SEO TIPS

SEO Tips for 2012

1. Create High Quality & Unique Content
      Great unique content is the basis for SEO, without great content you may as well whistle into the wind. You need to make people want to share your content and ensure that it is top quality content.

   2. Keep Producing Fresh Content
      A website that doesn’t change for months is a dead website to your users and search engines. Search engines and users love fresh content, it inspires loyalty from readers and ensures search engines will visit your site on a regular basis. Also the more fresh, relevant, unique and high quality content you have the more likely you are to rank highly in search results.

   3. Focus on 1 Keyphrase Per Page
      Keyphrases are your focus of a page. Each page you create should be summed up with one keyphrase of about 5 words, for example Piano Lessons in Manchester or Handcrafted Silver Jewellery or Gorgeous Designer Baby Clothing. Choosing the keyphrase before writing you page content will help naturally make your content lean towards the keyphrase you want to rank for. You can learn more about using keyphrases for SEO here.

   4. Make Your Website Accessible to All
      Ensure that your content is written in a friendly way that your reader will understand. Ensure your website is coded to modern web standards and that it is able to be used using PC’s, tablets, mobiles and accessible browsers. Doing this will also ensure that search engines can find and process your website easily.

   5. Create Amazing SEO Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

These are your sales windows on search results pages, so make them page. Carefully crafted page titles and meta tags can really help boost click through to your website and drive visitors.

   6. Use your Keyphrase in your URL
      Focusing on a keyword or keyphrases is great, so make sure search engines know it’s the focus. In addition to your page title, and content put it into your url, this will secure the signal and say this is what this page it about.

   7. Use Microformats in Relevant Areas
      Microformats are a way of pointing out a particular type of information, so a business address, an article, an event or a person. There are several key types of microformat, one which bing and google are known to use is Schema.org, you can also check out what formats google is seeing on a page when you’ve implemented them using this rich snippet tester.

   8. Contribute for Links
      Blog comment and forum participation are great ways to gain links and drive some traffic. But what they are better for is branding you and your website as part of the community. Do not silo yourself by not looking and contributing to other websites. Participation gains reputation which means both users and search engines will trust you. Go on participate, leave a comment.

   9. Be Social and Enjoy the Rewards
      Engaging using social media may seem time consuming but it is well worth the effort. Social media won’t just drive traffic, but it will drive reputation, search rankings and will help show that you are not just a company there are real people in your company. A human face is always a great way to interact with potential customers, so be personal get social and enjoy. And remember, social media is not a waste of time.

  10. Enjoy Your Passion
      Your website is your passion and no amount of SEO can convey passion that isn’t there. So write the content yourself, show why you love what you do and how you do it. Showing something is your passion makes people trust and love your site, its that honesty that will bring people back time and again. Be friendly and Be Passionate. Go on, get started! Love it!

Updated SEO Tips for Your 2012 Blog

SEO fundamentals have changed drastically over the last year or so. Using “old school” techniques on your blog will be ineffective, and in some cases counterproductive. Here are several of the key changes.

Keywords

Old: Use the same keywords over and over
New: Keyword variation is important

In the old days, we would use the same keyword phrase as anchor text for inbound and internal links over and over. Google is smarter now and looks for variation in root keyword phrases. Using identical anchor text will lead Google to devalue the link. Keep this in mind for new links, and consider tweaking anchor text on existing ones as part of a link reclamation project.

H1 Tags
Old: H1 tags matter
New: H1 tags matter less

Google doesn’t give as much weight to H1 tags as much as it used to. On the other hand, Title tags are still of paramount importance. In the past, bloggers would “double dip” on keywords by skillfully varying the composition of H1 and Title tags, but today that’s probably not the best use of a blogger’s time. H1 tags should still be optimized, but my recommendation for blog posts, for both SEO and social marketing optimization, is to make Title and H1 tags identical.


Reciprocal Links
Old: Reciprocal linking is good
New: Reciprocal linking is bad

Link exchange programs used to be a blogger’s bread and butter for SEO. No more. Google is smart enough to detect these arrangements and now concludes that such links are weaker than unreciprocated ones. As reciprocal links have been devalued, the technique should not be emphasized.

Content Location
Old: Onsite content is everything
New: Offsite content is important

There was a time when bloggers blogged on their blogs, period. While onsite content obviously is still important, bloggers are going offsite to guest-post, in large part for the opportunity to build high quality links to their blogs. This is a powerful technique and one every blogger should consider.

Google+
Old: No Google+ to worry about
New: Worry about Google+

Google+ is an SEO game changer. To quickly point out just three areas that bloggers need to be aware of:


   1. Rel=Author links associate a page of content with the author’s Google+ profile. Authors with high authority on Google+ have the potential to rank well for content even if it lives on a lower authority domain.

   2. Google+ content is indexed by Google and displayed prominently in SERPs. This has led some bloggers to produce lengthy, optimized, original content directly onto Google+.

   3. Google’s continuing shift toward personalized search means it will display content from one’s Google+ community in SERPs. This favors bloggers with Google+ influence (however that is determined) and who are in a lot of Circles.

Old: SEO
New: Social SEO 

Google values social shares not only on Google+, but on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms as well. Whereas in the past SEO could be divorced from social media marketing, this is getting to be less and less the case. A few years ago, if a blogger had slick SEO-social integration, it was a competitive advantage. Today, in many niches, it’s a requirement.