A Basic Run On SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

What business owner doesn’t want to see his or her website at the top of Google? We know that if we make it to the top, we can exponentially increase traffic and inquiries from prospective clients. In fact, many businesses that are lucky or skilled enough to be at the top of Google can barely handle all the business that Google is sending them.

So, the question is, how do you get there? How do you climb all the way to the top? What professional seo all about?

There is so much information about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out there that it’s hard to focus and not feel overwhelmed. The goal of this article is to demystify SEO for you. I want to make the core of SEO crystal clear for you in easy-to-understand terms, so you’re no longer confused about SEO and you have a roadmap forward.

Part 1: Keyword Research

The first part of SEO involves choosing the right keywords for your campaign. If you choose the right keywords, the ones that your target audience is using when they search on Google, you are creating a strong, solid and sustainable foundation for your SEO campaign.

If you choose the wrong keywords, you’ll spend the next months wasting your time and money. So make sure you get this step right. Characteristics of good keywords include:

* Relevant to your offer
* High search volume
* Action-oriented (as opposed to research-oriented). A keyword like “computers” is most likely to get a lot of visits from people doing research. A keyword like “Dell X105 prices” is a lot more likely to bring you people ready to buy.

Part 2: On-Site Optimization

The second part of SEO involves optimizing your own site with the inclusion of the keywords you have decided to target. The following are some of the places on your website where you should put your keywords:

* Page titles
* Meta tags (not very important anymore, but it doesn’t take a long time and you will get a small gain)
* H tags (H1, H2, etc.)
* Your URLs
* The body copy

You also need to make sure your site is built right. Among other things, this means:

* Avoid frames
* Use DIVs instead of tables for layout
* Avoid 100% Flash sites
* Don’t put your text in images
* Make sure you structure your pages and folders right
* Make sure search engines can follow your links (avoid Flash links and JavaScript links if possible)
* Use keyword-rich anchor text for your links



Part 3: Content Creation

Once you’ve optimized all the content on your site, it’s time to create new, robust, compelling content. Create amazing content so people tell their friends about it and their friends correspondingly link to your articles. The search engines feed on content and reward high quality links, so create as much relevant content as you can and make sure it’s of great quality.

And, don’t forget to include your keywords here and there whenever it makes sense.


Part 4: Link Building

The most important factor that determines which websites rank at the top of Google is inbound links (from outside of your own website). Make sure that:

* You get a lot of links from external sites (Easy, low-hanging fruit would be to get links from your business partners.)
* Those links contain your keywords in the anchor text
* You get as many links as possible from high-authority sites (you can check the PageRank of a site or its Compete.com ranking to make sure they are high-authority sites)
* You get as many links as possible from sites related to yours
* You get as many links as possible from blogs covering topics in which your target audience is interested
* (You link to your own pages from within your website using your keywords, too)

Conclusion

I hope you now have a much better idea of what SEO is and what it involves. I also hope you realize this is just SEO 101, and that there’s a lot more to SEO than this.

Have fun optimizing your site, and I’ll see you at the top of Google! using our SEO Services India

How to Grow A Blog - Blog Tips

Growing a blog to a successful state is a long journey that requires a great deal of effort and dedication. I believe there are four stages of growth that a blog must pass through in order to achieve this goal.and also helps in professional seo standards.These stages can be described as follows:

Stage 1: Getting Established

The first stage of growing a blog is simply getting established. The focus during this stage is primarily content and blog setup. Most of your effort will go into creating a sufficient quantity of quality content for a sustainable blog launch. I believe a good way to do this is to actually write anywhere from 10 to 50 articles prior to launching the blog.

Basic blog setup tasks like SEO and plugin setup is also a part of this stage, although this takes much less time than creating the actual content. You also want to make sure that you get a handful of backlinks simply so that your blog gets indexed by the search engines. I typically like to do this the natural way of getting a backlink and letting the search engine “naturally discover” your blog versus submitting your blog to be added to the search engine. I’ve noticed a more quality indexing of your content through this more natural process.

Most people fail in this initial stage by focusing on monetization. You’re not going to make any money in the early stages, so you may as well ignore it.

Time to complete stage 1: 3 – 6 months

Stage 2: Traffic Growth

You’re ready to enter the growth stage if you have an established blog with quality content. You’re starting to get a handful of comments and maybe even some regular readers. You’re also getting some traffic from search engines based on your indexed content.

The growth stage is marked by traffic growth, subscriber growth, and the start of some income produced by the blog. Even at this point, traffic growth is still more important than income growth so it is there where we will focus. The growth of traffic is created by continuous quality content plus the addition of quality backlinks.

The best ways to get the backlinks are not the easy ways. I think it is good to assume that Google is smarter than we think they are and know how to weigh hard-to-get backlinks versus easy-to-get backlinks. As such, I don’t place much emphasis on backlinks in comments, forums and social media. The better backlinks will come from guest posts and natural backlinks (when someone decides to link to your site because they like what you have to say). Establishing relationships with other bloggers can help develop backlinks, since building a relationship with someone will make him or her aware of your existence.

The backlinks serve two purposes. First, it actually drives traffic to your blog and hopefully, some of this traffic turns into regular visitors. Second, these backlinks help your search engine status which is crucial.

Make a goal for yourself to write two guest posts per month on quality blogs with established readerships and preferably solid Page Rank numbers. Of course, part of this process of getting guest posts on blogs is convincing the blog owner to publish your stuff and a link to your blog.

Stage 2 is a long process that can go on for months, even years. The growth will be slow, but the goal is for it to be consistent. Some blogs based on some helpful circumstances and maybe even a little luck will get through this stage rapidly, but for most of us, you’re looking at a longer process.

Time to complete stage 2: 6 months – 2 years

Stage 3: Maturity & Monetization

The maturity stage in most business cycles usually refers to a leveling off of growth. In blogging, maturity doesn’t necessarily mean the slowing of growth. In my opinion, it simply means that achieving the same growth rate doesn’t require as much effort. I repeat, this stage still represents significant growth in traffic.

Because this stage does not require the same level of effort in producing quality content for your blog as well as other blogs (guest posts), you should now put effort into refining the monetization of your blog. This can include signing advertisement deal, optimizing Adsense performance and possibly trying out some affiliate programs. With that said, quality content still must be continuously produced during this stage.

In addition to continued growth in traffic during this stage, you should definitely see significant growth in income. It is during this stage, that you can begin enjoying some of the fruits of your hard work of the previous months and years.

Time to complete stage 3: 6 months – 1 year

Stage 4: Maintenance

This stage is very interesting because there are several big blogs that do very well that have let their blogs deteriorate with regards to quality and perhaps quantity of content. The reason for this is usually because they no longer have to produce the same quality of content in order to continue growing and driving significant income. Could they grow even more and make even more money if they didn’t let their quality slip? Probably, but it is probably a natural tendency of bloggers at this stage.

With that said, not everyone falls into that trap, but the point is that the level of effort required to maintain a blog that has successfully reached this stage is significantly less than the effort required during the previous stages. Once blogs reach this level, it has almost reached a self-sustaining point where the readers continue to grow and spread the word without your encouragement to do so. Content is still required but it is not nearly as important as it was in previous growth stages.

In this stage, there is significant income potential. Possibly career replacing income potential. Most blogs don’t reach this level. In fact, it’s probably a tiny percentage of the blogosphere.

Note : Time frame stated above depends upon the quality of content and blog page indexing.

Tips To Get Through The Stages

1. Blog about a topic that you are either really interested in or are already involved in professionally. This will help you continue to produce content when it becomes difficult to continue to do so.

2. Approach growing your blog like growing a business. It takes time and requires work. There are few short cuts.

3. Understand ahead of time that growth will take time, and you are likely to become discouraged at times. Be persistent.

Ways To Speed Up Your Website Site

The load time of websites is one of the most important factors affecting its usability; most Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds. Below you will find the summary of the “Speed Up Your Web Site” series. Those are simple yet effective ways to make sure that your website is running fast. Also it does help for a professional Seo point of view.

Optimize Images: always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an online image optimizer.

Formats: apart from optimizing images it is important that you choose the right format. JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-color images. The GIF format should be used with flat-color images like logos or buttons. PNG works very similar to GIF but it supports more colors.

Optimize Your CSS: most websites are designed with CSS nowadays. Make sure to aggregate and clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that will merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.

Use a Slash on Your Links: when a user opens a link on the form “http://www.domain.com/about” the server will need to figure what kind of file or page is contained on that address. If you include a slash (/) at the end of the link the server will already know that this is a directory page, reducing the load time of the site.

Use the Height and Width Tags: many people forget to add the Height and Width tags on image codes. Those tags will make sure that the browser knows the size of the image before loading it. The result is that it will reserve a spot for the images while loading the rest of the page, speeding up the whole process.

Reduce the HTTP Requests: when opening a web page every object (images, scripts and the line) will require a round trip to the server. This latency can add several seconds to the load time of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of objects and to combine CSS files and scripts together.

For further clarifications contact SEO Services India.

Top 10 SEO Tips To Follow For Website Design

It’s useless to have the best designed website which no one can find! Many web designers often ignore search engine optimization to improve their website’s search engine results page rankings. In this article, we’ve shared some quick and easy professional SEO tips all designers should be using in their layouts.

Tip 1: Employ SEO techniques right from the start of web design and development.

Tip 2: Designs must be given more importance, but it’s basically the back-end code that provides proper support. Therefore, try optimizing the code and checking for W3C compliance from the very beginning.

Tip 3: Don’t forget the basics including title tags, Meta tags, Meta descriptions, Header tags etc.

Tip 4: Don’t forget to optimize your website images using alt tags. Also make sure to optimize the image size and loading time to the minimum.

Tip 5: Search engines simply adore text and content, particularly the unique one. So make sure your pages have relevant content to boost your search rankings. Try not to overload your web design with so many graphic, but have appropriate text too.

Tip 6: Flash is cool and interactive feature to engage users, but it doesn’t work with flash. If you really want to put some flash on your website, use flash banners and slideshows, and keep alternative text versions for websites in full flash.

Tip 7: Competitive analysis is also crucial to know your competitor’s status. This way you can not only improve your own rankings, but also defeat them in areas where they are showing poor results.

Tip 8: Optimize your website URL’S with your relevant keywords. Assign a different title name to each page, and don’t repeat the same title throughout the entire site. Moreover, the page title must not exceed 65 characters.

Tip 9: Replace JavaScripts in navigation menu with CSS based navigation. Using JavaScript can make your menu less search engine friendly but you can some use of its features in a CSS menu and retain the fanciness of the navigational menu.

Tip 10: Use a SEO friendly design that does not block or hamper the indexing of important areas on your site. Also, to ensure both search engine and user friendliness keep your keyword rich content above the fold.

These 10 tips will help you design a website that works equally well on search engines and give your design the exposure and traffic it needs to survive in the online marketplace. For further information contact Seo Services India.

Basic Characteristics Of User-Friendly Websites

What makes a website user-friendly? There are probably an endless number of factors, but let’s look at these major characteristics according to professional seo point of view...

1. Page Load Speed

Although high-speed internet connections are becoming more and more common, there is still a large number of internet users that are on slower dial-up connections. Even with high-speed connections some pages just don’t load very quickly. Most of your visitors will be fairly impatient and pages that load slowly could chase them away. At the very least, slow loading times will reduce the number of pages that they’ll visit on your site.

Knowing your site’s audience can really help to know how your pages should be designed. A program like Google Analytics will show you the percentage of your visitors that are using different internet connections. Based on the numbers you can get a good idea of what type of impact page load speed will have on your overall audience. If your site attracts a high percentage of users with dial-up connections, you should be sure to keep pages loading as quickly as possible. If a very high percentage of visitors are using high-speed connections, you may be able to add a few extra elements to your pages.

Factors that influence the load times of pages include the number and size of images, extra items like flash, the amount of excess code (example, designing with a table-based layout instead of CSS), and the size of your pages. (Read more about website optimization).

2. Accessibility

If someone can’t use or access your website it serves no purpose for that visitor. Accessibility of websites has become a bigger priority for designers and developers in recent years, but there is still a long way to go. Even major corporations have struggled to achieve complete accessibility. Target was even sued over the accessibility of its website for handicapped individuals.

Some of the easiest things that you can do to improve the accessibility of your site include using alt tags for all images, use valid HTML and CSS coding, avoid frames, and allow text to be re-sized by visitors. There is of course much more to accessibility, which was covered in detail by 456 Berea St.

3. Navigation

All users want to be able to move through the website to find what they want. A huge factor in being user-friendly is providing simple and intuitive navigation. Major areas of navigation should be located consistently on all pages. Using common elements that users expect to find, like About pages and Contact pages will help as most internet users have come to expect them and will look for them at times.

A general rule of thumb is that any page on your site should be reachable with 2 clicks from your home page. For larger sites this probably isn’t realistic, but offering a sitemap and/or a sitewide search can really help.

Another important factor with navigation is that user’s shouldn’t have to guess where they will end up if they click on a link. Regardless of whether the link is part of a navigation menu, or if it is simply in the body of the text, visitors should understand where the link will lead them.

4. Information

Visitors are coming to your site for a reason. Whatever that reason may be, you want to provide them with what they are seeking. Are they coming to find basic information on your business’ services? Are they coming to read in-depth articles on a particular subject? Whatever the case may be, the information that your website provides needs to sufficiently meet the expectations of visitors.

A blog like this one will need to provide its readers with great, insightful articles in order satisfy its visitors. The website of a restaurant may need to provide hours of operation and a menu in order satisfy its visitors. Obviously, each situation is different. In order to have a user-friendly website you need to anticipate what visitors will expect to find at your site, and then put it right in front of them.

How To Design Web Sites Successfully

Basics of Web Design

Having a good looking and functional design is essential for any website or blog. Even if you are not a professional designer, however, there are some basic concepts that can drastically improve your understanding of this area and the layout of your blog.

Success isn't just restricted to professional seo or web designers. Anyone can easily learn the essential skills required to design sites to the new standard.

Successful design does not always depend on attractive visuals, though that can help. Success is primarily a result of good thinking. For me, this approach should result in a site in which everything -structure, brand, page layout, graphic design, and error handling - is deliberately geared to success.

The guidance on this site gives you everything you need to be a web design expert and create excellent sites, starting now.

The most important tool for designing to the new standard, is my "Golden Rule".

Every element that goes into your web site must have a purpose.

Every single feature must either

• Help your visitors achieve their goals, or
• Support the site's goals without obstructing the visitor's goals

Web Design from Scratch is a complete system for designing sites to the new standard. The processes help you build a complete web site from clarifying your purpose, and creating a solution in architecture, layout and page design.

Every step of the process rigorously applies the Golden Rule. The result will be a web site that really works.

Courtesy : Website Design Basics