Search Engine Optimisation Tips - Part 4

Off-Site Optimization - Link Building

Are many articles on the Internet about links building and what to avoid and what to do...

I just want to point out that Google treats links as appreciation of your site from others and it gives value to each inbound link that you get.
More value, the better, so a good source to get valuable  links would be websites with high PageRank and less outbound links,because value of a link is direct proportional with page PR and inverse proportional with number of external links that that page has.

On the other hand, quantity matters, even if you get links from Sites with low PR and lots of external links, you still get some value for your links and, most important, these Sites could evolve in the future and get higher PR.

How to get links?

If your Site is new, a good source for links could be link-exchange. Software Packages like SEO Powersuite offers  powerful tools to get started and manage your link-exchange campaign.
Link Assistant let you find link partners, sends customized emails, tracks  status and scans their websites to find your links. Link Assistant is a very useful tool to control your link building campaign.

Of course, you should ask all your friends and family to posts ONE WAY links on their sites. ONE WAY links are powerful. If you can get SITE LINKS - links posted on each page of a website - they are more powerful, if not at least bargain for a link on a main landing page - like HOME PAGE.

A pretty easy way of getting valuable links is commenting on BLOGS - especially blogs that are posting DO FOLLOW links. Search in Google for "Do Follow Blogs" and you will get a list of them.
Important thing when commenting on Blogs is to read the article first and get a response that is relevant and not SPAMMY.
If you SPAM your comment will be probably deleted by BLOG Admin/Moderator.
Try to be reasonable first time....

Many people are saying that WEB Directories are DEAD... I wouldn't say so, it still important to get your Site enlisted to the major ones and then if you have time and patient send your sites to more directories. A manual submission is preferred, or at least a smart semi-automatic.

I would recommend you to submit your Site to DMOZ and any directory that you find and has a page rank higher than 6. Many directory lists could be found just searching Google.

Witting articles is a good source of links and a good way of growing content. Articles could be sent to Article Directories, published on your on Site Blog, posted on external blogs, other blogs.
Just remember, from our experiments - Blogspot and WordPress pages are indexed each 5-15min. It's a good spot to publish something cool/explosive/viral....you name it.

Don't forget about social media - a strong presence in social media will give you links and visitors.
Social media sites are extremely valuable because they are free to join and have high PR. It takes few minutes to join a social media site and set up a page that contains a link to your website. Are sooo many, start with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Digg.
Search "list of social media sites" in Google and find a huge number of Social Media Sites not mentioned here.

These are only 'the classical' way of getting links.
More details are coming soon.

What should you use as links title?

Of course links are valuable, but are more valuable if are using as title your most marketable keywords. Use your keywords as title for these links, vary them to get similar amounts of links for each and don't forget about image links. Use ALT attribute to key in your keywords.

Another important step in link-building is to scan your competition and analyze what links they have, which are more valuable and how did they  advance in SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
You could do it using Yahoo linkdomain search operator or you can expand this analysis using professional software - SEO SpyGlass  - it offers a range of professional reports that surgically analyze your competitors pages and their most powerful links. Get links from same source and you could get in front of them, in SERP.

That's about it, for today.

Cheers,
Nick
 

Search Engine Optimisation Tips - Part 3

On-Site Optimization
  
Content matters, but few things have an immediate, positive effect upon your Site, so add them in your TO DO LIST of ON-SITE Optimization.

Write your Meta(s) - Meta Title and Meta Description are the most important ones - for people and for Google bot.

Meta Title is the blue underlined text displayed in the search results page for each site. 

Meta Description is the black text that usually follows, underneath the title.

Both represent the essence of your business, you have less than 100 characters to summarize your activity in your title and a bit more than that in your meta description.
 
They both need to contain your most valuable keywords, written in a human-friendly and Google-friendly way.

Once you have done this, could be enough to get your site listed in Top 100. Of course is not enough to be in Top 100 and everybody wants to be in Top 10.

If you want to play tough, on-site optimization could be applied further and you should optimize your:

• meta keywords - add more keywords
• body text - stuffed with your most marketable keywords, do not over-do it
• H1 Headings - good place for a strong keyword
• bold text - another nice place for few more strong keywords
• anchor text -add your most valuable keys
• image alt texts - first thing, all images should have ALT text; secondly, they should be stuffed with keywords - smartly put - human readable and BOT friendly
• Don't Forget - Site Load Time Matters - if you have a huge, highly optimized Site, which is very slow - it will not DO well - speed matters a lot and keep an eye on it.

 If you need software help to DO all these ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION stuff, WEBSITE Auditor is a nice software, that lets you analyze and export pretty useful reports.


You can try it for free from here.
 

For more  info about ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION - drop us an email at: info@nicks-software.com

Cheers,
Nick 

  

SEO Tips - Part 2

Choose carefully your keywords

As I mentioned before, choosing carefully your key-phrases is crucial for your SEO campaign.

How to do it right?

Start from obvious keywords that describe in the best way your activity, ask your friends how do they search Internet if they want to get what you offer, use software tools to get more suggestions.

After you have run out of suggestions, the next place to go is Google, type "AdWords keyword tool" - Google offers a free key suggestion tool.

You need a Google Account to get rid of annoying CAPTCHA, but it is working without an account just fine, just go to "Reporting and Tools" and pick up "Keyword Tool"

Type in your best key-phrase and click search. The "Keyword Tool" will come back with suggestions, see example below - suggestions for keyword 'games':

It provides you enough information to get an idea about the value of each suggested key: 

• Competition, 
• Global Monthly Searches, 
• Local Monthly Searches.

A good way to sort the key-phrases is based on their 'Key efficiency index'=KEI.

A good formula for KEI is:

KEI=((4-R)/3)*Sv*Sv/C

Where we have:

Relevance (R): it is how closely your keyword is related to what you offer to your customers. 

Use a three points scale:

• 1 for Excellent
• 2 for Good
• 3 for Poor

Search Volume (Sv): it is how many queries are made for a keyword per month. 

Competition (C): that's how many websites are already more or less optimized for this keyword.

The easiest way to calculate the KEI is, export in Excel your preferred suggestions from Google's keyword suggestion tool, create a column for 'Relevance' and add your best assessment there (remember 1 to 3), then create another column called 'KEI' and calculate it based on above formula. 

Coz Google's data about competition is less than one - you should multiply it with 10^6 or 10^8 for reasonable results (avoid huge number).

Once you have the column 'KEI' calculated, you should sort your keywords descending based on column KEI value and voila, you have the first logically ordered list of key-phrases.

Few things to remember when you work with  "Google's keyword Tool":

• use Match Type = [Exact] to get a realistic number for Monthly Searches
• use Local Monthly Searches - forget about Global (if you use this free tool - think local first - start small, grow big)
• due to the fact that competition number is not terribly accurate, better don't use it - get your competitors number from Google, just type in your 'keyword', press search and read the competition as shown below:

 

KEI is not all that you need, to be able to pick up the most marketable key-phrases for your niche... You need to apply few more filters, do more research, in order to get to the honey.

You need to get more data about your competition and the real dimension of it.

How many webpages are optimized for the same potential key-phrases? 

How many links are out there having these key-phrases as anchors?

You should answer these questions before picking up your 'most marketable' keys.

Google helps and let you use search operators to figure out these answers, and the ones that we want to use are INTITLE and INANCHOR.

Example - Type in Google:
INTITLE:[keyword]
INANCHOR:[keyword]

Having the number of sites optimized for a specific keyword, gives you the real dimension of your competition = number of websites that have the 'keyword' in their title.

If this number is in billions...then you are totally screwed (big boys are using your keywords), if number is in low millions that's more achievable and if number is less than a million just GO FOR IT.

Best thing is to add few new columns to your previously put together Excel file and recalculate the KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index) based on INTITLE (replacing C-Competition with INTITLE number), then you can sort the keys descending by this new column (INTITLE KEY).

Continuing example given before with keyword 'games' - below are the top 20-ish keywords, ordered descending based on their true key efficiency - giving you the TOP of your 'most marketable' keys...

Many keys will have similar descending patterns on both KEI columns ("KEI" and "INTITLE KEI"), but you can see that are some surprises.

BY example [car games] based on KEI=465.51 should be placed higher in the list, but due to a relatively high number of optimized competitors webpages = intitle:[car games] = 49,000,000 it will be downgraded having INTITLE KEI lower than [shooting games] by example, which has only 2.5mil sites that have this key in the title (compared with 49mil for [car games]).

You could use more formulas and more filters if you want and need - free imagination always helps and by the way....if you have a favorite key that doesn't qualify based on formulas, but your gut feel says use it, then use it.

Formulas are good in SEO, coz give you a sorted list based on some logical assumptions, but your gut feel can be the missing parameter that can send to you millions of visitors. 
So keep an eye on your gut feel.

Keywords Selection, Hard work? Yes, if you have to do all these stuff manually, or using just EXCEL (or similar), then you need time....a lot of time.

If you don't have time or just need to be quicker...you can do it using SEO software. 

Which one? Are so many out there and all cost money and promise miracles....

I can tell you about my choice SEO POWERSUITE from Link-Assistant. 

 

Rank Tracker (part of SEO Powersuite) - it slashes your SEO workload in half and does all above and much more....
FREE version is fully featured, no restrictions, it is easy to use and in this way it is not hard to figure out if you truly like it or not.

Next time at SEO Tips - we talk about On-Site Optimization.

Cheers,

Nick