Do it yourself easy seo 2013 edition by ericwelke

Articles from EricWelke.com Do It Yourself Easy SEO 2013 edition by Eric Welke

I’ve been putting my SEO efforts in the back burner these past few weeks. I’ve been checking out the new updates from Google and how it might affect my SEO work on my other sites. There was a series of major changes to their algorithm last year and 2013 may bring us a whole lot more changes. It’s always best to be prepared. What are the easy SEO best practices we should continue to do for this year? Quality Content This should always be your primary focus. No matter how well optimized your site is if it doesn’t provide relevant and useful information to its visitors, it will get surpassed in the rankings by sites that do. If you only add content whose main purpose is to improve your search engine rankings and is unreadable by actual people, expect to lose your rankings eventually. Especially since social media signals now play a big organic part of rankings. Social Media Signals Speaking of social signals, all websites and blogs should already have these features standard. The ability for people to share your site to others adds additional reach for your site. This in turn gives your site more traffic and exposure. Keywords You need to have your keywords appear on your article or your post. The number of times it appears on your post should look natural. Forcing your keywords will make it look over optimized and it will result in penalties. Read your article out loud, if the keywords come up too often to sound like natural speech, you may be putting in way too much. From experience, it’s better to skew towards fewer mentions, especially for long-tail phrases. Google, Bing and Yahoo approved Tools Optimizations

The 3 biggest search engines provide webmasters with tools to help gauge site performance. They also give their recommendations on how to make sure your site gets indexed. Checking out updates on their respective blogs and adhering to their recommendations generally help to keep you on their good side. Organic link building Link building still counts, but the quality of the sites sending you backlinks is now very important. Posting comments on established and reputable sites are still a good way to get some traffic and gain ranking, just make sure the number of backlinks you generate in a day from post don’t look too unnatural. Stay away from the pseudo link farms, bad reputation sites and mass directory listings. Being on these sites can cause damage to your rankings. Google’s Disavow link tool Last year Google introduced their Disavow link tool. This tool allows you to report sites that you don’t want to link back to you. It’s useful for removing your links from sites with a bad reputation. It’s been reported to provide the intended benefits, but the jury is still out on how effective it is for those who got burned by the Panda update. Focus on Local SEO Local SEO helps you narrow your focus and this in turn, gives you the opportunity to get useful traffic. It’s especially helpful if you’re a service provider or seller who is targeting a specific locale. A car dealership in San Antonio is better served by having a higher rank for the search phrase “use cars in San Antonio” than just plain “used cars” Mobile Friendly Website Due to the prevalence of smartphones, a mobile friendly version of your website will help you reel in more traffic. There’s nothing worse than viewing an unreadable version of your site when you pull it up on a smartphone’s screen.

Well, that’s a short list of what I’ve considered so far as critical aspects of an SEO campaign for this year. It’s not a complete list so we should always be on the lookout for any new developments from the search engine companies. Easy SEO is actually a misnomer if you think of how much correct prep you need to do start getting good results. But then again, almost anything gets easy the more you do it.