8 General Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips

[BizGuy]

I was contacted by Ian over at Latitude Group who asked if I would share some of their great tips on Search Engine Optimization. So, here they are! Let me know if you found them helpful!

8 General Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips

1) Be Realistic
Everybody knows the “ideal” keyword that they would like to rank for, but the chances of ranking well for this keyword may be slim / almost impossible in competitive industries. Be realistic with yourself in terms of the amount of time, money and effort required to rank well for these search terms. Does the potential reward justify the time and effort? Are your competitors actively carrying out SEO work? Would the rewards of achieving 6th / 7th position justify the effort? Are you competing against big brands outsourcing their SEO to large search marketing companies? Prioritize your tasks and look at outsourcing opportunities if you do not have the time necessary to complete tasks. You should be asking yourself all of these questions before deciding on a primary keyword to target.

2) Short Term / Long Term Goals

Related to the point above, setting realistic short and long term goals are great ways of staying motivated. Keep the short term goals towards longer tail search terms. If you already have a relatively established site, which terms are currently driving significant amounts of traffic? How easy will it be to increase the ranking of this term? Use click through rate data to predict the number of clicks you can achieve. For example, if you rank 9th for “purple mice”, and receive 22 visitors per month, if you increased this 4 places to 5th, you could expect to almost double this number. Look through all of your search terms looking for good short term search strategies. Longer term goals should be your more competitive keywords, often with a 6 -8+ month timescale (depending on industry) for achieving good rankings.

3) Research
Spend a lot of time researching every aspect of your strategy. Keywords, potential link building strategies, onsite work, content, industry authorities, competition. In order to have a credible search marketing strategy, all of these factors need to be analysed in as much detail as possible.

4) Competitors
One of the most important individual factors to focus on is the competition. How good is their onsite SEO? Have they missed obvious tricks? Can you take positive things from their site design /structure and implement it yourself? How impressive are your competitors’ backlink profiles? How are they going about obtaining back links? Is there scope to replicate strategies, or further improve on strategies your competitors have implemented?

5) Use available tools
There are a number of useful tools out there today to help with all aspects of SEO and search marketing. The use of Google webmaster tools, and rank checking software are a definite must. Google trends and Google adword keyword suggestion tools are great resources for keyword research. Other handy tools include SEO plug-ins for the firefox browser, spider simulators and keyword density tools. There are multiple versions of many tools, it is worth spending a little bit of time trying each tool.


6) Stay Up to Date
The SEO industry is changing all of the time, so it is important to stay up to date with the latest developments. Reading SEO blogs and browsing SEO discussion forums are a great way of staying informed of the latest developments. By doing so, you will also learn a lot, be it a new link building idea or a new handy plugin which may save you a lot of time.

7) Wider Picture
Look at your search marketing campaign from broader picture, what else could you be doing in online marketing that will have a positive impact on your backlink profile / traffic / rankings? For example, if your site has a blog, are you using blog pinging services (Googles own service or services such as Weblogs and Feedburner). Are you utilising local search, universal search elements? How appropriate is your site to social media outlets?

8) Stay White hat
There are a lot of SEO practices that are frowned upon by the search engines, if you are unaware of them, the chances are that you are not doing them. If you have heard or read of “new” SEO techniques, spend a lot of time researching their potential negative impacts before implementing them. Search engine algorithms are getting better and better at detecting techniques used to purposely manipulate their algorithm. Read their guidelines and stay within them, if you decide to implement grey hat or black hat techniques, it is only a matter of time before you are found out and penalised.




Provided by Search Marketing agency - Latitude Group
Latitude - Search Engine Marketing

[x3xsolxdierx3x]

Thank you for posting that!

Does anyone know if having a MySpace site for your company, linking to your company website, would affect your rankings negatively?

Iv'e heard that having outbound links FROM your site to MySpace doesn't look good to Google.......but, I'm not sure about the other way around.....

[martinlock]

There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. If fortunehotels Alexa’s user base is a fair statistical sample of the internet user population, Alexa’s ranking should be quite accurate.

[brokemet]

Outsourcing SEO can be a good idea if internet marketers would like to focus on strategizing more of the earning areas of the business such as meeting new ventures through arranging interviews, creating videos and meeting the other experts and recommending their products since SEO would cover a lot of time and effort to promote the online business through the search engines. Also, determining the skill sets that you need in the business would help you find staff to work on SEO. Copywriting and coding tasks for instance are highly needed.

[faisallatif]

thanks biz guy, nice info shared, i must say that I've learned lot of SEO tips from this forum keep informing us (Y)

[DeonKrey]

Heading onto research and evaluating competition are great points. I've succeeded in SEO because of keen keyword research and seeing the volume of my SEO competition because I then started using the concepts that haven't been used by these competitors I'm having.

[arnoldsmithh]

Thanks for sharing nice tips. I agree research and competitor analysis is the main thing for SEO.

[heidrek]

another important factor I've found is localality.

By this i mean whether or not there are a large number of "local businesess" that show up in a G search. Even if you're #1 on G, the search results will Display upto 7 local business results before your site. This sucks up a lot of clickthrough I think.

if you can conquer a term with no "local business" results so much the better.

[businessbrokers]

Hello friends,

Here are few more SEO tips.

• Include the keywords within the title tag so that robots of search engine get the instant idea what your page is all about. In addition to this, make sure that keyword is also included within the body’s page.
• Avoid spamming of keyword mega tag or description tag by overstuffing it with keywords.
• SEO friendly content is basically indexed by the major search engines like Yahoo and Google; therefore do not use doorway pages as they are only used by robots, not by humans.
• If unique content is considered as king, then quality links are considered as queens. Building a network of effective backlinks well-stuff with keyword phrases surely going to bring desired traffic to the website.
• Keep on adding new and fresh contents at regular basis for improving rankings of the website. For search engines, new content aids in adding relevancy to the website
• Do not forget to use keyword phrases and keywords appositely in domain name, text links and in image ALT attributes.

Hope you'll like it..!!

[mymvtindia]

Pretty Useful stuff
mvtworld.com

[Jenie0109]

Great info here i learn form this thread.

[flora_life]

With regards to SEO, you have to do On-Page Optimization (done within your site) first, then next is Off-Page Optimization (done outside your site).