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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tracking how effective your actions are on these outposts require different approaches, depending on the social network. In this article I’ll present a quick and easy way to track your impact on YouTube. As you probably know by now, your own video channel on YouTube can be a powerful marketing tool and a great way to drive traffic to your website.

In this article I’ll concentrate on how you can measure the impact of your videos over your website. The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that you need a strategic approach. The requirement for tracking your results is to have some kind of analytic software installed on your website. I personally use Google Analytics.

The simplest thing you can do is to look at your referral traffic and check for YouTube. In order to get some results you’ll have to edit your video description on YouTube and place a link to your website. People will click it and they’ll show up in your Google Analytics reports.

The big disadvantage of this method is that you can’t measure how effective each video is. I think is very important to know how many of your viewers for a particular video clicked the link in the description and not the overall performance of the video channel.

The solution is a small strategic decision. Instead of creating content that you’ll place as standalone videos on YouTube you’ll create video content that will supplement your articles. Each video will be designed for a specific article. And when you’ll edit the description of the video, the first thing to do will be to place a link to that specific article.

You’ll not have all your videos pointing to your home page but each video points to a specific page, where you’ll probably also embed the video. By making this small adjustment you’ll be able to track the impact of each video. You’ll know what videos work and what not and you may also find out that high number of views does not necessary means lots of clicks.

With this setup you’ll be able to go to your Google Analytics account, go to Content > Content by Title, locate a page that has a YouTube video on it, select it and as a second view option you can check for Source. Now you’ll be able to see how people reached that page. Search for YouTube and see how many visits you receive, what was the bounce rate or how much time they stayed on that page.

You can now compare the number of views with the number of visits and you can make decisions on what types of videos to create in the future so that you’ll increase the click rate.

What do you think of all this? How do you track your impact on YouTube? If you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

Basically an analytic software will tell you how users come to discover your content and what they’re doing while on your website.

A very important aspect of the problem is this:

1. Where are my readers located?
2. How they find me?

Why is very important to correlate these two reports: it may give you the answer to the question “why am I not selling anything?”. If you want to rank well for a certain keyword that you believe it will bring you conversions and you see that you receive traffic from that keyword but no conversion, what do you do?

The first thing is to look at the landing page to see if your readers arrive where you want. But if this is ok then you’ll have to see from what country your readers are. If your company only sells products in UK and you get traffic from other countries then that traffic it’s irrelevant to you.

This is something that you’ll have to think about not only in the case of keywords: direct traffic, referral or e-mail correlated with location can help you solve many issues. If you are trying to market on a social network and you’re not getting traffic from the location you’re interested in then maybe you should change your message or the social network.

Location can also be responsible for high bounce rates or low bounce rates with no conversion. The implications of a location can be huge: different culture, difference expressions, a different way to look at your products/services, different prices and the list could continue.

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

The Process of Finding Long Tail Keywords

Just like in the case of main keywords, long tail keywords have to offer a decent search volume/month and also be relevant. Once you decided that a main keyword is relevant to your website then almost all the long tail keywords that are derived from it should be relevant to your website.

Before I tell you the process of how to research for long tail keywords, here are the tools I’m using: Google Keyword External Tool (because it has information on any language or country), Google Sktool and two features from Google Search: Wonder Wheel and Related Searches.

And now, here are the 5 steps that I take in order to find long tail keywords:

1. I start with Google Keyword External. The first search is just using single words. For example for my market I start with words like: seo, keyword, keywords, content and so on. Is very important to let the tool suggest related terms that people are searching. These terms are really the starting point of my search. The same method can be applied using Google Sktool.  I choose one main keyword and then go to step 2.
2. I perform a search on Google for that main keyword. The things that I pay attention are the general competition and title competition. These numbers play an important role in deciding if a keyword is worth targeting or not. So write this down: you’ll have to compare it with the data for the long tail keywords.
3. I use the Wonder Wheel to see what other keywords people searched after the main keyword. Watch the competition and when you find something under 1 million or maximum 2 million you can go for it. Write it down.
4. I also use Related Searches to see what the search engine says that are the related keywords other people searched (these searches are not necessarily performed after searching for your keyword). Again look at the competition and make your own decision: is this keyword relevant and also have a decent competition.
5. I return to Google Keyword External Tool with the long tail keywords that I found. Keep in mind that these keywords were definitely searched by someone but this is not enough. So, you’re checking to see if the tool says it has Not Enough Data or shows you a number. Depending on your market you choose to target a long tail keyword or not. Sometimes a search volume of 100/month can be enough, other times you’ll need a few thousands. It’s relative and depends on the overall search volume trends from your market.

What Do You Think Of This?

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The downside of targeting long tail keywords is the fact that you really have to concentrate on large numbers of long tail keywords. The reason is because the number of monthly searches for a long tail keyword is usually much lower than the searches for a competitive keyword.

Here are some of the advantages of long tail keywords

1. The competition is much lower than in the case of main keywords. So it’s much easier to rank well and faster.
2. Higher conversion. The reason for higher conversion is because long tail keywords mean that people know exactly what are looking for.
3. Help with your rankings on main keywords. You usually use long tail keywords related to your main keywords. A good practice would be to use this additional content to link to your other articles. More articles on related themes will boost your ranking.

Major disadvantages

1. Low search volume. Because of the fact that a long tail keyword is so specific few people are searching for it and the more specific it gets the lower the search volume. So you’ll have to pay attention and decide what long tail keyword is worth the effort and what not
2. You need many. Because of the low search volume you’ll need to target many long tail keywords in order to see some benefits.

The Fact

You can’t do it without long tail keywords. Although it has their disadvantages you’ll have no other option. Why? How many main keywords do you think you can target? Not that many. Yes, it can deliver high volumes of traffic but to get that traffic you’ll need to rank well. And you can’t rank well with just one article.

So long tail keywords are not an option: it’s something you have to do. You already write 3 or 4 or maybe 7 times per week. Why not using long tail keywords in your articles?

What say you?

What is your opinion on this? How do you select your long tail keywords? Share your experience and don’t forget to subscribe to this blog and receive my articles in your e-mail.