2012 Top SEO Tips

Change is the only constant. Things keep on changing so does SEO algorithms and techniques. Not all but some of the things have changed a bit. Here comes the list of latest SEO tips and trends for that you must follow for good results

1. Add G+, FB, Twitter & Linked In share buttons to your webpage and promote through social networks.

2. You website should work on mobile phones. Create a mobile site and build it search engine friendly.

3. Be natural, don't address Search Engines only just write contents for users and not for search engines.

4. Get natural back links from your readers by writing quality content.

5. Create your Google+ profile page and link it from your webpage.

6. Promote your pages on G+ and get G+ for your webpage from well reputed persons.

7. Place javascript in external file.

8. Page should load very fast.

9. To get local traffic, add your business information in Google places.

10. Participate in related forums and post your page links that has answers to the questions.

11. On selling pages, always get users reviews.

12. Avoid Javascript navigation.

13. There should be a very good balance in keyword frequency, keyword prominence and keyword density.

14. Don't ignore low priority search keywords that you see in analytics.

15. Work on the pages that generate impressions and not clicks. Use Google Analytics to find out the detailed reporting.

16. Use paragraph tags for page contents.

17. Emphasize your keywords in contents by using bold tags.

18. Add all pages in XML sitemap and add it to Google, Yahoo & Bing through webmaster tools.

19. Make sure that page Meta description is short and is all about the webpage content.

20. Add page heading and sub headings without keyword stuffing.

21. URL's should be SEO friendly with keyword rich page names.

22. Don't put styling in html, instead use an external CSS (Style sheets) to place styling.

Hope you will find it very useful.

Good luck!

SEO Off-Page Best Practices

When it comes to search engine optimization, many webmasters will often ignore important off page SEO factors that should be considered.  Here is a list of main off page factors that you must consider
SEO Off-Page Factors

1. Get back links from other relevant websites.  The back links from the relevant websites are considered a plus for your website.

2. Link to quality websites.  It is very important that the sites linking to you are relevant to the contents on your websites and these sites are considered authority sites.

3. Use your top keywords in anchors while linking back to your website. You should use your targeted keyword in the anchor text and the anchor text should not be same in every website linking to your site.

4. The PR of the web page linking to your website is very important. Make sure the pages linking to your website have higher PR.

5. Link time span is also very important. Old link is better.

6.  On referrer page position of link in the first section of HTML is best.

7. Keyword density on referring page also plays an important role. High density  is recommended.

9. Listing in Demoz and other popular directories is recommended. List your site to as much relevant directories as possible.

10. Website age also plays an important role. The older website is considered more authentic by search engines.

11. Make pages on social websites and make a habit to post on social websites.

12. Domain Registration Time of more than 2 years by the same user is recommended.

Hope you will find it very useful.
Good luck!

SEO Keyword Best Practices

Keyword research is one of the primary and most important task in SEO. I did a post about keyword research named Steps To Keyword Research, that will help you find the right keywords. Once you have the right keywords, the next step is the appropriate usage of those keywords. This post provide SEO Keyword Guidelines to help you use the keywords to rank higher in search engines

SEO Keyword Guidelines

1. After keyword research you will have enough keywords. The very next step is to prioritise your keywords.

2. Use your top 3-4 keywords in URL of the page.

3. Include your primary keyword phrases in your Meta tag Titles.

4. Descriptions meta tag should have your 8-12 primary keywords.

5. Add your top 20 keywords in keyword meta tag. Some search engines still use keyword meta tag.

6. Make sure your page's main heading and sub-headings have your keywords.

7. Add your keyword phrases to content. Make sure to add 3-5 keywords per paragraph. Keep it reasonable don't overdo it.

8.  write natural  and unique language. You need to incorporate your keywords, but not to the point that you ruin your contents.

9. Incorporate keyword phrases in bold, italic or bulleted lists where it makes sense.

10. Make sure to proof-read your contents  for duplicate and redundant contents. If it sounds redundant and off balance to you, it will sound the same your site visitors.

Hope you will find it very useful.
Good luck!

SEO URL Best Practices

Clean and SEO friendly URLs make a great difference to rank higher in search engines.  Search Engines have shown a preference for static and short URLs. Shorter and cleaner URLs tend to increase user experience as well. Keep in mind the below seo best practices and guidelines for URL's

 SEO URL Guidelines

1. Your domain name should have at least 2 of your top keywords.

2. If you provide services in a specific country only, then get a domain of the particular country.
For example www.yourcomain.ca is better than www.yourdomain.com if you just provide services in Canada.

3. URL should contain top 4-5 keywords in your contents.

4. Avoid underscore charters in URL's, instead use hyphens to separate words in URL's.


5. URL should be descriptive and it should give an idea about your page contents. Avoid system DB keys in your URL's. For example www.yourdomain.com/seo-best-practices is better than www.yourdomain.com/34 .

6. URL should have a proper hierarchical structure. It should have the following descending structure
       -domain
       -type

       -category

       -title

    e.g. www.yourdomain.com/type/category-name/title

7. Avoid special characters in URL's. URL identifiers should be made URL friendly.

8. The URL should not have .php, .html, .htm, .aspx or anything related to the underlying technology.

9. URL's should be shorter. The shorter the URL, the easier to copy/paste, read/write and use.

10. URL should be human readable and should not rely on non-user important data (like the post ID).

11. Static URLs are preferred as opposed to long dynamic URLs – as the search engines still have an easier time following static URLs. If URLs are long and dynamic consider using URL re-writing to make the URLs cleaner.

12. URLs should be in lower case throughout.



Hope you will find it very useful.

Good luck!

Top Ad Networks To Make Money Online

Ad Networks are the best way to make money online by publishing ads on your website/blog. Ad Networks pay on different basis which includes CPC (Cost Per Click) , CPM (Cost Per Mille or Cost Per One Thousand Impressions) , CPA (Cost Per Action) and few more.

Top Ad Networks
Now a days choosing the best ad network is an uphill task. To make it easier for you I have complied a list of Top Ad Networks to increase income of your websites and blogs. Here comes the list and summary of each top network.

Google Adsense - http://www.google.com/adsense
When we talk about how to make money online from a website/blog, the first option that comes to mind is Google Adsense. No doubt, Adsense is the best Ad network. But getting approved for Adsnse is not so easy as Adsense only accept quality websites/blogs. Adsense displays contextually similar ads by analyzing user needs and preferences.
AdSense is a great way to earn money on top of what you are already earning. Adsense has become main source of income for thousands of content rich websites and blogs. With Google AdSense, one can easily manage the ads that may appear in a web site. It blocks certain ads from appearing in the web pages, depending on the owner's requirement.
The amount of money that you will be able to make depends on your keywords, as well as the amount of traffic you have coming to your site. Therefore you need to do a keyword research to determine which keywords to develop your content around, and then begin to market that content. Adsense pays 68% of the ad revenue to its publishers.
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Clicksor- http://www.clicksor.com
Clicksor is a great Pay Per Click program which pays 85% commission back to publishers which is very high. Deploying ads is very simple, just register a free account and give details about your website/blog. Click on Ad-setup and choose which type of ad you want to display on your website. Unlike Google Adsense you only have to put one Java Script on your blog and you are ready to go. They have multiple ads format like Text Links, Image Ads, Flash Ads, Animation Ads, Banners, Pop under, Interstitial Ads, Dynamic (DHTML) highlighting etc. They only pay via Paypal, Bank-wire and Check so the payment options are not as good as you like. Minimum payout for Paypal and check is 50 dollars and for wire-transfer is 1000 dollars.

Chitika- http://www.chitika.com
Chitika is much like Google Adsense where you are paid on CPC basis. Chitika only shows relevant ads matching your website/blog content. You are given the facility to customize your ads as per your choice to get maximum clicks. Chitika can work with Google Adsense ads on your website. They make payments though Paypal and Check. Minimum payout in case of Paypal is $10 and for Check payment, minimum payout is $50. They also have an active affiliate program that you can use to earn some extra income while referring new members to their network.

InfoLinks- http://www.infolinks.com
Infolinks perhaps the most easy and advanced Pay Per Click program after Google Adsense. They have inline text based advertisement system which consumes no extra advertising space. So, you can add one or two more advertising program with them without compromising your website/blog design. Payment options include Payoneer Prepaid MasterCard, Paypal and Bank Wire. Minimum payout is 50 dollars which is good for newbie bloggers.

Kontera- http://www.kontera.com
Kontera is another text based advertising network like Infolinks. While Infolinks is more conscious about website traffic and only allows high traffic websites/blogs into its network while Kontera used to accept high as well as low traffic websites into its network. Kontera is asking publishers to join them for getting best payouts in the business, premium ads with market leading CPC, record high CTR’s, best relevancy and user experience. Its very simple to setup and it takes only a minute to configure.

Adbrite- http://www.adbrite.com
Adbrite is considered as good option for making money from your website/blog while showcasing pay per click ads on your website/blog. Adbrite also offers inline page links facility to its publishers to help them with making extra income on their website overall traffic. Adbrite is not much concerned about the website traffic, that's why you will get accepted into Adbrite network as a publisher even if you have a blog or website with small traffic numbers. Adbrite is keeping a high revenue share of 75 for its publishers, which is quite high when we compare it with other pay per click advertising networks.


Bidvertiser - http://www.bidvertiser.com
Bidvertiser is another good alternative to Google Adsense in Pay Per Click category like Adbrite. Not only they pay you on PPC basis but they also pay extra money for every conversion through your ads. Bidvertiser send payments to its publishers via Check, Wire and Paypal. You can get money transferred into your paypal account instantly once you have reached the minimum payout of $10. Bidvertiser makes sure that only ads with highest bids will be shown on our websites and blogs.


BuySellAds - http://www.BuySellAds.com
Buy Sell Ads allows you to buy and sell ad space on websites and blogs. As a publisher you have to create ads inventory into your account and once you get a banner advertising initiation, you need to accept or reject. As a publisher you get 75% of the total earning. You can transfer your earnings after every 15 days into your Paypal account. BuySellAds does not force minimum payout limitation in case of Paypal transfer.

AdHitz  - http://www.AdHitz.com

AdHitz is a very reputable PTC solution provider for every type of websites/blogs. They pay you via Alertpay and Paypal with low payout limit of only 25 dollars. Click rates are also good and you can set your own ad rate price up to 0.11 dollar per click. Site approval process is very quick. They pay you after every month. Payments than send to your Alertpay or PayPal accounts within 10 days.

Dynamic Oxygen - http://www.DynamicOxygen.com

Dynamic Oxygen has a very good advertisements system despite the fact that they are new in this field. They provide Interstitial Ads, Layer Ads, Peeler Ads, Anchor Ads, Image ads etc. The best thing about Dynamic Oxygen is their excellent support. They pay via Paypal, check and wire transfer. Minimum payout via Paypal and Check is 50 dollars. Payments are sent in the first week of every month.

Ad Bull - http://www.AdBull.com

AdBull is a great source of making income for your websites/blogs. They have also very easy signup process and accept websites with in 24 hours. The ads are much like text links ads as well as image ads. After generating code put it on your blog pages and ads are instantly displayed. They only pay via check or Paypal and minimum payout for both is 100 dollars. Payments are eligible to pay after 45 days and paid in the first week on each month. AdBull also have referral program in which you can refer this program to others and earn money.

Good luck!

What SEO Tricks You Must Avoid

There are many things that you should take care of for SEO, but there are also some things that you must avoid and we are going to take a look at some of these. Here is a list of items that you must avoid for SEO campaign.

SEO DON'TS List : What SEO Tricks You Must Avoid

1. Do not submit your site to spam submission directories. Don’t pay to companies to submit to 1,000 search engines or 500 directories etc.

2. Never link invisible images or single pixel images.

3. Don’t go for any cheap SEO company. Choosing an SEO company should involve a lot of research and questions with the companies you’re considering.

4. Never include invisible text on your pages.

5. Don’t spread your content over several domains. Know the pros and cons of using sub-domains and additional domains.

6. Don’t waste your time submitting your URL to search engines through SEO vendors.

7. Don’t make an all-Flash website. Flash based website are uncrawable.

8. Don’t target overly general keywords. Try target the more specific keywords.

9. Don't use javascript based navigation menu.

10. Avoid keyword stuffing. Don’t stuff keywords in your page footer with lightly-colored or hidden text.

11. Don’t have the same title element on every page.

12. Don’t allow both www.yourdomain.com and domain.com to resolve to your home page. Both are different for search engines and there could be duplicate contents issue.

13. Don't use ajax to load the  page contents but don’t ignore usability.

14. Avoid duplicate contents. Try to create contents that are unique.

15. Be careful when getting back-links by exchanging links with others. Reciprocal links aren’t bad by default, but if most of your inbound links are the result of link trades, they won’t help much. Reciprocal links should only be made with quality, relevant web sites.

16. Don’t request the same exact anchor text on all links to your site. This is an obvious sign of unnatural link building. Your link building should look natural, and varied anchor text will help.


17. Avoid Spamdexing. Your target keyword and closely-related terms should appear in the page title, description meta tag, and page copy but don’t over do it.

18. Don't use Doorway Pages.

19. Avoid Cloaking (search engine dodging technique)

20. Don't ignore Google Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines are very important and help more than anything to rank higher.


Hope you will find it very useful.

Good luck !

SEO Must Follow Checklist

Here is a must follow SEO Checklist that every webmaster should go through before launching a new  website

Checklist Before Launching a New  Website

1. Did you research the right keywords for your website?
2. Did you check that the domain has no previous bans from search engines?
3. Does your domain name contains at least 2-3 keywords?
4. Does your page URLs contain keyword?
5. Are your page URL's separated by hyphens?
6. Does your page title contains 20-10 characters?
7. Does every page has proper meta description tag with 8-10 top keywords?
8. Does page description meta tag is 200-250 characters long?
9. Does every page has keywords meta tag with 8-15 top keywords? Google no longer "relies" upon this tag, but will often use it. 
10. Are the page title and meta description compelling for users?
11. Does page body contains all of your keywords?
12. Does keyword density in body text is 2%-8% of the total words ?
13. Does your contents have unique and high quality texts that will be useful for users?
14. Does heading tags contain your keyword?
15. Does every page of your website has the proper keywords in contents?
16. Does word order in the page match word order in the keyword query?
17. Does your most important keywords have prominence in page/title (how early in page/tag)?
18. Have you used keyword in image alt tags?
19. Are all links valid? 
    
20. Does page links contain keywords?
21. Have you used title tags (with proper keywords) for links? 
22. Does your page has less than 100 links?
23. Does your website has links to good external websites?
24. Do you have page consistency across your site?
25. Do you have short URL's (no more than 6 words) for your pages?
26. Do you have a sitemap for search engines to help them navigate your site easily?
27. Does your website is browser compatible and it dies work on all major browsers? 
28. Is your website accessible without requiring to use Flash, Silverlight, JavaScript/AJAX, Java applets, frames etc?
29. Did you setup Google Webmater Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools?
30. Does your each web page size is less than 100KB?
31. Di you submit your business address to Google Maps ?
32. Did you create social media website pages (Google+, FaceBook, Twitter)?
33. Did you set up a Google Analytics account?
34. Did you check your web pages speed with Page Speed ? 

Hope you will find this post very useful.


Good Luck!

SEO Pillars - 5 Steps To Rank Higher

The main purpose of Search Engines (google,yahoo,bing,etc) is to provide the accurate information against the user queries. Search Engines list websites against the user query according to some predefined algorithms. The Search Engine Algorithms are based on guidelines that websites should follow in order to rank higher in search engine results for the relevant search criteria.
 Search Engines provide Organic Search and Paid Search. Organic search is based on natural rankings based on the search engine algorithms, and can be optimized with various SEO practices. On the other hand, paid search allows you to pay to rank higher on the search engine results page against the user search criteria.

Organic results are clicked on a lot more than paid results, especially for well educated users. More than 85 percent users click on organic search results. If you quickly want to rank higher then you must go far paid listing or PPC(Pay Per Click) but should also optimize your website for organic listing. In this post, my focus will be on organic search basics. The most important task in SEO is to research the right keywords for your web pages. Please check this post Steps to Keyword Research for finding the correct keywords for you web pages.

1. Domain Name & URL's
Domain name should be short, unique and should contain top 3-5 keywords. If your website targets specific area then try to get local domain name instead of .com, .net etc. Its better to have yourdomain.ca rather than yourdomain.com, If your website targets only canada users. Domain name should be easy to type and remember. URL's should be short and descriptive. From a URL user should be able to know the contents of the page.

2. Page Title
Page Title is very important search engine look for matching page title against user search query. Page Title is shown as a search heading in search results by search engine. Page Title must contain your keywords.Your Page title should be 20-60 characters long.

3. Meta Description of Page
Meta Description is what is shown in search results below the URL in search engine results as shown below. Meta description tags are not only important to search engine rankings but are also extremely important in gaining user click from search engine result pages. It must contain the keywords. The length of description should be around 200-250 characters.

4. Page Headings & Contents
Heading tags help user in navigating through a page contents. That's why, heading tags (h1-h6) are given very much value in page ranking by all major search engines. The sizes of the headings shows semantic hierarchy of a web page. The h1 heading marks the highest level in the semantic hierarchy. The h2 heading marks the second highest level in the semantic hierarchy. The h3 heading marks the third highest level in the semantic hierarchy, and so forth.Your webpage must contain keywords in your heading tags to get higher ranking by search engines.
Search engines like unique contents. All content must contain your keywords and phrases which appear throughout. These repeating words and phrases draw the attention of search engines. Ideally, for every 500 words, you should include keywords and keyword phrases at least 2-3 times. Its good idea to use bold and strong tags to emphasize keywords in your contents.


5. Back Links
Google relies heavily on quantity and quality of the back links to determine what web sites rise to the top of the listings. Google relies on the voting public to determine what sites are most popular and rewards them by pushing their site to the top of the search results. In order to place well, your web site needs to be validated by other website (back links).

Hope you will find it very useful.

 Good luck!

Steps To Keyword Research

The most important and primary step in search engine optimization is to find the right keywords for your products/services that you are going to exhibit/sell on your web pages. The keywords must describe your products/services keeping in mind your potential users. Below are the top guidelines for keyword research that will help you find and refine the keywords.

1. Use the below tools for keyword research and build a list of keywords

Google Insights for Search

With Google Insights helps you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction

Google Trends shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker  helps you to determine popular keyword phrases and their activity and popularity among competitors. It provides valuable data to estimate the competitiveness of each keyword phrase. This is very useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to rank for a given term.

Microsoft AdCenter Keyword Forecasting

Microsoft AdCenter Keyword is a tool provided by Microsoft to quickly and easily build out lists of suggested keywords and develop informed keyword strategies based on actual Bing and MSN query data, including: relevance, volume, cost history, demographic and geographic

 WordStream 
WordStream presents tools for keyword research to use in pay-per-click marketing and search engine optimization. 

2. Using the above mentioned tools, setup list of keywords against every web page. Think of each page as a separate service and find keywords for each page

3. If your products/services are for some specific geographic location then you must add the country/location in your keyword.

4. If you have a new domain, choose the keywords that don't have higher competition and after sometime you can target the higher competitive keywords . Google Adwords Keyword Tool   can help you determine which keywords are most competitive.

5. After using the tool mentioned above you should have 10-20 highly focused keywords, now what do you do with them? You prepare them for launch!

6. The next step is to used your keywords in your page contents. If you did your keyword research right, at least some of the words on your list already appear in your site content, but some of them may not. Try to use the missing keywords in your contents.

7. Inserting keywords in contents is important but its also very important is to insert the keywords in the below tags.

• Title Tag
• Meta Description Tags
• Headings
• Image Alt text
• Anchor Text/ Navigational Links

You've created your keyword list using the keyword research tools and placed them into your contents and tags. You're done, right?

Remember If your site changes, so does your keywords. The key to success is to keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary.

Hope you will find it very useful.

Good luck!