Off Page Optimization – Getting the link juice from SEO

Too much has been said about the On-Page SEO. Too many people stress on the basic SEO elements that have to do with the web pages. SEO is a large area where getting backs play a vital role. The new search algorithm demand’s getting more one way back links from relevant and authoritative websites to anchor your hold on the search engines and also to get better search engine rankings. What needs to be done in the off-page optimization? I asked my friend who is now is Dallas and is running a SEO company in Dallas, Texas.

“Off-page optimization is an interesting part of SEO process and an important one too” he replied to my question. “If you are a social animal, you would love to talk to people, meet people, interact and leave your traces; so much so that the people coming into your net follow your trail and link back to you in appreciation of the valuable information being shared. These will, naturally be, people belonging to the same interest group, or the market niche or will be the people hunting for solution through the products and services that you are commenting and talking about. It’s that simple.” “Get the point,” he said. “All the people linking back will be relevant, some might be bigger than you, people that command authority on the net. How would you feel if you get linked with an influential person and can take benefit of his connection? My friend, the web works the same way in the Off Page SEO.”

“Getting into the following will help,” he said.

• Blogs
• Forums
• Press Releases
• Blog commenting
• Article writing and submissions
• Blog submissions
• Submitting your website to web directories
• Link Wheel development
• Social Bookmarking

“Participating in the niche forums and commenting in the blogs will leave trails. These will lead many people to your web pages, so would the press releases, articles. Directory submission too will get you back links. You have a lot to play with; you can also employ social networks to build your links,” he commented.

I figured out that there is a lot to do when we start with the Off-Page search engine optimization. We need to be focused and need to spend time on our computers and with the search engines Web 2.0 sites.

Monitor your SEO expertise – Google Analytics help

Google Analytics have been here for quite some time now. The SEO gurus and experts have a gate way opened for them and now are in the arms length of monitoring the performance of their optimized web pages. The strategy change and adjustments have become easier. We no longer need to beat about the bush; we have everything in front of us in the form of Google Analytics report helping us to measure our websites performance.

A tool by Google that helps us getting customized reports on our websites performs, user behavior, most visited pages, which keywords have performed well in generating more traffic and similar stuff that helps the web masters to articulate the SEO strategy for better search engine ranking.

Let’s take a deeper look. Dan is a SEO expert. When we met and discussed SEO he was all over the place with the analytics. “If you don’t keep a regular check on analytics you will not know what is happening with your website’s performances. If you want to understand what on the earth triggers your website visitors to click through and arrive at your website and from which place on the internet they are entering your website. The exiting points are also outlined and hence tell the owners of the website and the webmasters how to tailor the website for its best performance.”

“Great, but does it tells us exactly from which source the web traffic is arriving at our website?” I asked. “Yes, it breaks down the points. If the traffic is flow through Yahoo, Bing or Google, it will tell you exactly how many do arrive through different search engines. Whether the visitors are coming through PPC ads, it will point that too. It will also tell you whether the traffic is coming through Face book, Twitter, Press Releases, articles or blogs.”

“Yet, my friend, if your browser is not cookie enabled it will not be read by Google Analytics. This tells us that, though very useful for the insight of your website’s performance, Google Analytics does not give a 100% picture. People with cookies blocked while browsing the net get left out.

On the whole the analytic gives us great measurement of performance results and helps us in our SEO strategy.

Why is Meta Description Tag Important?

We had just yesterday discussed the Meta Title Tag. We know why it is important. Moving beyond this let me tell you about the description Tag. I had learnt fast. Fast enough to do the On-Page Optimization for my website. The biggest and the tricky hurdle in my effort that made me spend more time was the keyword research. But now, once the keywords have been selected I can move ahead fast.

This is how your Meta Description Tag looks like < Meta name="description" content="#">

“Is it important?” I had asked my tutor. I asked a silly question. He told me it is important as this snippet tell the readers about the web page and its content. After reading the meta tag, the website visitors go through this summery to decide whether clicking on the link would be worth while or not.

“It should not be more than 250 characters (with spaces). Here bigger is not better, it will left out by the search engines. So make it precise and to the point.”

Leaving the Meta Title Tag blank harms your SEO process, but if we leave the Description Tag unfilled, you would find that Google and the Bing will fill it up for you. I learnt that the web pages description tag must contain the some very important keyword relating to the web page being optimized. Hence, when the user‘s query is made, the search engines return your website displayed on the SERPs. The position i.e. the placement on the search engines results page depends how effectively you have made your description and title tags.

It is difficult to please the search engines and the web users in 250 characters summery displayed as description. Practice will make you perfect. It is an interesting test of you English drafting skills.

People might end up making Meta Description Tag that might look spammy to the web visitors. With the generic description i.e. the snippet picked up by the search engines might be interesting for the search engines. Thus, we need to create the description tag that are more meaningful and those that do not look like keyword stuffed Descriptions made for SEO purpose only.

What to do next in SEO – Have gone through Keyword Research

Keyword research is a complex area of SEO. If anyone thinks it is easy, he can take a walk. Perceptions have no place in the keyword research. If you think that you know the right keywords without checking them out, you are wrong. You need to go through the process. Our customers think differently, you would too think differently if you go out to buy something. Similarly our perceptions deceive us. We need to make a thorough research. I have been there. I have done what you might think of doing and believe me; you will find yourself in a mess.

Get ready for trip. Once we have selected the keywords and the search terms to optimize our website, we must first check these search terms for the current competition level.

We move ahead to build Meta Tags. The HTML tags that still have a say in the SEO and now out of three important Meta Tags, just two have maintain their important position in the On-Page SEO. Yup, I am talking about the Meta Title Tag and the Meta Description Tag. Keyword tag has lost its place, though you can use Meta keyword tag too, during the On-Page Optimization, if it is not useful, it will not harm your SEO process.

Meta Title Tag, my tutor told me that this is the heart of the On-Page SEO. This tag is displayed by the search engine in the search results and is the first line, hyper-linked to the relevant web page. This is the link that the web user clicks, if he finds it interesting. So build you Meta title tag correctly and make it interesting. Make it relevant to the users query and do not, he DO NOT stuff keywords. Use keywords in the Meta Title Tag but do it intelligently.

“Make is interesting. Do it for the search engines, but do it for your web visitors too. If the web visitors find it uninteresting, you will not get the needed visitors”, he had said.

I am practicing to make powerful title tags. You must too, redesign your title tags and make them as is being preached by my tutor.

Learning SEO – 15 minutes or more

Reading through the SEO e-book and a few search engine optimization tutorials on the web made me realize how easy it is to learn SEO. Actually, I had been living in the fools land till now, thinking that SEO needed me to learn the software development basic skills. This is exactly what pushed me away from the learning optimization.

My research on the subject and my friend’s guidance led me to a number of valuable informative pages on the web.

Though very interestingly told, the learning curve, the beginning of the SEO process titled as the basics of SEO led me to understand the keywords remain central to the SEO strategy. This is easy to understand. We as visitors to the web do conduct our searches by keying in search terms. Sometimes we search with vague terms but many a times we are searching very specifically for goods and services.

The core of keyword research as they tell me is to arrive at the right set of keywords, as the correctness and the relevance will make or break the situation. Make us thrive on the web or make us lose the internet marketing game.

Understanding keywords

Conceptually, the keywords are the prime words that relate to your products, services or the marketing niche. I had to dig deeper to understand the process of keyword research.

Keyword research tools like Google Keyword tool, Word Tracker or Good Keywords help us to arrive at the selected keywords. We need to list down our search terms and check these on Google, Yahoo and the Bing to see the competition that we face for these search terms.

They also tell us in their SEO e-book that we have to go for lesser competitive keywords if we want ourselves to be seen on the web search results. Face less competition at first and then go for the bigger move.

Yes, Learning SEO is easy, but the fact of the matter is, putting it to practice is difficult. We understand the first steps but I guess practice makes the man perfect. I have requested my friend to let me help him in some SEO projects where he will supervise and I will work. Guess this is the best way to learn.

How to become SEO expert

Are you still thinking of becoming an SEO expert. In these days when the SEO gurus are finding themselves stuck with Panda and Penguin updates. I think people have been feeding you with wrong information. It’s become difficult. The good old days when we could have brought links, when we could have stuffed keywords, go a few hidden keywords on the page, get the crawlers to crawl by a few black hat techniques and call ourselves ethical search engine optimizers. Friends, the search world has changed.

White hat is the call of the day. Forget buying links, forget pushing for back links. Forget stuffing and cloaking, the search engines have gone smarter and whoever is feeding you with information about getting website up in minutes, is misleading you and unfairly leading you to lose the Seo game.

SEO is still there. The rules of the game have changed and are being regularly altered. We had forced this situation onto ourselves. Our friends, through unfair competition pushed the quality sites up on the SERPs that resulted in the web visitor’s frustration. Google watched with hawk’s eyes and so did the Yahoo and the Bing. Google made the first move to favor the users. Gave a pat at their back and make the web more useful by pushing back the search engine tailored sites.

Today, SEO needs us to concentrate more on the fair competition. Keywords are still there as these are the triggers that force the search engines to collect the answers to the users query. Artificially intelligent BOTs can now make out the user’s intent and return the search engine search results accordingly.

You also need to be intelligent and be natural. Content has always been the king. It still is. So dress the king with vigor. Being original helps. Copy Cats do not made a permanent headway to success and are pushed back by the search engines.

To become a SEO expert while you need to study SEO guides available on the internet. Do study the Penguin update to remain in the SEO ball game.

It’s difficult to SEO

Yes, this is true. I had sat down to build my website. I thought it will be easy to get the pages up and running with the on page SEO elements. I was wrong. It is not as easy as they tell us in their articles and PDF tutorials. Making the deign layout and panning the website structure is not that easy too, but getting your SEO guns ready is far more difficult. I have designed the layout, had selected and tailored the images for my website. Have used Photoshop to build my graphics and have used Dreamweaver to make the web pages.

Now that I am hear doing my bit. My friend tells me to move to Joomla – the content management system. He said it is easier and faster to customize the Joomla web templates and the content management system has the SEO elements built in. I would find working with Joomla easy.

Great! But my friend does not know that I am comfortable with the CSS and the HTMLs. I don’t find any problems with building my site. I have been doing website design professionally and now I have turned around to start my part time business building websites for small businesses. I need my website up and put up some of the work I did for people who asked me to build their websites.

I like to be creative and I like to work out with colors and images. Building web content is what chases me off, but many of my clients did give their own content which I had placed in their websites. Now that I have also decided to optimize my customer’s website, I need to work through the SEO elements. I have learnt online how to optimize the sites. It seemed easy in the beginning but believe me I am not on the bed of roses.

I have searching for keywords, the most relevant keywords. I had also checked the competition for these keywords, heck, I found the competition too high. Then I had to choose lesser competitive keywords and had to settle for the second best, as I had learnt that getting to the first page for the lesser competitive keywords is easier. I need to take small steps. Get to the top for lesser competitive keywords and then leap up to fact high competition.

SEO Now

Some people say SEO is dead. Some are of the idea that SEO has gone useless after Panda and Penguin. I was told about Bing testing paid search results. Heck, what is going on. If organic results too are paid, than why we would need to compete for top positioning, just buying off the top position would do the trick and get bags of greens for the search engines. The web thing will lose the luster. Till now many have thrived and it was this umbrella that had helped many small bees to climb from rags to the riches.

SEO in terms have become difficult. Look back to the good old days, getting top search engine position was easier, when the optimizers stuffed keyword in Meta Title tags, the description tags and the website content. Though the content then looked a lot articulated and manufactured out of the mill but it did the bit for the optimizers.

Today, the scenario is difficult. The companies find it hard to get to the top as easily as before. (a) thanks to competition (b) thanks to the Panda and the Penguin updates. Manufacturing links seems to be difficult. The search engines smell the rat. Buying off the position proves expensive for the new entrants, thus the only way out is to spend time on the SEO. Yes, now SEO need more time, more concentration and far more efforts in terms of working hours. We need to be more creative with our web content.

SEO now demands more sophistication. Remember the semantic search days are here. We need to be creative, authentic, and our writing must be targeted for the visitors more than the search engines. The intent weighs more than the words. While quality of content and more focused on page optimization, good website structuring, being social and disseminating of the information is needed now than ever before.

Future of SEO

I have been wondering about what does future hold in the terms of SEO. The web marketers have been repeatedly jolted by the fact that the search engines have changed their algorithm and kept the optimizers busy with their changed programmings. The way bots crawled has changed. I needed to clear out the confusion and I was seeking SEO specialists who can guide me through. Reading Google’s Blog and other informative articles gave me the idea but hearing out from the experts usually gives me a particular advantage as I get out some tips and tricks from them.

Penguin brought the big change. Those who based their SEO heavily on the keyword density felt the earth below their feet rocking. The earth quake measuring XX was felt by them. The surprise was the artificial intelligence being used the search engine to read between the lines. Not just what the words meant but the intent behind the search was under scrutiny before the search results were present in front of the web visitors.

Today the semantic searches built within the Penguin update is an eye opener. Google thinks beyond, their focus are the web visitors and their aim is to provide value for the time spent by the users on the search engine and give them more precise results for the search being conducted.

Our focus, thus changes. We as SEO’s now talk about being natural and use less traditional keywords. When 3% keywords seemed prudent and thoughtful keyword density ratio we walked that path, now 3% is high density.

What do we do now and what about the future of SEO?

Can you predict future? I cannot, but by looking at the current scenario, we must agree to the point that we need to be natural when we build content. The targeted keyword must mean something instead of mere alphabetically ordered words. The content must have the purpose to compete on Google. You will be up against your competition and the same time fighting for the place on the search engine with searchable content to get into the latent semantic indexing process.

Aim of the SEO

Really it is not difficult to understand why people need to optimize their websites. Google is making all the efforts through the change in the Google algorithm and with the Panda refresher update, as I have heard, just couple of days back, to make the sites most relevant to the users query to appear in the search engine ranking results. Good for us, as the users, like me, will get to get better precision results, not fake landing pages with Google Ad sense ads smiling at our facing. That was and at times, still is the case when searches are conducted.

Being natural helps today. We have to get out of the habit of making keyword rich documents. Like someone rightly said, we need to keep our ego out while optimizing the site. I did not understand what he meant, than yes, the dust cleared. We must focus on the web visitors, people for whom we make the website. Sure the in-depth or the hidden fact is that our websites are made by us to serve our bottom line, yet it is the web visitors through which we ultimately benefit. If they don’t find us, we cannot thrive. Thus on the web we must aim for full visibility.

The recent changes in the Google algorithm, Google says, are designed to give the users better results. The updates done last years had an impact of 11.8% on the user’s queries and this resulted in lowering the ranking of poor quality websites.

To create a healthy web ecosystem, Google says, they need to make the changes and that these changes will affect the websites. While some sites would go up, other might not be found in the older positions. Web content, they say, rules and will continue to rule the game of SEO. Lower density of keywords and more natural style created content for the web visitors and not just aiming for the search engine bots.

You need more customers, than think in the terms of the web site visitors. Aim your guns at them and for the time being, forget the “YOU” in you.

The aim of seo is to create more visibility on the search engines, get more free web traffic and from amongst the web visitors get hold of the leads that we get in the process.

SEO - Get ready for the local market

With more than half of the people fighting for the top search engine positions for global searches, we see that the competition is really tough. I have been there, and am still there, but what did I get. Yes, free web traffic was the fruit of my effort and I did get healthy business from the 1st spot there. Yet, I think things could have been better, if I had at first understood the importance of being on top for local searches too.

Why did not it cross my mind that most of my buyers, my customers and the prospects will be the people living in the area and the city where my business exists? I am not one of the Fortune 500 companies; neither am I a global brand like Apple or Dell. I am a medium sized local business who has gained online visibility though hard effort and by spending valuable time in learning the trade.

Local SEO has its own importance. It brings more locals into your net. When we were discussing business, this weekend, my friends and I concluded that lets take a turn and get our local SEO in place. We all agreed to follow the footsteps of Mr. Green, the owner of the printing company, who has launched every campaign for the locals. In return, he has not got people from all over the country talking to him about getting their printing jobs done. He is sending business cards all over the US and the Canada.

He told us that he put the company up on the Google Maps and Google local listings. Yahoo local was his next target. Now, he said, Google+ is giving him more advantage. He and many of his customers are there and share information. I am loving it. Additionally, Facebook, Twitter and my printing blog has got me many local customers.

I think it’s worth the effort, he said and suggested that by far our efforts have worked for global seo positioning, why we don’t get a few pages up with local SEO tags, build a Google+ profile and also get listed in Google Maps.

The rest would be easy for us as we a familiar with the tips and tricks of SEO. Our market concentration will change, the basics will remain the same, he said.

SEO tip of the day, November 01, 2012

Harry just called me to talk about the SEO of his website. He seemed to be jittery about search engine friendly website designs and was seeking advice on how to carry on with the process. My suggestion was:

Take each page and the sub page separately. You don’t need to push through.

Your home page is the main landing page and we should take careful steps to build purposeful Meta Title Tags, Meta Description Tags. The H1, H2 and the H3 tag must be finely designed. Optimize the images by placing good ALT Image Tag.

Each page of the website, I said, was equally important. As such, get into the act now and first select the keywords (a) general relevant keywords for your website, (b) specific keywords that would go with and are more relevant for the particular web page. E.g. Products page would need more specifically related keywords. We must look at the each page as a separate SEO project and optimize these for different searches.

Similarly, once we are done with the On-Page SEO, we must opt for Off Page SEO with the same mind set. Our articles, our blogs, our press releases and our social media must be developed so that it gives effect to the each page separately while, our efforts must not hinder the collective SEO effort for the website.

The SEO process is a big ask but is not a difficult process. Most of the common sense plays it parts, but do not forget to go through a thorough research process. We need to study the web; we need to know what other people are doing on the internet. How well placed our competition is on the search engines?

Harry needs a SEO specialist. He might not be able to carry the SEO work through, as he is busy with his business details.