How to do Simple SEO

Simple SEO is really an easy task if you do it in simple way. Strange! Yes but it is so. First step of Search Engine Optimization is known by almost everyone who is up to doing this as hobby or professionally. This first first step is keyword research. No... Keyword research is not the first step.

First step is to check the layout of website and consult the webmaster and developers. The website should be search engine friendly. It must contain the necessary tags. These tags should be filled with the targeted, required and appropriate words in specific length.

All the keyword research and back linking may be useless if the layout is not compatible with the strategy of search engines. Few things are compulsory like title, meta, links and content. Actually its all about website. But presence of these makes sure that once you deeply optimize the website with passage of time it will not be easier to push you down in search result page.

Concentrate on the layout, find the proper tags and if not as per the requirement of SEO, then ask the webmaster or developer to modify the code. You should also be capable enough to understand the coding that only include head section (meta & title) and linking, images, headings and alt tags in body section.

Website should not contain much java scripting or animations. Because search engine does not understand or can not read movies or flash stuff.

After finalizing the design of whole website now concentrate on titles of every page. This should be within limit of 7 to 9 words. It should be relevant to the content of its page. General title for every page is not recommended. Personalize it as the content describes. Actually it describes the content in a glimpse. Search engine consider titles and give worth to them in rating of a page.

Now do the research on keywords, sort them out, use different tools, filter them for different pages. List down all relevant keywords. List down all links of pages which you want to be displayed in search results. Like product page or portfolio page or services page depending on nature of website.
Compare the keywords with every page and join the most fittest ones.
Avoid repetition of keywords because it will confuse search engine and keyword cannibalization which means internal competition within pages will start.

After doing keyword research now focus on description of the page which you want to tell search engine about the page. The length should be kept in mind, Squeeze the most suitable wording within description tag. Describe it well and it should be thoroughly relevant to the content. Description is shown in search result. Readers sometimes do not read the whole link but the description. So do not ignore the description. It must contain some words for the website as a whole and then it should be customized for every page. You can use different descriptions on different pages and it is recommended.

Now make pages on social networking websites like twitter, google buzz, RSS and others. Invite people through your social circle and propagate your website content and features on regular basis.
Put links of such websites on your pages so that user can also share your website over their social network. It will increase the traffic over your website.

While maintaining above mentioned important points now start working on backlinking. It is quite important for websites. Because search engine find more worthy a website if many websites are referring to it. It will first give the good impression of authenticity and further it will add to the pagerank value of your web pages.

SEO is slow and hard hitting continuously.




Also See

Social Search in Google
Understanding Coding and Meta
Web 2.0 & SEO
Search Engine Strategies in 2011

How Search Engine Works

First of all we will understand what is search engine? Search Engine is basically a website that collects information from Internet and display to the user as a result page against his query. Search Engine contains a bot or space where the user enters keyword and press "Search". The result is shown on the next page with links and a short detail.

Search Engines basically use an algorithmic software called Crawler (bot, robot, spider). All of these terms are used for the same purpose. The search engine does not see the website as we do. The crawler visits the website, collects information and process it. To understand the working of crawler, we take an example: Crawler contains a worksheet with fields on it. When it starts visiting the website it fills in the data in appropriate fields. It is quite similar like people who go door to door to collect information of people living in houses to estimate the size of population. The work sheet that crawler contains have such entries like URL, Title, Meta, Content and Links. Each of them is expandable to write details in the worksheet. After collecting the required data from the website the crawler process it and index or store it in search engine database.

There are trillions of website floating all over Internet and these crawlers are being run by set of high end servers to collect most updated information. This information is presented to the user upon his query through search engine.

The information presented to the user may contain web pages, images or news. Everything is presented as a link. User clicks on the required search result and redirected to the page he was looking for. To give most appropriate information search engine crawlers are frequently updating the database of search engine by regular visits on websites.

The best SEO needs the understanding of search engine working. Search engine rate the website according to its text. The text comes under the coding. Coding exactly tells the crawler about title, meta and content. The crawler crawls the website and find most relevant information and among all websites most relevant website is rated on the top. Search Engines further index the pages in their database and process them. It results in to a compiled database of most relevant and appropriate websites. Indexing means tagging the words that best describes your website. That is why the website design should be search engine friendly. It must contain proper tags and relevant information within them. Optimizing the website with proper information in terms of coding will let search engines to give a higher ranking.

When a person enters a phrase or keywords in search engine bot, the search engine compares these words in its database to fetch most relevant information matching the keywords entered. This information is retrieved from indexed database. It is displayed on SERPs as links with some short description. Now there could be millions of websites matching our keywords here is the job of search engine to give us ease by providing most relevant websites on top of its search results. Of course this process of search engine is quite much complex but it all depends on the content, head and links of the website. Their relevancy with the content, title, headings and links.

Different search engines use different algorithm to represent the search result, thus we are given options to optimize our website according to their strategies. Search engines do change their formula time to time which is required to meet the searching criteria of users. SEO expert should keep pace with the search engines changing strategies. This requires a proper SEO plan.

We can not optimize perfectly for every search engine so we should first analyze which search engine is being used by most of the users. After analysis we have come to know that Google is the most popular search engine. More than 90% people look information through Google. Then around 4% user use Yahoo and 3% people use Bing. Our focus must be on Google and then we should also keep some requirements of Yahoo and Bing also which can be accommodated in our optimization process.

SEO vs Branding

SEO vs Branding both are marketing strategies. Both are opted to increase sales. Generating high ROI. We will describe a comparison between both business strategies in details.

Branding is traditional approach to attract customers and win loyalty. SEO is all about targeting actual customers. Branding requires huge budget but SEO is cost effective. Usually big giant companies have budgets to invest in branding and running marketing campaigns using all media means but for a medium and small sized company budget comes first as a major constraint and SEO helps to invest the capital in nurturing those efforts which can bring potential and targeted customers. Ultimately it increases sales and profit.

For an SEO expert there is always challenge what to promote a brand or the well optimized site. For the CEOs brand is more important because what actually they earned is the loyalty of customer and impact in his mind. Customer will refer the other for the same brand. As I told you earlier it is a traditional marketing strategy so owners have different focus and people are having different aspect for what they are looking for.

To Understand this scenario lets have an example: It starts from the keywords, in a company who was selling GRP Pipes (Glass Re-enforced Plastic). The debate was centered around what the manufacturers call it and what the customers call it. Manufacturers were more focused on their brand and its relevant keywords to be promoted and used in SEM campaign. But question was how people are searching for the grp pipe. Arab searchers may not use "grp pipe installers" keywords in their searches rather they would be using "grp pipe structured buildings" or somewhat like this. And may be another Asian is using "grp installation company"
Now whats the nightmare? People are looking for buildings with grp pipe installation won't be able to find the example over searches or the completed projects page of the same company who is providing service for grp pipe installation.

For a big company the branding keyword requirement wins because they have built the trust through their name. But for the smaller company where the customer relationship is building, the SEO organic strategy wins.


An SEO expert builds the strategies with improved web site structure, web site content and linking strategies to get your web site organically listed on the first page of major search engines.

SEO can also be used as a branding tool. If the SEO expert think wisely he can settle down the clash between SEO and branding. Because no doubt the brand is supreme important as well. It is earned in years by huge investments. The SEO must be included in the marketing strategy because it is cost effective way to bring targeted customer.

Brand may be well known in a particular region but SEO brings it to horizons. So either the product line is promoted or the brand, it converts in to profit. CEOs and other manufacturers should always consider an optimized SEO solution to promote their business over multi-billion rupees Internet.

Important point to be noted is bringing brand through SEO can be toughest marketing strategy but yet not to be ignored. So either facing a clash between SEO or organic searching and branding, one must build a unique strategy to blend the brand within SEO. Secondly if the product's target market is not associated with Internet, SEO can do nothing about it. Like a construction consultancy and management company wins the project through links or advertisements because they are already known in the industry and people looking for them do not use Internet as a tool to find best among them. But still people are considering SEO as a better marketing tool over Internet. This way or that way to make the brand drilled in customers mind or to bring targeted customer SEO is must effective and supportive.

Lets take an example of DELL. In Pakistan and rest of the world for laptop brand DELL is considered as most reliable. Why? They just show up in google's top ranking in the SERPs of organic searchers. When a person is looking for latest laptop and reliable laptop and he finds DELL at top. Instantly a concept is built that among all it is better because search engine is showing it on the top. Now brand is well known but SEO strategy helped the customer to decide. Search Engine is used to play the trick.

SEO is the cornerstone of Internet Marketing on the road of business prosperity.


Also see:

SEO 3.0 in 2011
Pagerank in 2011
What is Search Engine Marketing

Search history and settings - Using Google SafeSearch

Search history and settings - Using SafeSearch

SEO 3.0

SEO 3.0 in 2011 and on:

This is what we need to know in order to succeed both today AND tomorrow. These are the new rules we need to learn and apply if we want to succeed after all the major search engine algorithm changes that happened in late 2010 and so far in 2011.

So what were the major changes? It's more like what weren't the major changes. There were more game changing search engine events between October 2010 and March 2011 than there had been in the previous decade combined. Let's look at a few of the biggest:

Number One: Bing Joins Forces with Yahoo!

In late October 2010, Bing and Yahoo! made good on their long-standing threat (or promise) to unite - at least as far as rankings go. Now Yahoo!, which has about 22% of the search market volume, displays nearly identical listings to Bing. Because Bing already had about 11% of the search market's volume, Bing and Yahoo! combined now control a full third or more of the search market.

So how does this affect you? Well, in the past many people did not bother optimizing for Bing because it accounted for so little of the actual search space. For those people, the money they spent optimizing for Yahoo! is gone with no return on investment in sight, and they have to start fresh with Bing. That is a big deal.

Tip One: Start paying more attention to getting ranked on Bing. Some of the more important things on Bing are:

Good titles that include your three most important keywords and your company name (optional) separated by pipes (Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Keyword 3 | Company Name).

Descriptions that contains your three most important keywords.

Making sure each keyword appears on the written page about two to three times for every one hundred words, but no more than six times on a page.

Another big deal is SEO friendly URLs. So if your keyword was "search engine friendly" this would be a great URL : domain.com/search-engine-

friendly.html.

Number Two: Google Goes from Global to Local

For more than a decade Google has been proudly making the world seem smaller and smaller by being "the global search engine". Now, it wants to be the "local search engine". To accomplish this it has made all kinds of changes. One of the first, and biggest, was moving the Google Places '7-pack' listings from the upper right corner (where most people ignored them) to be integrated right into the main search results (where no one could miss them!) Welcome to Google's latest and greatest "Place Search".

What does this mean to you? It means that if you do not have a Google Places listing claimed, your nearest local competitors will be eating your lunch online when local customers find them instead of you at the top of page one search results within Google Place Search.

Tip Two: Visit "places.google.com/business" to claim your free Google Places listing. When you do, complete the listing as close to 100% as possible and then try to get some feedback posted. This will go a long way toward getting the best results from your local search engine optimization efforts.

Number Three: Google Eliminates the Need to Click

Google might have borrowed this idea from Bing (actually MSN a couple years back). It's called Instant Preview and it makes it so potential visitors no longer have to click on your search listing to decide if they like your site. This is thanks to a small magnifying glass icon on each search result that, when clicked, turns on a preview mode that shows a large thumbnail view of your web page. If the visitor does not like the looks of it, they simply move on with having to commit to the click.

This means anyone can now really "judge your book by its cover" and not ever even glance at what you have to say. A few months ago all you had to worry about was compelling copywriting. Now you need to worry about getting a person to invest one second in actually clicking the link. The fewer people who visit your site, the lower your rankings will go. Yes. Google does keep an eye on site popularity.

Tip Three: If you start seeing a decline in the number of visitors to your site, try this simple test. Print out a nice color copy of your web page (usually the home page) and the closely ranked pages of your competitors. Now mount all of them on a matte board and cover it with another matte board. Then have someone unfamiliar with your site quickly glance at the (now uncovered) board with the pages on it. Reveal the pages for just 2 to 3 seconds and ask them to indicate the one they like most. Repeat this process at least five times with other volunteers. If yours is not the page the majority selects, consider revising it until it is.

Also see:

Search Engine Strategies in 2011

Social Search in Google