Top SEO Tips and Tricks

Write great, unique content with titles that are catchy and spark the interests of readers right away.

Like fishing, you need to reel in readers first before they can discover and read that wonderful article you wrote about mushrooms and women. Use titles such as “How to <blank> in 7 Days” or “10 Ways to <blank>.” Even more effective are titles with the word “secrets” or countdown lists in them. Of course, once you’ve drawn in the reader, you still need an excellent article to keep them there and entice them to link to your website. That’s where a great copy and unique content comes in. By great copy, we mean a well-written article free of grammar and spelling errors and is a joy to read. By unique content, we mean an article that is written originally and not just recycled from some other websites (also called article spinning or reusing an article by just replacing some words with its synonyms).

Add content regularly, in a timely manner, continuously over a long period of time

Adding content on a regular basis makes your site more dependable as a source of information, and will make it likelier to be bookmarked more than if you add content on an irregular basis. You should also add content which is new and fresh. Fresh and updated information will endear you to readers, old news will not. You should also avoid “building your website overnight.” Sites that have collected pages over a period of time rank higher than a website that just seemingly grew overnight.

Build your website both for spiders and for readers

You want your website to be accessible to spiders so it can be indexed and ranked by search engines. But you’ll also want your website to be accessible to users. Keep in mind that accessibility here means making your website accessible to disabled users. This can be done by providing alternative text in image tags or descriptive text for audio files and movies files or adding text-only link for image-heavy pages.

Build your link popularity through reputable websites

One incoming link from a reputable website is more valuable than a thousand links from websites that practice reciprocal and social linking. Getting involved in some link exchanging schemes may even be detrimental to your website’s ranking.

Use your keywords strategically

Instead of targeting one keyword or key phrase for your entire website, use different keywords or phrase for each page of your site. Try to get a domain name with your keywords or phrase. If you can’t get a domain name with your keyword, use your keyword in your URL. Always use your keywords in your title tags. By placing your keywords in title tags, you help search engines identify and index your pages. Use your keywords sparingly all throughout your article, and if possible, try to use related or synonym words for it. And if you can, try to have people link to your website using your keywords as the anchor text. You can do this by providing a ready-made link available to your readers. Make sure to provide a variety of links which can be used in blogs, forums, and other formats.

 

Secrets of Search Engines

Aside from the algorithm used by search engines to rank web pages, search engines don’t have a lot of secrets to hide from users really. Most of what others consider as “secrets” really aren’t secrets but are just little known facts that most don’t know about either because it’s too esoteric or have been buried underneath all the myths. Here are some things a webmaster who has achieved first page top listing in Google can tell you:

Authority over anything else

Links from authority sites are still the biggest drivers of Google rankings. High traffic sites with good reputation weigh the most in Google rankings. Google has fixed a lot of the attempts at gaming PageRank by blacklisting sites showing activities which perform or mimic link exchanging or traffic exchange sites. Reciprocal linking is also valued very low and will hardly give you any positives unless the links are found in the content and not on homepage links.

Gradual growth of your content

A site which appears to have grown overnight will be looked suspiciously upon by Google. Good sites and authoritative sites add content slowly and on a regular basis. Each posting is also graded separately and the keywords for which your page will be ranked on depend on the keywords optimized for the page which garnered the most “authoritative” links.

Low bounce rate accrued over a long period of time

This does not get any noise at all, but this is probably the best kept secret Google has which no one or rarely anyone talks about. Think about it. If you are Google, what’s the best way of knowing if the searches you are returning are serving the users as intended? Bounce rate!

What is bounce rate?

Simply defined, bounce rate is a single page visit by a visitor on ONLY ONE PAGE of a website.

How can this effectively measure the relevance or the usefulness of a page to users?

Think of it this way, if you are a user searching for information on a certain keyword, you will not likely stay very long or even go to other pages of a website which does not produce the information you are searching for. You will probably immediately close the page or click the back button if your search led you on a wild goose chase. That single page visit on that website counts as a bounce rate. The higher a page’s bounce rate is the lower its ranking will be (and vice-versa). However, this formula is adjusted for sites which offer specific information which can be gleaned from a one-time page visit (like online dictionaries, thesaurus, wikis, etc.). Aside from individual bounce rate, Google compares your site’s bounce rate on other pages which are related or comparable to your website.

Average visit and page duration

Another less talked about or less known metric, but also another very important factor influencing your ranking is average visit duration. This is the amount of time a visitor spends on your site or page. Obviously, the longer they stay, the more likely it is that they are interested in your website or web page. Google translates this interest as your page or site having correctly served the user’s needs. Meaning: you provided information for the keyword they searched for. Which translates to: your page ranking highly in that keyword which garnered the hit for your website or web page.

In sum

Combine all of these with what you know about good on and off-page optimization, proper marketing techniques, and more than anything else, GOOD CONTENT and you can be sure to reach the top of the search page listing. And that’s the truth of search engine secrets, exposed.

 

CSS vs. Table layouts on SEO

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) or table layout, which is better to use in designing your web pages? This has been a long-standing question ever since the inception of CSS. CSS fanatics argue that CSS not only produce cleaner code, it also facilitates faster loading time of your web pages because of lesser code. Proponents of table layouts on the other hand argue that CSS will never achieve the cross-browser functionality that tables can. Your fancy CSS page may load faster on other browsers but may not display correctly or even load at all in older browsers. So who is right? Which layout is better to use when designing web pages? Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of both from a web designing point of view.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of using CSS in designing your page’s layout is that it produces fewer code compared to using table layouts. How does it do that? Well, for one, CSS separates presentational data (the code that dictates your page’s layout) from the page’s actual content (the text of the article/s the page contains). Amazingly, this one simple thing has a “cascading” effect on CSS-based web pages it’s not even funny this pun is intended. What are these effects?

• Faster loading time – with fewer codes, pages load faster. And because presentational data is separated from text/content, users don’t have to download presentational data with each page visit since these are cached in the user’s browsers, allowing for the downloading only of the text data for each succeeding visit.
• Lower hosting costs – smaller file size because of fewer code translates to lower hosting costs. Unless you have subscribed for unlimited bandwidth usage, your website will probably feel the effects of having bigger file sizes to download by users.
• Greater accessibility – screen readers choke at reading table-based layouts but reads CSS just fine. If you want greater accessibility for your website, using CSS is better.

A few things table-based layout still does better:

• While most modern browsers are CSS-compatible, the older ones are not. So using CSS will probably limit your viewers to users who have modern browsers. You can probably correct this by providing a fix for every browser not supported or for every browser that does not display CSS properly, but that’s a lot of work.
• Tables are also still best used if your content is mainly tabular data. If most of what you will be displaying is part of an excel file or is in fact, an excel file, using a table layout would make perfect sense.

From a SEO point of view

In a SEO’s standpoint, using either makes no difference, technically. What do we mean by that? Well, spiders are automated programs that crawl the web in an unbiased manner. As long as it can understand your code, it will index your page indifferent to the language used in its layout. Meaning: the coding itself will not increase nor decrease your SEO ranking. HOWEVER, because of the big advantage a faster loading time gives to CSS, your page will likely pull in a better ranking OVER TIME as better loading pages get more people to stay on your page and view your content, and increase the likelihood of your page getting links IF your page’s CONTENT is GREAT.

 

Why Internet Marketing Should Be a Vital Part of your Business

Internet marketing is a billion dollar industry. It is estimated that more than $16.9 billion dollars is spent yearly on online advertising alone. Internet auctions have become a multi-billion dollar business, with eBay leading the way as the premier auction website. Even politics has utilized internet marketing, with politicians making use of social networking sites to drive their campaign and reach a larger number of voters. People from all walks of life use the internet in one way or another; for socializing, for business, for pleasure. In 2010, the internet reached a staggering 1 billion users from all across the globe. A far cry from the 300,000 users it had eleven years ago. Of those who use the internet, 90% are potential buyers or customers, with the remaining ten percent still a potent sales or lead force if you market your website wisely.

What all these numbers mean for your business

What all these mean is that there’s a vast market out there lying untapped waiting for you to turn them into profitable numbers. The 90’s and the aughts were the decades of TV and celebrity advertising. This decade and beyond is all about reality TV and the internet. It is estimated that in 10 years, majority of people will be reading their news online and printed news will just be an oddity of the past. It’s not hard to imagine that in a few more years after, TV will also be going the way of print. In fact, more people today prefer to watch movies and shows online than on their TVs.

Benefits of internet marketing

Perhaps the biggest advantage of online marketing is that it is cheaper when compared to other forms of marketing or advertising. Internet marketing has also the added benefit of providing advertisers with a way to track consumer statistics inexpensively and in real-time. A business can thus build their marketing campaign to target a specific audience or make changes in their strategies as new data comes in. The effect of advertising can also be tracked fully, with results showing instantly the moment users or consumers click on a link or an ad. Studies also show that more and more people are going online to research on a product they are interested in before going out and buying it. More consumers are also shopping online as security and privacy issues are addressed by vendors and banks.

Internet marketing provides instant conversion

Unlike traditional marketing such as print, radio, or TV, internet marketing can convert an audience instantly without the obstacle of having to go out of their homes to purchase your product or avail of your services. This increases impulse buying and provides ample avenue for increased sales.

Mobile marketing, social media, and the future

These two are the frontiers of online marketing. With the rapid growth of mobile users and with social media being the preferred touching base of the youth, focusing your campaign on mobile and social media advertising is a wise thing to do. As technology improves and the speed by which information is exchanged online increases, we can see more people shift towards mobile computing and even as you read this now, the demise of desktops may just be decade or two away into the future.

Website Traffic Builders

What are website traffic builders?

Website traffic builders are basically any tool, method, scheme, or technique that brings traffic to your website, hence the name traffic builder. There are free traffic builders and there are paid traffic builders. There are traffic builders which you can use online and there are ones which you can use offline. In the context of simplifying things, traffic building is simply just another method of marketing, only this time you are marketing your website to others.

What are examples of traffic builders?

Online

Submission software – helps you to submit your site, articles, blog posts, press releases to online directories, article sites or online magazines, PR websites, and RSS feeds.

Traffic exchange sites – as the name implies, this website allows others to exchange traffic with each other. A bit similar to link exchange sites, traffic exchange sites provide traffic by a trading scheme which requires webmasters to visit the websites of others in the scheme by a certain ratio in order for their websites to be visited in return by others in the scheme; more easily described simply as “you visit my site and I visit yours.” There are free and there are paid traffic exchange sites.

Traffic builder companies – these are companies that offer the whole array of traffic building techniques to clients. These can range from simple website and article submission to the more complex tasks of link building, search engine optimization, article marketing and managing press releases.

Be generally active in the online world – interact with others, join forums, comment on blogs, reply to your readers, all the while always using your website homepage as your link, signature, or ID in your online activities.

Offline

These methods or tools hew more closely to traditional marketing

Free samples – give out free samples of your product with your site’s URL printed or embedded in them. Not only will consumers be able to try out your product, but if they like it enough to want to order more, they can easily find your site through the address you provided.

Join trade fairs and expos – by joining trade fairs and expos you allow your company and your brand to be known by industry insiders and other important people within your field. This goes without saying that you need to prepare the marketing materials needed to expose your website to others. You can print up flyers, brochures, even calling cards and have those contain your website URL or domain name.

Run traditional ads on traditional media – it’s kind of strange but somehow makes sense. If you’re having trouble breaking into the online scene, why not advertise your website where the noise from other competing websites vying for attention from consumers isn’t as loud?

Run online contests – run contests wherein customers actually have to visit your site in order to join. Your website gets known, and if others promote the contest, you get free inbound links!

Use your website address in all your correspondence – your website homepage is your online address. Add it in your contact information and in your company letterhead. You wouldn’t believe how such a simple thing can lead so many visitors to your site.

Website Content Planning Techniques

Part of designing websites is about planning the site’s content. You can’t go forward creating your website if you have no idea what its content will be. You don’t necessarily have to know or write beforehand each content or each article you will put in the site, but you will need to have at least a working knowledge of what topics and subtopics you’d want to cover. This is where website content planning comes in. After the preliminary tasks of coming up with an idea for a website, thinking of a domain name for it and then registering that name, and then deciding what functions or services you would like to offer in your website, you need to draw up a rough outline of the topics you’d like to put up in your website.

Content planning and drawing up your website’s sitemap comes hand in hand. You can’t draw up a sitemap without at least knowing what you’d like to put in your website. This goes without saying that content planning should also be done in conjunction with designing your website’s structure. You’d need at least a rough outline of the topics which will be written for the site in order to decide the website’s layout, structure, and page interactions.

Information Architecture

Information architecture is just the fancy way of saying topic outline. Yep. That’s basically it. Information architecture is just the categorization of data or information into a structure which is coherent and which anyone will be able to understand instinctively. Most start out with the website’s homepage and main category and branch out from there. Bullet points or some other system for subdividing topics is used. What is important is that you see the hierarchical structure of your website.

Storyboarding

Storyboarding can be a helpful tool in content planning. You can use storyboarding as part of a larger process of drawing your sitemap. Storyboarding can save you a lot of time by helping you avoid time-consuming mistakes in the coding and designing process of the website. It can be as simple as drawing up how you imagine the website would look like. Start with the homepage and think like a visitor would when looking at your drawing. Do you like what you see? Is the layout clean and uncluttered? Ask others and see what they think of your initial layout.

Using wireframes

Wireframes can also be used if you prefer it over storyboarding. Wireframing can be as simple as making structural drawings of the site to as complex as using software to create a simulation of the site’s navigation complete with functional links and page interactions.

Content planning is continuous

Content planning continuous even after the site goes live. At this stage of content planning, your main thrust is in improving your site’s content and optimizing it for search engines. You do this by researching for topics which are high in demand in the category or field your website is dealing with. If you are in the business of selling cars and your website is all about car sales, then you might start by finding out what readers are asking about the topic. Look at your comment pages and see what readers are frequently asking about. You can also go to related forums or blogs to see what others are talking about. Be in constant watch for hot news or topics regarding your field. Make use of meme trackers and other news aggregators to find out what’s hot in your area of expertise.

Exciting New Trends in SEO

Search engine optimization is always a changing field. Competition drives evolution, and with the way online marketing has surged ahead in the many pressing concerns of businesses and companies, Search Engine Optimization will only see more growth as the years go by. Saying “the best is yet to come” may be an understatement, but here goes anyway: the best is yet to come!

For a sneak peak of the best and brightest SEO has to offer, here are some exciting new trends (and some already obvious trends starting) you should watch out for in the world of SEO.

The Future of SEO is Social Media

It’s no accident that this year’s Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is Mark Zuckerberg. And no, The Social Network had absolutely nothing to do with Time picking him to be 2010’s Person of the Year. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are the face of the new generation of consumers. The battle for sales leads and conversions will be fought here (and in some other places listed below). Positioning your business to have a strong presence in popular social media sites can only be good in the long run.

Mobile Search

In 2009, mobile users reached 4.6 billion. This year, it easily broke the 5 billion mark and still shows no signs of stopping. The growth of cell phone users worldwide is easily the biggest phenomenon in telecommunication – and marketing. With such a huge market, mobile search is just too big to ignore. Planting your feet (and your firms’ roots) firmly in this fertile ground should be one of your company’s goals – yesterday. If you haven’t done it already, then for the love of all that’s good and profitable, please do optimize your site for mobile devices! Have mercy on those poor mobile users who are missing out on your fantastic website because they couldn’t browse it on their phones. Please.

Going Viral

What do Justin Bieber and SEO have in common? Well, aside from millions of hits, both SEO and Justin Bieber now share the spotlight in YouTube and other popular video sharing sites. Yes! If you haven’t noticed it yet, YouTube just overtook Yahoo! to become the 2^nd largest search engine in the U.S. behind Google. If that isn’t an indication yet of how important it is to have a video of your company uploaded tagged with your target keywords, then we don’t know what is.

Personalized and Local Search

This is just a double whammy of exciting SEO trends currently developing. On the one hand, personalized search favors established websites and makes it harder for new players to break in. On the other hand, local search do help smaller market players beat out bigger competition which may not necessarily have a strong presence in your area. By having a lower number of competitors, you stand a better chance of coming out on top with an aggressive push to be more visible locally. Just make sure your website is hosted in the same country your business is located in to capitalize on the benefits of local search.

Best Practices and Innovation

Meeting the challenges of the years ahead and successfully overcoming them is a combination of continuing the best SEO practices and improving on some of the old. As always, building your brand and managing your reputation continues to be an integral part of SEO. So is maintaining on and off-page optimization. SEO has always been an art between technical finesse and public relations management. Achieving a balance between the two is key in any business’ online success now and in the future.

Top 3 Most Common SEO Mistakes

If there’s one thing you need to know about SEO, it’s this: there are no shortcuts. If Search Engine Optimization is a race, then SEO is a marathon, not a sprint race. Everything about SEO speaks of doing things in the long run. No top-ranked page ever shot to the first page of SERP overnight. And even websites that achieve first page SERP listing need to continuously improve and adapt to the ever growing number of competition. In fact, if you think SEO is just a one-time optimization deal, then you’ve just committed common SEO…

Mistake #1

Optimizing your website once and then leaving it thinking SEO will do the job on its own – even top ranked sites need to continuously add new content and keep abreast of new changes to stay on top of the SERP battle. Staying still means stagnating, and stagnating is never good in an ever changing environment where players are always fighting for the top spot. Aside from providing regular and timely content, you need to continuously check your SEO stats in order to make correct changes and updates to your webpage.

Mistake #2

Perhaps one of the more egregious mistakes SEO newbies make is keyword stuffing. This is the practice of unnecessarily loading keywords in content or in Meta tags. Not only will keyword stuffing not help you in increasing your site’s ranking, it will often get your site blacklisted and consequently banned by search engines. Use your keywords or key phrases sparingly, using it only in the most appropriate places. Use it once in your Meta tags and images tags, and then use it naturally in your content. And don’t try to commit an even worse mistake…

Mistake # 3

Using senseless, grammatically incorrect phrases in your content in the misplaced belief that keywords need to be grouped together in a certain order for it to be crawled by spiders – this practice just screams: WE DON’T VALUE OUR READERS. WE THINK WE’RE SMARTER THAN GOOGLE. Guess what’ll happen next? Your visitors will be turned off by your content and will never come back again, and Google? Well, Google does not necessarily penalize this kind of practice, but they do reward websites that offer relevant information in sync with their tags and keywords by ranking those sites highly. So next time you’re told putting “Affordable Web Design services San Jose California CA” as is in a copy is OK, stop and just fire the guy. Tip: it’s ok to use stop words to separate grammatically incorrect key phrases to make it grammatically correct. In our example above, instead of writing, <company name> offers the most affordable web design services San Jose California CA, write it this way instead: <company name> offers the most affordable web design services in San Jose California, CA. Notice how just the inclusion of the single stop word “in” made our copy infinitely better and grammatically correct too?

Last word

Perhaps the biggest mistake an enterprising webmaster/web owner can make is in neglecting to read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Not only is it’s free, it’s also full of information and quite frankly, the most authoritative SEO guide you’ll ever get.

Enable cURL

I wasn’t aware about cURL until I stumbled with a problem regarding this thing. I was using a certain library code for our web project when an error regarding cURL popped into my screen. So what is cURL anyway?! cURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax. The main purpose and use for cURL is to automate unattended file transfers or sequences of operations. For example, it is a good tool for simulating a user’s actions at a web browser. It is also used for http authentication and SSL communication.

I am not going to help you delve on how to use the cURL since I myself have to do my own homework on this. But if in case you are also modifying someone else’s library and encountered same error while testing your project in XAMPP or debugging it at NuSPHERE debugger here’s how to do it.

Using CURL in XAMPP
It’s quite simple – uncomment extension=php_curl.dll in your php.ini file, then restart Apache. You might wonder which php.ini file is going to modify. It might be confusing because there are multiple of them and you might do all the trouble in modifying all of them. Well, for those looking for a straightforward solution, ignore everything but the /apache/bin/php.ini file, regardless of which PHP version you’re currently using.

And you are off to go!

If you are debugging the web project using NuSPHERE here’s how to enable the cURL:

1. On the menu click on Tools -> Settings.
2. Click on Tools on the popup window and you will see the path to php.ini at the right side. Click on Edit button. Then uncomment extension=php_curl.dll to enable the cURL.

The steps written above are very straightforward so I am confident you will get it right. With just a few steps you can continue again your web development.