Also, follow the refining path. People that don’t know too much about your market will start with a very broad search and then refine it by adding more terms to the search. On the other hand a specialist will search for exactly what he wants to know, by using a long tail keyword.

Best practices on How to use keywords in content

The SEO techniques to target keywords are very simple to use by anyone. When it comes to targeting keywords on a page here are some simple guidelines:

-          Use your keyword in the title of the page: this is the most important thing

-          Use your keyword in the description metatag

-          Use your keyword in the first subtitle, the first paragraph, content, anchor text, ALT property, bold text, H tag, image/file names, URL, last paragraph

Don’t expect to apply these rules and wait for a miracle to happen. You have to realize what you’re doing with these techniques and what you’re not:

-          You’re telling search engines that a page is targeting a keyword

-          You’re not telling anything about how relevant and important is your content to your targeted keyword

That is why you need consistency in what types of keywords you target on your entire website, how well you link related articles and of course the most important thing how good your backlinks are.

ALT property best practices

The ALT property of the img HTML tag is important for SEO because it can influence your rankings on image searches. If your image will show then a click on that image will get you a visitor. So, along with the file name the ALT property must be used to target the keywords of that page.

URL form best practices for SEO

The simple advice for URL form is to include the keyword targeted on that page in the structure of the URL. Don’t use complicate URLs that don’t mean anything. Instead use descriptive URLs that let people relate and understand what that page is about just by looking at it.

Getting backlinks SEO best practices

Backlinks are the most important aspect of SEO. It’s like in real life when other people speak good things about you. When a person recommends you to their friends then your trust level is higher than it would be if you would offer your services directly. That’s why marketing to friends is more effective than trying to convince a total stranger how good you are.

When it comes to SEO best practices about Backlinks it comes to four major things:

1. Diversity: it’s better to have 100 links from 10 websites than 10000 links from one website
2. Anchor text: the actual text of the links is also very important because it tells to search engines what your page/site is about. That is why, as a word of advice: don’t link externally with your keywords
3. Link juice (PR): links coming from websites with higher PR have more value than links coming from lower PR. That is why higher PR usually means more requests to link exchange
4. Trust and Authority: this refers to the aspect of links coming from authority websites (big websites – just to keep it simple)

Exchanging links with other websites it’s not a healthy thing to do. Many link exchange requests are fake and those websites once they get enough links are switching to spam mode. Be very careful to whom you link. It doesn’t matter who links to you but if you link to penalized websites there is a strong chance you’ll get penalized also. The link exchange process is against Google’s guidelines because you are trying to interfere with the natural process of selecting quality content.

Getting quality Backlinks that will help your website is an ongoing process. Here are some do’s and don’ts:

-          Don’t list your website in hundreds or thousands of low quality web directories

-          Don’t create link schemes where you develop more websites linking between them

-          Try to get involved in activities related to your market: usually people that talk about those activities or the official websites will offer a quality link

So, here are some SEO best practices guidelines. I hope you find it useful and if you did maybe you want to let others know about it. Also you’re invited to place a comment bellow with your ideas, thoughts, suggestions or questions.

Content is the foundation of every website. You can’t do SEO if you have no content. That is why small websites, with just 10 or 20 pages have a hard time drawing traffic: there are thousands of other topic-related websites that publish new content every day.

So, if you’re not willing to think very seriously about developing new content, that is SEO friendly and that offers quality information to your readers there are others that we’ll do it and get your potential clients.

Here are 12 of some SEO best practices to think about, when you plan new content:

1. Think in groups. This is not only a battle of quality but also of quantity. Only one article can’t get you too much traffic by its own. Articles that target high competitive keywords must be supported by related content that targets derived long tail keywords.
2. Watch for rising trends in news. This is really big because when a news reaches a high volume of articles, searches, lots of tweets and so on, Google will enable their QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) ranking algorithm that is different from the classic ranking algorithm basically because it favorites fresh content that speaks about the rising news.
3. Have small lists of targeted keywords. Each group of articles that you’re planning should have a small list of related keywords behind it. This list will contain the main, high competitive keyword and derived/related keywords. This step is necessary, in order to develop articles that target keywords with at least few monthly searches. Many words can be related to your topic but it’s important to choose the ones that are being searched.
4. Think seriously about long tail keywords. Long tail keywords play a crucial role. The reason is because ranking for long tail keywords depends more on how well optimized your content is rather than external factors. All the good rankings on long tail keywords will improve the exposure of the article that targets the high competitive keyword and will also flow some link-authority to it.
5. Plan how you’ll link between your articles. Internal linking is extremely important not only for SEO but for improving user experience also. Because articles that target long tail keywords rank easier it’s more probably to attract incoming links. If then you link from these articles to the one that targets a more competitive term then some of the link-juice will also flow to that article.
6. Plan your titles. Titles are the most important factor of users clicking your articles. In terms of SEO, I think that titles play one of lead roles. A good title will contain your keywords for that article but also will have something that will trigger the curiosity or interest of readers.
7. Make sure you’re being crawled and indexed. Make sure you don’t have metatags with noindex that will block search engines from indexing your content.
8. Plan how you’ll spread the content. The Internet is like a big playground and if you want others to see “your new toy” you’ll have to go where the big attractions are. This means that you’ll have to identify what social networks host discussions or bookmarkings on related topics.
9. Don’t link externally with your keywords. The reason for this is because by doing so you’ll flow trust and relevancy to your competition.
10. Link internally in a natural way. Internal links should be made in a natural way. This means to have descriptive anchor text (not click here… kind of link) placed inside sentences. Don’t abuse of this and link all your pages to your main page: it will get you penalized. Also, don’t link internally with the same keyword: diversify, use singular or plurals, synonyms, related terms. Very important is to link between topic-related pages: this way you’ll maximize your SEO efforts. Be aware that more links to the same page from the same article will be considered by search engines as one: but use them to improve user functionality.
11. Users and search engines should see the same version of your content. Don’t try to cloak your pages and present different versions of your page to users and search engines. It will get you penalized.
12. Don’t stuff the footer or end of article with lots of links. Placing lots of links in the footer of your website or at the end of your article and thinking that this will improve your SEO and user interactivity is wrong. People will find it strange and will not even bother reading all your links and search engines will not assign any relevancy to those links. Links are meant to be clicked when reason asks for it. Use your links in a logical way to offer more interesting information and you’ll get clicks from your readers.

Let me know if you have something to add. Also, if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

This is a preview of a series of articles about SEO best practices that I’ll publish on my blog. I’ll address common issues and try as much as possible to offer easy to implement SEO solutions. So feel free to drop me a comment when the solution is not simple enough or you want more info on a subject.

Here are some of the SEO topics that I’ll talk about. The list can be further developed, maybe with your help. If you think I overlooked something just place a comment bellow:

-  SEO best practices on developing content
-  Metatags best practices
-  SEO best practices on internal linking architecture
-  Best practices on selecting keywords
-  Best practices on How to use keywords in content
-  ALT property best practices
-  URL form best practices for SEO
-  Getting backlinks best practices

This is not an ordered list and it’s not a final one either. If you have suggestions on what other topics to address place a comment. Also, if you’re interested in this basic knowledge on SEO please consider subscribing to my blog.

A nofollow link is a link that search engines will not follow and that doesn’t flow page rank. You can do this by using an attribute in the anchor text and that is “rel=nofollow”. When you place a comment on a website you have the ability to list your website address, your name, e-mail address (that usually is not published) and the comment itself.

By default the links posted in comments are nofollow links. My SEO tip for you is to leave it just like this. Changing those links in dofollow links could damage your website in terms of SEO. The reason is because search engines consider that you have total control of what’s being published on your website.

So any link pointing to low quality websites, or websites that are penalized by search engines will affect you as well. Usually when you enable dofollow links in comments many people will comment just for the sake of it. They will also put their keywords in their names with links to their websites.

Even if you moderate the comments and allow only websites that are from your niche and that are trust worthy your SEO will suffer because you’ll offer more relevancy to those domains by linking to their websites with their keywords. Maybe those keywords are exactly the ones you are targeting and now you offer all your work to another website.

What do you have to say about this? Do you have dofollow comments on your website? If you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

I’m always happy when people return to my website: it means they liked what they saw the first time and want some more similar stuff. Keeping your returning visitors happy it’s very important.

Here are two big reasons for being so interested in the happiness of your returning visitors:

1. A returning visitor means a potential client in the future: conversions don’t happen from the first visit.
2. These people already like your website so it’s more likely they’ll tell others about your website/product/service

So, what I did is I created a Custom Report in Google Analytics that show me what Returning Visitors are viewing and other metrics, that I’ll talk about in just a minute. If you know nothing about Custom Reports you can check out my introductory article for Custom Reports and I also have an article about how to track what pages were viewed because of a keyword, using Custom Reports.

Now let’s get back to the custom report from today. Log in into your Google Analytics account and click create new custom report. Give it a suggestive name like “Happy Returning Visitors”. The thing is that you don’t have a direct metric for returning visitors. So here is what metrics you’ll choose to display and then I’ll explain why.

Metrics to choose to view: Visits, %New Visits, New Visits, Avg. Time on Page, Pages/Visit and Bounce Rate. The first dimension to apply these metrics to is Page Title. As optional drill down dimensions chose Visitor Type and Source/Medium.

Here is how to look at this custom report: you’ll basically look at the pages that have the less percentage of New Visitors. Click on that link and from the new table choose Returning Visitors. Now you’ll see how the Returning Visitors chose to return to your website (the source and the medium), the bounce rate, how many pages they saw and what was the average time on page.

Of course that you can also check this information for New Visitors as well. This custom report shows you relevant metrics for each page New and Returning Visitors.

What do you think of all this? Share your ideas for custom reports and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track how your website performs then Custom Reports is something that you should pay really close attention to. You can basically choose to see only what matters to you and most important you can also customize a single Custom Report to serve different purposes.

You can show different metrics about the same dimension depending on what each department needs. The Custom Report that I want to talk about today will show you what pages were viewed on your website because of a keyword.

So, when someone types a keyword in a search engine and that person clicks on your link, because of that search, what pages he/she saw on your website, what was the bounce rate, how many visits, how many new visits, what was the avg. time on page and so on.

The answer to all these small questions is a Custom Report. So, in case you know nothing about Custom Reports, I have an article about how to create custom reports in Google Analytics. In case you do know how to create one, log in into your Google Analytics account and hit create new custom report.

Here are the suggested metrics to place in your custom report (you can place what metrics you want): Bounce Rate, Page Views, Avg. Time on Page, Visits, New Visits, %New Visits. As dimension you’ll chose, of course, Keyword and as additional drill down dimension chose Page Title. Create the report and view it.

The first thing you’ll see is a table with a list of keywords and all the metrics you selected above. Click on one of those keywords (I like to start with those that have more Page Views) and now you’ll have a table showing you what pages from your website were viewed by a user that arrived on your website through that specific keyword.

While you are viewing this second table you have the option to display a secondary dimension. Chose Landing Page from the drop down menu and you’ll see on what page the reader entered your website.

Let me know what you think about custom reports and how you use it. Share your experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

You have a website and analytic software installed. I use Google Analytics but it’s up to you what solution to use. It really doesn’t matter because every analytic software should provide some basic reports. What I’m going to talk about in this article is how to use your top landing pages to improve your website functionality.

First thing that I consider important is this: any analytic software is meant to suggest some actions. Don’t just read your website reports: you have the answer to some of your problems right in front of you. Take action and then go back and measure it.

Top Landing Pages is a feature that shows you what pages, from your website, are used as entry gates. The tip that I have for you is to use these top landing pages to direct users deeper in your website.

There are two major cases of top landing pages:

1. The main page of your website
2. Particular pages/articles from your website

In the first case you have a lot more choices to direct people to other pages but when it comes to a particular page you have to be careful and direct readers to relevant content. When you want to improve the functionality of a particular page don’t place links to general pages (I mean don’t try to divert readers to your main page, for example).

The reason is that those people arrived on that page because they’re interested in that subject. A logical thing to do would be to direct them to more related subjects and from those subjects to other pages and so on.

So, your top landing pages could be the engine of your website if you know how to proper link it to the rest of your website.

What do you think of all this? Share your ideas and experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

Search engines are not the only thing out there, on the web. I see so many articles concentrating only to search engines and they miss the most important thing: all their content is actually for people. We tend to forget that all those statistics and all that we call traffic are people.

For a search engine a nofollow link is equal to zero but from a user perspective it could mean a lot, especially when you’re new on the market and your website doesn’t have too much authority. That is why is a good thing to go on the web, search for the authority websites and people on your market and comment on those websites.

If your comment is interesting enough then it’s a good chance other readers of that blog to click your link. It may not happen right from your first comment but this social-web is about persistency. So keep posting interesting comment and even thou your links will be nofollow you may receive some benefits out of it.

The most important thing is that those websites already managed to gather people interested in your market, so any click will have high value and may also lead to a conversion.

Now, I don’t want you to read this article and just run and place comments all over the web. Find a balance in everything you do and find its value. Just like in a brick and mortar business when you’re evaluating everything you do in terms of costs, you should try and do the same with a web based business.

What do you think of all this? Share your opinion with us and if you find this article interesting please consider subscribing to my blog!

I recently had to perform an SEO analysis on a website that had a high bounce rate and the main question of the owner was “why such a high bounce rate, if I have good quality content?”. I looked at the text content from the website and he was right: lots of good information but extremely high bounce rate.

How to look at it in Google Analytics Reports

When you’re checking the bounce rate you should also look at it together with time on site. Only when you’ll have a high bounce rate and almost zero seconds time on site you should think that your content is not relevant to what the reader was searching for. And only then you should try and find out the sources of traffic for that page and better understand the bounce rate.

But if you have high bounce rate and a couple of minutes time on site then this means the content was relevant to what the readers were looking but they didn’t had a good reason to navigate further. This is a common issue to blogs because many articles are created as standalone pages. This was the case of the website I analyzed: lots of good content with no natural links placed in text to point to other topic related articles.

Suggestions to improve bounce rate

When you plan your articles don’t just think of standalone articles: try and plan groups of articles. Start with the main one that speaks about a problem in general terms and from there go for more specific articles. Link between articles in a natural way and use descriptive anchor text. Don’t just place links on words like “here”.

If someone sees the link for the first time, without reading your article he should already have a general idea about what the next page would be.

Your turn

What do you think of this? Did you find this information on bounce rate useful? Share your experience and please consider subscribing to my blog.