12 Best Search Engine Optimization Tips

12 Best Search Engine Optimization Tips

In this article I will provide you with 12 best search engine optimization tips that will be relevant for 2014 and beyond SEO. In this article I will focus on Google SEO strategy, other search engine ranking strategy is slightly different but till date Google is the most popular search engine. You must have experienced that SEO is becoming very competitive and also very confusing as Google is updating its search engine ranking due to which many of the old school SEO strategies are not relevant. For latest updates in SEO checkout my website 101internetmarketingblog.com .

You must have read lot of seo tips and tricks on different websites or blogs. On one website you must have read particular method of Google seo, by the time you understand and start to implement it you realize that the search engine optimization technique does not work anymore and your method might lead to red flag by Google. It becomes so frustrating and confusing as to which Google seo strategy works and how to implement that strategy.

As Google updated its search algorithm with panda,penguin and recently humming bird lot of site have fallen down from ranking, this is a good opportunity, as now there is good scope for ranking if it is done the right way or in other words as Google wants it.

So here I will present 12 SEO tips that should be working even for future Google update. I would like to mention disclaimer here that these tips should not be used to claim any losses, for all purpose this article should be treated as entertainment value.

One thing is very important to remember that Google wants to provided highest quality content relevant to search term in its search results, and our effort should be to satisfy its requirement, this one golden thumb rule if applied correctly than non of the Google search algorithm updates will effect your ranking.

Since content is the main focus of Google In this article I will be talking only about on-page SEO, it is my belief that if your content is of good quality than back-links will get created naturally exactly as Google wants Keywords: Focus on topic of content Well recent Hummingbird update is not just an update but it is complete change over of the search algorithm. All these days more focus was on keyword, keyword in title, keyword in meta tags, URLs, keyword density, etc, all this is still necessary but now it is now more about topic of the article, your article should include more keywords that are relevant to topic.

Over the years Google has studied search trends and has made great effort in improving synonym identification and concept grouping. This means your article should have as many keywords that are synonym to main keyword and also all the keywords that are related to topic, also combination of both. This will give impression that the article is highly related to the main keyword.

Article Quality: Write Longer and Meaningful Articles There was a time when 250 words articles used to do well in search engine ranking but after panda

update we have past the age of short articles. Many websites have suffered ranking because of small article especially corporate website which hardly post long articles. Well you cannot continue to have such small articles in your website, few of such pages won't be a problem but if bulk of the webpages are of such type than your site can get panda bait.

There are many website that have seen success with 1500 words articles, so if you are someone who writes short articles than you can combine them to make it long article but the main focus here should be to make it a meaningful article and not bother too much about word count. Your content should be well written, grammatically correct and very much meaningful. The best way to write long articles is by creating list type or combining features and benefits.

Increase Audience: With Unique and Fresh Content One of the main focus of online marketing should be to increase the audience for your content. This can only happen if you focus on creating fresh content, what I mean is that writing new topic which others have not touched upon. This will help in increasing your audience base.

As result your circle of influence will increase in Google+, Facebook , twitter or other social media.

Writing a new content does not only help in increasing readership but it also helps in increasing crawl frequency and depth of your website. You have to have a mindset that content on your website is for generating awareness and trust. Having this kind of mindset will help you with more topics to write about.

Bounce Rate: Visitors Engagement on Your Site How much time does visitor to your website spent or in other words bounce rate. Well if you are having a meaningful content and giving what visitor wants than he will be spending more time on your webpage. Increasing user engagement on your website can reduce bounce rate and thereby increase the chances of better ranking.

User engagement can be improved by not only having good text content but also by having good webpage design, better layout of page, good fonts and line spacing arrangement, better navigation and link presentation. All these factors can effect immensely on the time, bounce rate and user engagement statics.

Advertisements: Too Many Ads can Get Penalized How many ads and where do you place your advertisements?, well having ads on your website is not a problem but if you have too many ads or inappropriate ad placement can cause penalization. You have to be cautious about text link ads, they should be content matching. Automated phrase link advertisements should be avoided.

If there are any kind of advertisements like popups or interstitial advertisements that can cause interference to the ability of search engines to crawl your website than those ads should be avoided.

Titles Headers: Create Meaningful and Attention Garbing The rule for writing SEO optimized title tag and header have not changed but there there could be change in Google title tag algorithm. Can you still continue with optimizing title tag for keyword or multiple keyword? so if you are optimizing your content focused on topic and not on keyword than obviously your title should be based on topic.

You have to choose right keyword that you want to use for title tag and header, consider a term which is having highest exact match search volume and optimize it to create a meaningful and attention garbing title tag.

If that keyword cannot be optimized than opt for another keyword that could be optimized such that the title and content relate and very much focused towards topic. This kind of optimization will gain ranking for longtime as its social circle will also become strong.

Description: Should be Focused to Increase Click-through Rate There is no much change in optimization of meta description tag. Avoid duplicate description tag, make sure that every page on your website is having different description. Keyword stuffing in description can raise alarm so the best idea is to focus on increasing click through rate.

Also you enticing description should be written within 150 word this is to ensure that non of the words get cut off and the actual massage is presented as it is written to increase click-through rate.

Google also might intend to pushup ranking of sites that have better click-through rate.

Structured Data Markup: Think Before You Implement It.

You must understand that search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing show the search results in the data format they want to, so that their visitors are provided with the best and maximum information about a topic.

Employing structured data markup in your site you will be providing maximum information to the search engines and the visitors will get the required information from the search engine. So there is a possibility that the visitor may not come to your website, while you want that the visitors should come to your site and take some action or get lot of other information not shown by search engine.

So you need to think before you implement it.

Having said this there are some structured data markups which are best practices and must be implemented like publishers and author tag.

Keyword Stuffing: Avoid it or Hide It Talking about keyword stuffing is like a old school talk and by now all the SEO followers know very well that keyword stuffing will be penalized. But there are some kind of website like shopping cart where it is possible that same keyword appears many times may be as a category or titles of products. So will this not affect your seo and thereby ranking.

If your website is old and authority site than it may not get effected much but if it is new or about 2 years old than better be careful with keyword stuffing. If you want to show keyword to search engine than use HTML if you want to hide than use image, java-script or other media.

URLs: Keep It Readable Well as for URLs you can continue as you were doing earlier, that is keep the urls readable. A readable URL gets better click through rate in search engine as well as with back-links on other pages. In Google search results a better readable url has more chance of being clicked than other short or non formatted urls.

Also if you hover mouse over a link on any webpage you can see the url at the bottom of browser, since the anchor texts are few words the visitor may not understand the topic of that url. But if the urls are readable than the visitor understands the topic and hence there is more chance of getting clicked, thereby traffic.

So make sure your CMS has a feature to create url similar to that of title for that post, if your CMS is not having this feature than better change your CMS to the one where in you can create URLs as you wish it to be.

Speed: More Important to Reduce Bounce Rate.

Although there are claims that speed of the site does not account much for the search engine ranking, but it will surely effect the visitors patience and thereby increase bounce rate. If you really want to know the speed of your website, than try to open it in a busy local network. If it can open quickly than your site speed is okay.

Remember that if the site is loading very slow than the visitor will close the window and switch to another site, this will increase the bounce rate. Google gives lot of important to the time spent by user on a particular page that is bounce rate. So your bounce rate should be low, even fraction of milliseconds can help you reduce bounce rate. So try to design sites that will load faster.

Crawl: Ensure Your Website Can Be easily Crawled Unless your webpages are not crawled they cannot appear in search engine results. So you have to make sure that all your webpages are crawlable. Also make sure you use proper meta tags like index, noindex, follow tags etc depending on which pages you want to be crawled and which you do not.

Also ensure that the search engines have crawled the webpages that have been recently updated. If you find that updated pages are not crawled than it might be problem of your domain authority. This problem can be resolved by better internal and external back-links.

You have to make efforts to get the pages you want to get ranked be crawled faster and frequently updated. Do not leave it for the chance.