Today, we will try to dig into some of the new tactics that are slowly emerging as must learn ways for webmasters if they want to survive in this world of Search Engine Optimization. This discussion will try to graze through the still unreal modern-day SEO practices.

Target Local SEO

Look at those search results. Sights like these are common on Google’s SERPs and they are frightening for webmasters. It is very obvious that searchers will prefer the jungle of Google Places results and hardly any of them will scroll down to check different blogs (if any) and various websites.

What do we do in such situations? Well, the answer is pretty simple. One must expand the SEO horizons to Google Places which seems to be the next big thing when it comes to local SEO. Note down these quick pointers:

• Your business on various services: Hire someone or keep some time aside for this activity as this is going to take some time. You will have to make a list of all the services that acts as Yellow Pages in your niche and in your locality. Start registering in all of them and list your business along with the other necessary details in all of these. If they are worth the money then don’t hesitate in paying for such services. Also, remember to be consistent with the content on all the services where you are leaving your details. Lastly, remember to do the most simplest thing. Publish your address on Google Places, Google Maps and the like.
• Optimize the Google Places Page: Try to point your Google Places page to a landing page which leaves the visitors in awe. Spend time on your Google Places page and see to it that you have done your bit to give out the information that visitors are looking for.
• Get Reviewed: You have your landing page, your Google Places page and your business details listed in almost all the listing services. Now what? Well, it is time to get yourself reviewed from some of the recognized critics that increase your rankings and Google’s trust in your listing.

So, as the discussion above suggests, it is time to move out of the world of backlinks, keywords, tags etc. It surely is time to expand your reach into the modern world of SEO. If you don’t start now then you are bound to be lost in between all the competition.

Integrate Your SEO Strategies Smoothly with Social Media

Gone are the days when SEO and Social Media Marketing were two different approaches for traffic. Today, you will find Twitter handles and Facebook fan pages on huge bill boards and on screens before a movie starts. It has become so obvious for every business to be present on Twitter and Facebook for starters. You aren’t hip if you aren’t on Twitter.

One good example of integrating Search Engine Optimization for a business with Social Media Strategies is the #BeatCancer hash tag. An Atlanta-based Social Media Communications company launched a campaign to raise funds for various non-profit cancer organizations. The idea was that the sponsors (eBay/PayPal and MillerCoor Brewing Company) will donate $0.01 to charity whenever the hash tag #BeatCancer was used somewhere in a blog post, Facebook page, Twitter or any other platform on the Internet. Surprisingly, the idea resulted into $70,000 being donated to different charities. Also, the amount of hidden publicity that it brought to the campaigners attached with the same was innumerable.

Social Media giants like Twitter and Facebook can play a huge role in your search engine rankings if the approach is planned and help from someone with expertise isn’t ignored.

Start Targeting Humans Instead of Robots

As I said before, enough of SEO for bots. We have tried a lot of keywords and pushed multiple tags. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could ignore search engines, programs, algorithms etc. and start writing for humans? For our real readers? For the people who make or break our business? I am not asking you to follow this approach because the older methods of SEO are failing but because Google has started to move towards real-time results that are appreciated by the general searchers. And, there is no room for blackhat SEO tactics in these results. Either you start listening to Google or get left behind.

Remember that people come to Google because they are looking for something authentic. If you give them goofed up content just by tricking the algorithms then you might have won for that particular search query but in the long run you just lost a visitor because of the stupid content.

Again, No More Love For Backlinks

I am trying to emphasize this because this point is very important. You cannot fool Google. Just accept this fact and stop trying the silly tactics that you think can break Google’s algorithms. As of now Google has started a very human approach with their search results which does no longer looks for keywords only. It is about the authenticity of content, the value of the same to the searcher and various such considerations. It is impossible to trick this approach.

They will know when you bought a backlink and if they do then life ahead will be killing for you. It will be better if you don’t take such risks that can actually see your business being kicked out of Google’s SERPs.

Use Schema.org to Check the Authenticity of your Efforts

If you haven’t yet heard of Schema.org then you surely have been sleeping. Although Google is the boss it was generous enough to sit with the minors like Yahoo and Bing to come up with standards that help search engines understand a website better. These results help such search engines read the particular website better and index it as per its features.

Like, if a website starts using rich snippets then it has the ability to inform Google that the SERP will have product reviews too along with the usual website link. Do you see the reviews in the image above with rich snippets enabled for a particular website? It is possible to show those in your search results if you too start using rich snippets. Also, you can test your approach using the Rich Snippet Testing Tool.

Analyze. Rinse. Repeat.

Theory is good but it is the numbers that matter. So, analyze your results and gauge your efforts. See where you are heading. How many visitors come to your landing pages and how many of them actually stay there for more than 2 minutes. Optimize your efforts as per the results and keep trying new things. Remember, it is not just the keywords that matter but the overall effort of the modern-day SEO practices. It requires a lot of planning and smart execution.

Conclusion

What I discussed was just a small section of Modern Day SEO. Google is drastically changing its approach and we have to keep up with these changes if we want to be in this game. What do you think and what are your new strategies towards SEO?

The advent of mobile media has made SEO even harder. When they first came out, not too many people used mobile devices to search the web. Today, nearly 40% of visitors use mobile devices for social networking. As a webmaster, you can’t afford to ignore this overwhelmingly important source of traffic. When you develop your website, you need to make sure it is optimized for both desktop computers and mobile devices.

Life would be so much easier if mobile devices used the same algorithms and bots to search the web. Unfortunately, mobile devices are more limited in what they can do. Many of the tags, tools and blocks of code used in websites are ignored by mobile bots. Why would search engines make things so complicated? They want to make sure the most relevant data is provided to the user. If a particular site can’t provide the value to a specific mobile device that it provides to other users, it won’t rank as well. This isn’t a limitation of the search engine crawlers, it is intentionally done to improve the experience for all web users.

If you want to maximize the traffic to your site, you definitely want to take advantage of the potential from mobile devices. Also, the conversions from mobile devices tend to be much higher than those accessed from the main site. According to a study conducted by Google, 61% of users will call a business after they have found it through a mobile device. Therefore, websites need to take conversions into account just as much as the traffic. This may be due to the fact that more people are trying to find things on their mobile phone that they intend to do right away.

At the same time, a study conducted by Google found that 77% of mobile users use their phone to conduct searches. Some people are speculating that mobile media will be the death of the PC in a few years. Personally, I think that is hype. However, mobile searches are clearly going to play a greater and greater role in driving website traffic over the coming months and years. As a website owner, you can’t afford not to capitalize on that.

How Is Mobile SEO Different?

Although my focus in on the differences between mobile SEO and traditional SEO techniques, I think I should emphasize that the two practices are very similar. You don’t need to completely relearn the laws of search engine optimization. Rather, you need to tweak a few things and change your SEO process slightly. First, you will need to make sure your website is well optimized for traditional search engine bots. Afterwards, follow these tips to refine your strategy for mobile search engine bots:

1. Make your site functional for all devices.

The first thing you need to do is approach your SEO as if you didn’t have a specific device in mind. If you optimized your website for a specific screen size , you would be missing key traffic for all other sizes as well. By all means, make sure your site is functional for all users. I can’t think of any reason why you would want to limit your visitors to a single device, so make sure they can all take advantage of it. It’s a wise idea to make sure your site is set up for every major mobile device.

2. Go lighter on content.

When you develop a webpage for a mobile crawler, you are going to need to enhance SEO through conciseness. Articles will need to be lighter on content and you will want to make sure you can still get your keywords in the right places. You will need to balance brevity and conciseness if you want to implement a better SEO policy. Some sources will actually advocate using no more than 150 words for the mobile version of your website.

3. Create a secondary mobile style sheet.

You want to upload a style sheet for your site. You will want to call it mobile.css. If you use this style sheet, you can customize the settings for different mobile devices without having to create entirely new content for each device. You will also need to create an iPhone.css style sheet to optimize for iPhones, which unfortunately don’t look at the mobile.css style sheet. If you are interested in what a mobile.css style sheet should look like, you can find an example here.

4. Make sure your do your coding right.

Coding is always one of the most essential elements of SEO. Since mobile devices look at code differently, you may want to consider using straight XML. Bad coding practices can cause a number of problems for SEO, even more so than regular search engine bots. You can find details on developing a mobile site through our 5-Step Checklist.

5. Realize consumer behavior changes.

One of the things you need to take into consideration with mobile devices is that users search differently. They tend to be more impatient and probably less likely to use long-tail search terms. You want to make sure you optimize your site for users who are looking at these keywords on top of the ones you have already optimized for. You should also make sure you know what types of sites people are looking for when they are on their mobile devices. For example, a study by m-Spatial looked at the most popular searches conducted on mobile phones in the UK. According to this study, they found that the most popular searches were cinema, fast food, drinking and taxis. Clearly, when people are looking for something on their mobile phone, they are going to want to find destinations they would visit while traveling.

6. Create a mobile site map.

Mobile site maps serve the same purpose as regular sites. Submit a mobile site map and make sure you have your mobile site map in your robot.txt file. You can submit a mobile site map through your Google webmaster tools. You can follow the steps outlined by Google. A sample of your mobile sitemap might look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>

 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:mobile="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0">
    <url>
        <loc>http://mobile.example.com/article100.html</loc>
        <mobile:mobile/>
    </url>
  </urlset>

As you submit your sitemap, you can use a single sitemap for different markup languages. However, you will need to make sure that you give a different name for each sitemap if you are uploading multiple ones.

7. Keep your site mobile friendly.

Mobile phones hate large files and excessive multimedia files. When you present your site for mobile devices, make sure you keep things as simple and manageable as possible. Search bots will rank your site better if you have smaller files. One of the best practices is to make sure you code in XHTML-MP. The second key element to making your site mobile friendly is knowing that you cannot put a whole bunch of content into it. You need to keep your site as simple as you possibly can. Cesar Keller made a post on Crazy Egg about how too many mobile sites make the mistake of trying to do way too much with their mobile sites. This ends up damaging the user experience and their search engine rankings in the long run.

8. Link the two versions of the site.

One of the biggest concerns with mobile search engines is that they have fewer links available. Link the two versions of the site together with a mobile redirect device. Oftentimes, a mobile bot will be looking for a traditional site. You can redirect it to the version of your site that is ranking better. According to a study conducted by Covario, the main site of one of their clients (Toolfetch) was able to increase traffic by 80% by driving traffic to the mobile site.

9. Use separate urls.

I know this is the opposite of everything you ever heard regarding duplicate content. You have probably always been told to use a single url for your site. If you used different urls, your site would be penalized. According to Pierre Far from Google, there are separate search engine bots for mobile sites and traditional sites. Hence, you will find that you need different urls to optimize your site properly.

As you can see, there are a lot of things you will need to take into consideration when you are optimizing your site for mobile SEO algorithms. However, you definitely don’t want to miss out on a core source of traffic. Take the time to understand what you need to do to get more visitors from mobile devices to your website.
There is a lot of literature on the topic. If you want to check out some of the other case studies, you can find them at the following sources:

• Business Case and Strategy for Executing Mobile SEO Programs by Large Advertisers
• UK Mobile Search Rankings
• Google Uses Single Url without Redirect
• Marketers Optimize Mobile Search with Better SEO Practices
• Google Pushes Mobile Optimization to Drive Search
  

What Are Skype Interviews?

Did you know you can record your Skype video calls? Well, now you know! ;) Skype has over 1 billion users worldwide and that number has been steadily increasing over the past few years. As more and more users get on Skype people are finding new ways to leverage the online video chat tool. One very cool new way to use Skype is to conduct and record video interviews relevant people from within your industry.

Skype interviews can be recorded and outputted as side-by-side videos which can then be embedded in your website. These interviews serve as educational and entertaining video content that will attract new website visitors and keep existing visitors coming back. The man who made Skype interviews mainstream is David Garland of TheRiseToTheTop.com.  To get a feel for what a Skype video interview looks like, check out one of David’s signature Skype videos when he interviews Seth Godin on Skype.

The Benefits of Publishing Skype Video Interviews on Your Website

Creating Skype video interviews for your website offers a number of benefits. Here are a few of the top benefits you will incur by taking time to publish Skype videos to your website. Skype videos:

• Attract new visitors to your website
• Encourage past visitors to return to your website
• Allow you to engage with other leaders within your industry
• Provide an entertaining way to educate your website visitors about your products, services, industry, etc.
• Help you build relationships with website visitors and/or customers (think about using Skype videos as a way to obtain customer feedback)
• Position you as a thought-leader and innovator within your industry
• Increase SEO juice for your website

I’d say these benefits are probably exactly what you’re looking for when it comes to giving your website a boost. Add all of these to the fact that you don’t have to spend a dime on video equipment and Skype video interviews should be at the top of your list of ‘things to do to increase my website traffic’!

Ideas for Skype Interviews

Now that you understand the powerful benefits that producing Skype video interviews can have on your website, let’s come up with a few ideas to help you determine what type of Skype video interviews you’d like to produce. Below is a list of Skype video interview ideas.

Interview a/an:

• Customer/Reader – Allowing new/potential customers or readers to hear what an existing customer/reader has to say about your website, product, or service might entice her to become a new customer/reader of yours.
• Industry expert
• Competitor (some might cringe at the thought of interviewing another website owner within your industry, but it could make for a great interview)
• Employee/Writer – This could be a great way to recruit new talent to help with your website
• Local community member
• Athlete
• Student
• Professor
• Politician

Each website focuses on different topics, therefore the list of ideas for Skype video interviews will be different for each. The list of Skype video ideas above is simply a list to help you get started. To come up with your own ideas, simply think about what you’re trying to accomplish and how Skype videos might help you do that.

Create a Skype Video – Pre-Recording Process

The Pre-Recording part of creating Skype video interviews is probably the most important part in the entire process. In anything that you do, planning is critical. Planning is even more critical when you are going to be taking someone else’s time (ie. the person you’re interviewing). You want to ensure that you’re ready to conduct & record the interview. Below are some of the things you should consider when planning to record a Skype video interview.

• Establish a goal for the interview
• Determine who would be best to interview in order to achieve your goal
• Put a list of questions together (keep this to 3-4)
• Reach out to the individual you’d like to interview, explain what you’re trying to do, and see if he/she is willing to participate
• Set a date/time for the interview
• Test the recording software prior to conducting the interview

Recording Skype Videos Interviews

Once the pre-recording process has been completed, it’s time to conduct your Skype video interview. When you have the right online tools, recording a Skype video interview is basically as easy as conducting a normal Skype video call. As you’ll see below, you essentially ‘flick a switch’, or in this case, click a button, and you Skype video call starts being recorded.

Record Skype Video Interview with Ecamm Call Recorder

Ecamm Call Recorder is a plugin that you can download for $19.95 (well worth the price when you think about how expensive video equipment is). When you’re ready to record your Skype video interview, simply do the following:

• Call the person you’re interviewing. Cover a last minute details before you start the recording.
• Make sure you both have your video turned on.
• When you’re ready, simply navigate to the pop-up box entitled ‘Call Recorder’. If you’ve downloaded Ecamm, this appears automatically every time you make a video call on Skype. Click ‘record’.
• Click the ‘Stop recording’ button when you’re finished with your recording

Here’s a great video tutorial on using Ecamm for Skype video recording.

Record Skype Video Interview with Pamela Call Recorder

For PC users, Pamela Call Recorder is a great tool to use. It’s just as easy as using Ecamm Call Recorder for Mac. Follow the steps below to start your first Skype video recording:

• Call the person you’re interviewing. Cover a last minute details before you start the recording. Make sure you both have your video turned on.
• A pop-up box from Pamela Call Recorder will pop up and ask you if you want to record the call, click ‘Yes” to start recording.
• Click the ‘Stop recording’ button when you’re finished with your recording

Here’s a great video tutorial on using Pamela Call Recorder for Skype video recording. Once the video has been recorded, you can go into the software application to retrieve your video file for publishing to your website.

Publishing & Promoting Skype Video Interviews

As you can see from the information above, recording the Skype video interview is actually the easy part. It’s the pre-recording planning and the post-recording promotion that takes the most time. Both Skype video call recorders will create a video file of your interview. We recommend that you host your video file on YouTube and then embed the YouTube Video into your website. Depending on the content of the video, you can either embed the video to a main content page OR create a blog article and embed the video within the article. For SEO purposes, creating a blog article for each new video is a good idea. You can create content introducing the video and explaining what readers will see if they watch the video. You can optimize the article with keywords and embed the video within the article.

Once the video is published and embedded into your website you should go out to your social media channels to start driving web traffic to your video. Over time each video will attract hundreds, if not thousands, of new visitors to your website. You will also start to create your own video library, which is an extremely valuable resource for anyone who’s looking for information about your subject matter.

What is a Blog Carnival?

Blog Carnivals are the compilation of blog articles on a specific topic.

• Blog Carnivals Author(s) – Blog Carnivals setup and run by an individual or team of individuals,
• Blog Carnival Writers – This is you! Anyone can submit blog articles (relevant to the topic of the carnival) to the author of the carnival. At set intervals (weekly, monthly, etc.) a carnival is published to its audience.
• Blog Carnival Readers – Readers can subscribe to a blog carnival much like you’d subscribe to an email mailing list or RSS feed. This ensures that you will have access to all new carnivals published within the topic that you subscribed to.

A blog carnival usually comes in the form of a blog article with a list of links to all of the articles submitted within the topic. Blog carnivals are great tools for driving more traffic to your website as each time you write a new blog article you can submit it to relevant carnivals. Those carnivals are then published to readers who will click on links to your blog articles to read your content.

Blog Carnival Topics

Blog carnivals come in all shapes and sizes… what that means is that there are so many different blog carnival topics that you’re bound to find a few that make sense for your web content. If you don’t find a blog carnival suited for your blog content, you can always author a new Blog Carnival, but that’s a topic for another day. Let’s review some of the most popular blog carnival topics that might be of interest to you:

• Fitness & Health
• Travel Guide
• Make Money Blogging
• Stress Response
• Selling Products Online
• Social Media Marketing Tools
• Pilates Fitness
• Black History Month
• Building Custom Websites
• Self Improvement
• Celebrity Gossip
• Just for Weddings
• Green Gardening
• Guide for Financing & Saving
• Personal Development
• Aquatic Therapy
• Dealing with Teenagers
• Art History
• Bankruptcy Counseling
• Pregnancy Tips
• Internet Marketing
• Boomers & Seniors News You Can Use

As you can see from the list above, there are many different blog carnival topics and this list doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s out there. Now that you know there’s one, or many, blog carnivals out there covering a similar topic to what your website is about, now let’s dig into how you can sign-up to use blog carnivals.

Benefits of Using Blog Carnivals

Using blog carnivals can be an effective way for you to achieve some of your website goals. Below is a list of the benefits to using blog carnivals:

• Attracts new visitors to your website
• Increases your overall website traffic
• Creates inbound links to your blog articles
• Increases the chance of your content going viral
• Provides an opportunity to build relationships with blog carnival authors
• Might help you increase your RSS subscribers

If you’re looking to accomplish some of the things above then blog carnivals are a great tool for you to use.

Searching for Relevant Blog Carnival Topics

With so many different carnivals to choose from, searching for relevant blog carnival topics for your website can be time-consuming. Let’s take a look at a few different ways to make searching for relevant blog carnivals a little easier. To get started, be sure to log into BlogCarnival.com and click ‘Browse all Carnivals’ on the left navigation bar.

Search Blog Carnivals by Category

Perhaps the easiest way to find the best blog carnivals for your website is to search by Category. To search blog carnivals by Category simply select the drop-down list at the top of the ‘Browse all Carnivals’ page and select the Category that makes the most sense for your web content. Once selected a list of blog carnivals within that Category will populate below.

Search Blog Carnivals by Keyword

Another great way to find relevant blog carnivals which match your website content is to search by Keyword. Simply type a Keyword or Phrase into the text bar next to ‘Search by Keyword’. Hit ‘Enter’ on your keyboard when you’re finished typing in your keyword and a list of blog carnivals matching that keyword or phrase will populate in the results below.

Search Blog Carnivals by Sorting by Next Edition

One of the most effective ways to search for blog carnivals is to ‘Sort by Next Edition’. Even if you utilize the ‘Category’ or ‘Keyword’ options listed above, it still makes sense to ‘Sort by Next Edition’. When you ‘Sort by Next Edition’ all of the blog carnivals that will be getting released in the near future move to the top of the list. Not all carnivals are published weekly, so it makes sense to always ‘Sort by Next Edition’ so that you can find all of the blog carnivals that are scheduled to be released sooner rather than later.

Pros and Cons to Creating & Managing Your Own Blog Carnival

If you cannot find any relevant blog carnivals that get published on a regular basis, but you still see the value in using blog carnivals to increase your website traffic, than we recommend that you create your very own blog carnival. With that being said, it’s not just creating the blog carnival that you have to think about, it’s managing it as well. Like everything online, there are both pros and cons to creating and managing your own blog carnival. Let’s take some time to explore each.

Pros for Creating & Managing a Blog Carnival

For those of you who are seriously considering creating a blog carnival on a topic that’s relevant to your website topic, we applaud you. There a lot of benefits that come from creating and managing your very own blog carnival. Here are some of the top benefits to creating a blog carnival:

• Creating the blog carnival is a simple process
• You now have a blog carnival that’s relevant to the content you create for your website
• You have the ability to control everything, including what articles to include (from other Writers), timing on when the carnival is released, the promotion of the carnival, etc.
• You can include as many of your own articles within the blog carnival as you’d like
• You’ll have the ability to build relationships with other website owners/bloggers who write about the same topic as you. There could be partnership and cross promotional opportunities that arise.

Cons for Creating & Managing a Blog Carnival

Again, if you’re seriously thinking about creating and managing your own blog carnival, please be aware that there is a downside to doing so. Mostly that downside centers around it being a lot of work on your part, but let’s take a look at what might be seen as a negative to creating and managing a blog carnival:

• Managing the blog carnival on an ongoing basis will take time. Is the opportunity cost of working on managing your blog carnival worth not spending time on something else, such as working on your website?
• You have to sift through a lot of article each time you want to release a new blog carnival, which again takes time.

As you can see, the Pros outweigh the Cons when it comes to creating and managing your own blog carnival. With that said, time is our most precious commodity, and even with all of the benefits you’ll receive from running your own blog carnival, it still won’t make sense for everyone. For those of you who do want to set up your own blog carnival, let’s show you how that’s done.

How Do I Create a Blog Carnival?

Creating a blog carnival is a fairly straightforward process. Follow the steps below and you’ll have your own blog carnival setup in a few minutes.

1. Sign-in to BlogCarnival.com and click ‘My Carnivals’ on the left navigation bar
2. Since you haven’t created a blog carnival before, the page is empty. You have the option to take over the management of an existing blog carnival or create your own. Click ‘add a new one’ in order to create your own blog carnival.
3. Create a Name for your blog carnival
4. Add a Tagline to your blog carnival
5. Provide a Description for your blog carnival – Take some time to think about a well crafted ‘Description’ so that you generate as much interest from prospective Writers as possible.
6. Upload a Logo for your blog carnival (not required)
7. Select a relevant Topic to categorize your blog carnival under
8. Paste in your Homepage URL. This is not required, but some people like to create a separate web page that explains what your carnival is all about.
9. Add a contact E-mail address whereby Writers can contact you about your blog carnival
10. Come up with a Deadline for when submissions should be filed in order to have a chance for inclusion in an upcoming blog carnival release
11. Add any Categories that Writers can select when submitting their articles
12. Click ‘Add’

Setup an Upcoming Release of  Your Blog Carnival

Now that you have created a new blog carnival, for which you’re the author, it’s time to set up a new edition (ie. schedule a new blog carnival to be released and start accepting submissions from other writers). Also, you need to host the blog carnival somewhere. We recommend that you host it on your own blog if it makes sense (which it should since it’s on the same topic as your blog). If not, you can always setup a free WordPress blog to host your blog carnivals. We recommend you put the blog carnival on your website because you will capitalize on all of the traffic from readers blog carnival. Think of each new blog carnival that you release as a new blog article.

Follow the steps below to set up a new edition for your blog carnival:

1. From within your blog carnival web page, click ‘Add a new Carnival Edition’
2. Select ‘Upcoming’ next to ‘This edition is’
3. Set a ‘Submission Deadline’
4. Set a date that this edition of your blog carnival will be published
5. Enter the URL of the site which the blog carnival will be hosted on (ie. your website if you choose to go that route)
6. If you’ve created a blog article explaining your blog carnival or this new edition add that URL in the text box next to ‘Permalink URL’
7. Add any Categories that you might break your blog carnival into
8. Provide a description about this new edition. Use this area to attract Writers to submit articles to your blog carnival.
9. Click ‘Add’
10. Start reviewing articles when they come in from Writers to determine which will make it into this edition of your blog carnival
11. Create the blog carnival as a blog post with links to each article that you decided to include
12. Publish your blog carnival on the scheduled date
13. Go out and promote your blog carnival on social media and within any other marketing channels that you see fit

That’s it! You’re finished. You now have your very own blog carnival with the first edition already published. Now you can sit back and watch the traffic come pouring in!

Use Your Location in Keywords, Headings, Meta tags, Anchor Text, and Page Body

Ranking well for local search isn’t very different from ranking well for a particular keyword. The main principle is the same – have keyword-rich content. The simplest you can do to rank well locally is to put your location in all those places that matter – i.e. the keywords, the headings, the meta tags, the anchor text of backlinks, and the page body of your pages.
For instance, if you are a Web designer from New York, and you are interested in local clients only because you are not too excited about onsite visits in California, for example, you can use the key phrase “Web designer New York” everywhere instead of simply “Web designer”.

Well, sometimes it is very artificial (and grammatically incorrect) to use your location in your target places, so if you are really concerned about this, you can modify it to “Web designer in New York”, for example. This will improve your local rankings for sure because Google and the other search engines strip articles and prepositions from the search string anyway. However, in this case, you won’t be ranking that well in all those searches that seek for an exact match (i.e. “Web designer New York”) and if these queries bring you a lot of traffic, you really need to think if it makes sense to sacrifice good traffic for grammar rules.

Even if you don’t put your location in your keyword every time you use it, if your location is present on your pages, this still helps. The simplest approach is to use your location here and there on the page, preferably closer to your keywords because search engines consider the proximity of search terms on the page. You can also add pictures of your city and your office and include your location in the description you put in the ALT attribute of the IMG tag. A map how to get to your office helps a lot, too.

Additionally, don’t forget to put your address, zip code, and phone number (provided that they all are local, of course) on every page. This has two advantages: you will have your location keyword on every page for sure and you will be easier to contact.

On the other hand, you need to make sure that your use of the location as part of your keyword stays within the acceptable boundaries. Therefore, you need to be very careful not to keyword stuff your pages because this can get you banned from search engines rather than boost your rankings with them.

If you operate in only one location, it is easier to optimize your site for it. However, what do you do, if you have branches in more than one location? Do you put them all in the keywords, headings, meta tags, etc.? No, you don’t – this will create a complete mess because there is hardly a person, who will search for a “Web designer New York Los Angeles Paris”, for example. The best you can do is to create separate pages or even better – a separate domain/subdomain for your separate locations and optimize them accordingly. If you are a huge company, separate domains and sites for each country are a must but even a small company with offices in multiple locations will benefit to separate the site into sections based on location.

Incorporate Rich Snippets in Your Pages

One of the advanced steps towards optimization for local search is to use Rich Snippets for Local Search. Rich Snippets are semantic tools that use microdata, microformats, and RDFa and they are great for sites with d content. Basically, you label your location using a predefined format and this is how you tell Google you are a local company.

Rich Snippets aren’t suitable for every type of site. If you don’t have structured content that falls into the information types currently supported by Google, i.e., “reviews, people profiles, products, business listings, recipes, and events.”, you will hardly benefit much from this feature. Rich Snippets won’t affect your ranking with search engines and as Google themselves admit, “Google does not guarantee that markup on any given page or site will be used in search results.”, so don’t rely too heavily on them.

It won’t require lots of effort to make your site semantically search friendly because you will be using information that is already existing on your page. E-Business and Web Science Research Group offers a handy tool to create your snippets and you can preview them with the Rich Snippets Testing Tool. The screenshot below shows how a rich snippet might look like in search results.

Submit to Google Places, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, Local Directories, and Search Engines

In addition to the onpage factors and the anchor text of backlinks, you can go local in some other ways. If you manage to get quality backlinks from local authority sites, this is a huge bonus, even if you don’t have all your target keywords in the anchor text.

Local directories and search engines, such as Google Places, Bing Local, or Yahoo Local are also to be considered not only as a way to get listed in them for the purpose of backlinks but also as ways to get direct exposure to your local audience. Besides, almost any place under the Sun has similar sites where you can get listed, so search for what is available in your case and submit your site.

The good old Web directories, especially their local varieties are also to be considered. If there are Yellow Pages for your city and local ads section on Craigslist and other similar classified ad sites, don’t skip them – they also help to get popular locally.

Get Local on Social Media and in PPC

Finally, social media and PPC are some more alternatives to explore. If your region has groups or any other similar sections on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, make sure you join them and be as active as possible. This will have a direct impact on your popularity in the local community. Also, when you register profiles at any site, be sure to enter your location.

Very often you can’t rely on organic search alone and you will need to use advertising, such as PPC. Fortunately, almost any reputable CPC network allows geotargeting, so you can precisely select that your ad is shown only to visitors from the region you are interested in.

Ranking well locally has many benefits and it isn’t very difficult to achieve. The rewards can be lucrative and this is why it makes sense to optimize your site for local search. As you see, this isn’t that difficult to do.

In fact, the specifics of mobile sites are so numerous that you almost always need to design a separate mobile version of your site rather than adapt your current site to mobile users. This might sound like a lot of hassle and it is. So, maybe you are asking yourself, if all the pain to make your site mobile-ready is necessary.

Do I Need to Make My Site Mobile Search Friendly?

It might be strange to ask such a question because the answer seems obvious – since you will be getting additional traffic, you do need a mobile-ready site. However, when you learn how much work is involved in creating and maintaining a site in a mobile-ready state, you might not be that certain anymore that you really need a mobile version(s) of your site.

Mobile devices are very different from PCs in terms of use and in terms of what they display. What is more, there are tens, if not hundreds, of various mobile devices and their capabilities also vary. It is a Gargantuan task to make a site run well (or at least decently) on all these diverse devices. On top of this, making a site mobile-friendly costs a lot and you need to take this into account as well when you are trying to make the preliminary estimates if turning your site mobile-friendly will be profitable or not.

As a result, it might turn out that you can safely skip the mobile crowd. Yes, you are losing visitors but if site is in a niche that mobile visitors aren’t interested in, then even if your site is mobile-friendly, this won’t be much of an advantage.

On the other hand, if your site is about news, stocks, local search, mobile stuff, ringtones, or any other niche where mobile visitors are frequent (i.e. those niches that provide current information on topics of interest to mobile users), then you should optimize your site for mobile search, even if this means maintaining a separate version(s) just for mobile users and the separate mobile brands of their choice. The investment will pay off.

This is why, you need to have a look at your logs and see how much traffic you are getting from mobile devices. Your logs will also tell you the type of mobile devices that are used by your visitors. If the figures are worth the effort, you can proceed and optimize your site for mobile search.

Steps to Optimize Your Site for Mobile Search

Many of the general rules for good mobile design, such as create multiple mobile stylesheets and resizing images are also search-friendly steps because they help to present your site in a more user-friendly manner, thus making it easier for mobile users to find and use your site. However, there are also a couple of other steps to take.

Optimizing a site for mobile search is really a lot of work and if your site is not designed to be mobile-friendly, your efforts might be in vain. Here are some very basic recommendations how to make a site mobile-friendly and increase its chances to rank better for mobile searches. Sure, these steps are not enough but they are a good start:

1. Support as many mobile devices as possible

Cross-browser compatibility for PCs is a piece of cake in comparison to cross-device compatibility for mobile sites. You might hope that there will be universal standards for mobile devices but this will hardly ever happen – at least not in the next couple of years – so you can’t rely on it. Try to support at least the major devices – or even better, check your logs to see what devices and operating systems your mobile users use most and optimize your site at least for them.
This cross-device compatibility is important because even if you rank well in mobile search, when users come to your site and discover that it is practically useless for their device, this will make you look very unprofessional. Sometimes you can “outsource” the job to a mobile plugin, i.e. the WPtouch plugin for WordPress but you still need to check that the final result is acceptable.

2. Keep pages short

The screens of mobile devices are tiny and reading long pages of text is next to impossible. This is why you need to keep your pages short, so even if there is scrolling, it won’t need 5, 10, or more scrolldowns in order to read a single page. This means, that if you want to achieve good keyword density for your target keywords, you need to put them in the portion of the text that fits into one screen. However, be careful not to overstuff the pages, because this will have an adverse effect.

3. Optimize for local search

Local searches are a substantial portion of mobile searches and because of this you need to make sure your mobile version is optimized for local searches. Putting your location here and there in the next isn’t all it takes to optimize for local search but since it is the most important step, do at least this.

4. Optimize for short keywords

Many mobiles have QWERTY keyboards but even these keyboards are a pain when you have to enter long strings. This is why most mobile users don’t bother to enter long strings of texts. Long tail keywords that consist of 5 or more words might bring you traffic to a regular site but for a mobile site many users limit their searches to 2 words at most. Also, you might want to have a look at what predictive suggestions for your niche exist and optimize for them.

5. Avoid heavy graphics and animation

Nobody says that your mobile site must be text-only but when you know that graphics and animation load so slowly and mobile traffic is not cheap, it is much better to make your pages fast to load. Cut animation and leave lean graphics only and your visitors will appreciate this.

6. Put the essential info in a visible place

As I already mentioned, scrolling down is not a favorite activity for mobile users. This means that if you want your essential info to be seen, you need to put it near the top because this is the most visible place on your site. When users come to your mobile site and don’t see right away what they are looking for, they will simply leave rather than scroll.

7. Promote your site in mobile search

If you have made your site mobile-friendly, you can expect that it will become popular among mobile users but still don’t count on this alone. Instead, promote your site in mobile search engines, mobile portals and directories. This can bring you a lot of mobile traffic you will hardly get from the organic results of general search engines. The mobile Web is becoming a system of its own, so take advantage of its potential.

Mobile sites are still in their early stages but as the number of mobile users increases, more and more sites will launch their mobile versions. If you don’t want to lag behind, do your homework and optimize your site for mobile search.

What is a Web Directory?

A web directory is a resource that organizes links to websites. Most are manually submitted by users. The organization of a web directory is intended to help other users find sites relevant to a specific niche.

Web directories are often used as a substitute to search engines. The key difference is that a search engine helps users find content relevant to a specific set of keywords, while directories help users find content relevant to a given category. Some web directories specialize in providing links to websites in a specific niche, such as business, medical or technology.

What Can Web Directories Do for You?

Web directories provide two major benefits to users: driving relevant traffic to their website and improving search engine rankings. People may visit web directories with the intention of finding lists of websites. As effective as search engines are at finding relevant content, it could take hours to build a massive list of websites for a niche you are looking for. You would have to experiment with dozens of search terms and have to deal with the frustration that the same high-ranking sites dominate the front page for numerous keywords.

If your visitors are looking to build a short list of highly relevant content, they would probably use a search engine. On the other hand, if they are looking for a number of sites in a category of their interest, they would probably explore directories instead.

As a website owner, you may have chosen a few very specific keywords to optimize your website for. You may be a web designer who specializes in Drupal templates for entertainment sites. You may get some relevant traffic from that keyword in Google.

However, you may want to also target website owners who are looking for a much more general category. If you submit your site to a web directory, you can find visitors who are specifically interested in web design. Alternatively, you could submit to other web directories under categories such as music or entertainment. This will clearly help you reach a different audience than you would reach with a search engine.

Web directories can also provide highly relevant, anchored, dofollow backlinks to your website for SEO purposes. Depending on the type of site, they may provide a lot of value for you in the search engines.

Are Web Directories Less Valuable Than They Used to Be?

The value of web directories has degraded since the advance of Web 2.0. In earlier years, web directories were helpful because search engines were easily manipulated by black hat marketers. They provided a lot of useless results and users often turned to directories to get information that was more relevant and useful.

As search engine algorithms changed, users became more accustomed to using search engines to find the information they were looking for. Even as far back as 2002, some web professionals said their clients were seeing much less traffic from popular directories such as DMoz. Over time, the traffic stagnated even further.

Some people still use directories to find resources. However, the traffic is much less than it used to be.

Search engines used to think very highly of backlinks coming from online directories. As websites began to exploit them and many of them became more like link farms, the search engines put less value on them. Many directories are still counted as trusted backlinks, but they don’t provide as much value as they used to.

Another issue is that most active directories are much smaller these days. DMoz used to be a big factor. Website owners believed that the success of their website hinged on getting accepted into their listings. Today, DMoz has been almost abandoned. Almost the only way to get your site listed is if you volunteer to become an editor yourself. Submitting your sites to many of the smaller directories will provide little or no value.

Strategies for Using Web Directories

Web directories can still be worth using, but you need to make sure you are strategic with them. A few things you should keep in mind:

1. Check the quality of the directory. What is the page rank and Alexa of the directory? Ideally, I target directories that have at least a page rank of 4. There are thousands of directories on the Internet, but many of them rank so poorly you won’t get any benefit out of them. You would just be wasting the time it takes to fill out the submission forms. Another thing to look at is the quality of the sites the directory accepts. Listen to the words of Matt Cutts, chief technology developer at Google. He says that it is okay to submit to web directories, provided they limit their listings to quality sites. He discourages website owners from using free for all directories that take anyone who submits.
2. Stay away from link exchanges. There is only one thing worse than getting a backlink from a website that has little or no value. That is doing a link exchange with such a site. Google looks at these link exchanges as blackhat strategies and seriously penalizes any website engaging in them. Only go for one way links.
3. Be wary of paid listings. SEO experts debate the use of paid listings. Some say they are bad, others say they may be helpful. The jury is still out. However, you should be very careful about doing any paid listing. This isn’t just because they cost money. Search engines hate it when users buy links to inflate their SERP rankings. Paid listings may not necessarily be penalized if they came from legitimate, well-respected directories. However, respected directories are likely to abide by Google’s terms of use and apply the nofollow tag on any outgoing links.
4. Be careful what categories you submit to. Many categories are littered with hundreds or even thousands of other sites. You will have a hard time reaching visitors if your link is a needle in a haystack. Also, you won’t get nearly as much page rank if your site share the page with many other outgoing links.
5. Avoid automated submission tools. There are a number of tools online that will let you push a button and submit to thousands of directories at once. These tools may be tempting, but they are another black hat tool that can penalize you. Also, legitimate directories are probably much less likely to approve of a listing that has been submitted via an automated system.

Should You Still Use Web Directories?

Web directories still provide some value for websites. You need to decide if it is worth spending your time using them. Compare the value of web directories with other link building and promotional tools such as guest blogging, commenting and communities such as forums and social networking sites. One thing is for sure. Even though web directories still have some value, they are not nearly as helpful as they were in years past.

The importance of keywords lies in the fact that it helps you get a good search engine ranking. The reason is that in the online world the keyword is the only tool that determines whether your reader will find your article or not. Keywords must be used very carefully and smartly in your blog/website. And thus a lot of research and study is needed for choosing a keyword that suits your blog/website the best.

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What is your Main Keyword?

Many readers will think this is a pretty simple question and think they already know the answer. But there are a lot than just the answer they have in their mind. Of course your website/blog would be about something which will help you easily identify its keyword. The keyword is important because if you get the top spot for that relevant keyword in the search engines, you will get a lot of traffic for sure.

So once your keyword is identified, you are going to make sure it’s embedded throughout your blog/website. But what about the fact that there are already many websites/blogs using the same keyword as you? The answer to this is to use synonyms at the very beginning. If you start doing some research and analyze the keyword by finding out what other similar words are being searched for in the search engines, it will help you select some more related terms as the keywords, and you can hope to get a healthy level of organic traffic from the search engines.

Why Should You Research For The Keyword?

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The reason for not selecting the first keyword that comes to your mind when you think of them by looking at your niche, is that you still have to look at the pro’s and con’s of selecting that keyword, from every perspective. There are a lot of online tools available for the SEO experts that help them find out the value of a relevant keyword, but let’s get into it a bit deeper. The first thing that you should check after thinking of a keyword, is about its frequency of being searched. Then find out how many people that search for the keyword actually go to the blog/website. This will help you find out which keyword actually converts your readers into customers. The story doesn’t end here, as you still have to research for the competition that is there for the keyword you are about to choose.

Note: Don’t get worried if there is too much competition, for many competitors are really focused on that keyword for they might have others too.

The Identity of a Good Keyword

It is certain that if I want to search for something on the search engines, I will type two words or more in my search queries most of the time. Maybe sometimes I opt for a complete phrase to get the best out of the search engines. What I am trying to emphasize here is that you should take time to selecting keywords that are phrases or three to four words, relevant to the article/blog/website you are about to write, and of course are frequently being searched. The icing on the cake here, is that when you have already selected the keyword for your article, you should try to emphasize it in your article to help you boost your rankings.

The Importance of a Keyword for SEO

Like I said in my above paragraph, that after you have opted for a keyword, you should try to emphasize it in your post. Use that keyword in your article more than once. The reason for this is that when the search engines crawl your article, they first check the keyword that you have selected for the article, and after that they crawl your page trying to figure out the density of the keyword in the article, which helps them determine the article’s relevancy for the keyword, and hence more relevant articles will come up the search engine ranking.

The Worry of the Keyword Density

A newbie into blogging, after selecting the keyword, might start inserting the keyword into his article so many times, or in unnecessary places, thinking that the search engines after crawling over it, will think of it the most relevant article. I have read a lot about keyword density, and by the experience of the SEO gurus out there, I have come to know that you should not overdo the stuffing of your keyword into the post. There are many different opinions about this, but I think, the keyword should comprise 4.5% of the whole article. If you still have doubts about it, I would prefer you to test it by changing the density of keywords in some of your articles, and look for the best change.

The Process of Stuffing

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As I was mentioning about the newbie, when they, not caring about the density, just stuff their article with the keyword. This is actually a bad idea for the fact that when Google or any other search engine, after crawling over your article, will think that it’s a spam post, for that particular keyword. Because of this, Google will not only penalize that article/post but also other related articles to that one, on the blog/website. And this would eventually affect your ranking, so be very smart during selecting the number of keywords throughout your article.

The Use of Keyword in Metas

Now when you have selected your keyword, try to select a Title for your post/page, starting with the keyword. For example, if you are writing a post on some tutorials to help you manipulate photos, well then you should go for, ‘Photo Manipulation Tutorials: Let’s Change the Captures’, or maybe something like this. Other than title, when you select a description for the post to be shown in the search engines, you should try to embed a keyword or two into that. This will give search engines, more insights about your article.

The Secret

Just to be frank, what I am about to tell you, is not really a secret but something many of you might already have realized. I have seen new bloggers stuffing in keywords on their homepage, making search engines think the blog covers all of them. But trust me, search engines also can penalize you if they find nothing about the keywords you have stuffed in. This will make your website fall down the search results, and instead of boosting your ranking, will suck it down.

So the best advice that I can give you here, is that its better to take some time and read a small book, than giving a little time to a large book. The reason behind, is that you can have time to research on the small one and understand it well. So in blogging terms, stick to a small number of keywords and focus on them, giving them full-time to boost your rankings for the particular keyword.

Note: If you are already a blogger, and want to find out the best keywords for your blog. Go to Google Analytics Dashboard, and on the left panel, select ‘Keywords’ and select the words from there. I am pretty sure you must have understood the secret of using keywords to help yourself get on top of the search results, already.

Its pretty easy to submit your blog or website to the search engines by just copying your sitemap’s URL and hitting the next buttons for their submission process. But in order to make the search engines pick your new posts and inject them into their site’s data we need to optimize our posts, just as we optimize our blog. It includes the keywords, that we use in our blog or website’s header as well as the Titles and the Tags. So in order to write a perfectly SEO optimized blog post, we need to think about it just as a web page and use some, or all, of my tips below. We will focus mainly on WordPress, for it is pretty easy to optimize for the search engines.

Post Title and SEO Title

Many users might not have yet realized that the title you write in the top bar is different than the one you write down in the SEO plugin’s bar. The title that you write in the POST Title bar is the one that appears on your blog above your post’s description or on the header bar of your browser. Whereas the SEO Title is the one that is tracked by the Search Engines and put up in their search results. Google shows up to 60 characters in their search results so it would be a better idea if you use as close to 60 characters as you can.

SEO Description And Keywords

I know many of the WordPress users just write a post, submit it and put it up on their Social Media thinking it will save the day. But trust me, that’s not the right way to deal with getting traffic. You need to have some organic and search engine traffic and search engines rely on the SEO description and keywords of your blog, more than the post content. You need to insert something into that description box that a reader can get the gist of the post easily, that it’s the thing they are searching for, because this description is the one that is shown below the post title in the search results. You should write up to 160 characters in here for the same reason as in the post title. And don’t forget about the keywords at all, for these are something that makes your post appealing. The words in this tab shows the search engine what the post is about, just like the description shows the reader.

Now, the real fact is that some users, just put in all the keywords related to the post inside that keywords box. But that is not going to give you any fruit, because search engines take these keywords and then search them throughout the content of the post, to confirm whether the post is truly about the keyword that reader has searched for. Now you might be thinking about what to put in that box, well here is deal, just think of yourself as a reader and look for the words that you would use to search for a specific blog post, for they are the one that will be more effective.

Post Permalink

This permalink is what adds up to your blog post’s link to let the readers get directed towards it. Most of the users use their post title as the permalink, and so you would be wondering whats the importance of a permalink. Well take the example of this post. The post title is ‘A Detailed Guide To Write An SEO Optimized Blog Post in WordPress’, and now if I use the same as my permalink, it would hurt my SEO. The reason is that the words ‘A, To, An, In’ are STOP words, and these are skipped by the search engines, to save their disk space and speed up indexing. We need to avoid having these stop words in our permalinks, and so the permalink I used for this post is rather ‘guide-write-seo-optimized-blog-post’. Oh and by the way if you have already submitted your post, don’t try to change your permalink now, for the old permalink will give an ERROR to your readers and it will effect your blog/website’s reputation.

You can find some more stop words HERE.

Post Interlinking

This is a crucial step while writing a blog post, especially when your blog has a very high bounce rate. Bounce rate is actually the percentage of the readers that run away from your blog without jumping to another page. How we work it out is that we link the old post on our blogs to the related words on our new blog post. WordPress has a new feature now while inserting/editing a link. You can now easily click or link to existing content and write the related word that you are searching a related post for, and select it. This option in WordPress clearly shows how user friendly WordPress has become for bloggers, to easily optimize their blogs. In SEO terms, interlinking to your old posts improves your page rank and gives a new route to the search engines to crawl over your old blog posts if they may have faced an error crawling it before.

Image Optimization

When I used to blog for my own blog a long time ago, I usually used to ignore this step and didn’t realize that I was doing something wrong until I started adopting this method for my new blog, when I saw some traffic being generated from ‘http://images.google.com‘. This happened because I optimized the images that I insert in my blog posts. The method to do that is very simple. After you insert your image, just open its options, and add the details of the image into the tab ‘Alternate Text’. See, for example, the image above is for the image settings, so I used ‘Image-Settings’ as an alternate text. Now whenever someone will search for ‘Image-Settings’ they will land on this post.

There are many plugins to do this, but the best one is SEO Friendly Images which automatically adds the name of the image as its Alternate Text, and so for this purpose when you are saving an image, always save it with the details that are in the picture.

To summarize all the important steps above, I would want you to do take care of your post’s keywords for that is what the search engine will crawl upon your post. In order for your post to gain a good position in the search results (rather than a post that tries to scam the system by filling everything with keyword after keyword and no real content), just take care of these things below and you will notice the difference:

After choosing a keyword for your blog post, try to make sure:

1. The title contains the keyword.
2. The title starts with the keyword.
3. The permalink contains the keyword.
4. The SEO description contains the keyword.
5. The SEO description starts with the keyword.
6. The SEO keyword contains the keyword.
7. The content has the keyword with a density of at most 4.5%
8. An image in the post contains the keyword as the alternate text.
9. The content contains a Bold keyword.
10. The content contains an Italicized keyword.
11. The content contains an Underlined keyword.
12. The content contains a keyword linked to a post on the same blog.
13. The content contains a keyword linked to a post from some other website/blog.
14. The content contains the keyword in the first and in the last 100 words.

The reason of having a keyword in the title, permalink, description and keywords is obvious. The keyword density being too low will prove that your post is not a scam. The keywords being bold, italicized and underlined is because search engines sometimes give preference to text that is different than the main body text and detecting the ones that ‘stand out’ as keywords will help further imporve yor ranking. Linking to other blogs also can improve your ranking.

I believe that this detailed guide to writing an SEO Optimized Blog post will help you reach your goal and you will surely notice the difference after implementing this method. Do leave your comments below to share your experience and even if you have something to ask about.

Through the following design practices you can improve a website’s SEO and ultimately their visibility. With these foundations in place, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing the website you spent hours designing (and developing) is now a top contender for search engine visibility. You may also find some of these tactics also go far in improving user experience as well.

Keywords

Keywords are an important part of any search engine optimization campaign. If you’re using the wrong keywords, search engines and your target market may never find you. It’s important when starting a website to first establish what the business objectives are. Do you want to target a local area, national or global? With this plan in place you can then build pages that target these specific keywords, or decide where these pages may go down the line once the foundation is built.

The process of creating
1. Create a list of potential keywords (i.e. words that are relevant but not overly used)
2. Input your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool (i.e. Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, Wordstream, etc)
3. Finalize your keyword list based on research (Create a list of both broad and targeted keywords)
4. Prepare them for launch (typically go after 3-4 related keywords per page)

Keyword Placement

For a website to successfully integrate into Google you first must tell us what a particular page is about. It’s important to get keywords on the right position on the page, but don’t overdo it. Here are the best places:

• Title tag
• Meta description and keywords
• Website slogans
• Navigation
• Breadcrumb trails
• H1, H2 and H3 tags
• Bullet points
• Alt text
• Title attribute on links
• The main website copy
• Internal links
• Footer links
• URL’s
• File / folder names

Search Engine Friendly Navigation

Having Search Engine Friendly Navigation basically means creating a structure that search engines can follow. A major culprit in search engines not being able to find a website is due to the links being images instead of text. So make sure you address this and all links and buttons are text-based. CSS3 can achieve the same effects that Photoshop can, which has contributed a lot in terms of modernizing the web and speeding up load times. Wherever possible, try to avoid the use of JavaScript, as search engines find it difficult to understand and may result in crawling issues. With the push towards mobile devices supporting the web, using advanced scripting languages on your website won’t fly so well, either.

URL’s and Filenames

Having an SEO-friendly URL means search engines can quickly identify what a page is about. It’s also a good tactic to include keywords in the URL as this increases Search Engine visibility.

An example of a not too friendly URL:

http://www.websitestore.com/products/item1?=20193

A better, more descriptive URL would be:

http://www.websitestore.com/home/furniture/ottomans

As you can see, the second option has a better selection of rich keywords, which will help the search engine in their efforts to index you.

It’s also a good habit to name your images using descriptive keywords. An appropriate file name can be the difference between your image appearing in Google images searches or not. For instance the name “1234.jpg” isn’t going to be as successful as “midcentury-furniture.jpg” when someone is looking for design inspiration.

Website Images

• Images are often an overlooked aspect of SEO, but play just as an important role in the process.

• You need to optimize your images to achieve faster loading times and subsequent search engine visibility.

• Try to keep your images’ file size as small as possible so mobile visitors in addition to those with slow internet connections can get the same intended, fast experience.

• An optimal image size is anywhere from 30-100kb and the best resolution is 72dpi.

• You can also set the image size as part of the corresponding tag for the image.

• It’s best to place your images on context in the page. The more relevant the text around your image, the better results you’ll get for rankings.

• Place your images inside a folder named “images” or something similar so the final URL of the image looks something like this: /images/image.jpg.

Perfect Website Optimization explains how to incorporate keywords into your alt tag.

Social Media

Social Media should be part of your SEO strategy as building relationships and interacting with connections can help build your brand enormously. Not only that but it gives you exposure and helps build a trusted community and gain credibility.
Link building is perhaps the number one reason to jump on board the Social Media bandwagon: the process of visitors sharing links within their own network can result in a large number of inbound links. In summary, social media can provide an organization with an affordable channel that accomplishes results.

Get started by joining:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Digg

Additional Resources

This guide by Google is a very helpful guide in learning about SEO.

55 Quick Seo Tips Even Your Mother Would Love.

Monitor where you stand with Google Toolbar and Alexa.

Conclusion

These are a few important ways to ensure your website reaches visibility in search engines. Although there are methods in place claiming you can reach the top spot in Google overnight, nothing is as effective as first having a solid foundation for a website in place first – the rest will fall into place. Of course, nothing can help you sell yourself as much as having a trusted, reliable product or service to begin with but with these measures ensure your online presence is seen. Take inventory of your web marketing goals and use the tools that are most appropriate to achieve the results you’re looking for.