SEO Analysis

What is this and why we need it?

SEO is a process through which you can make your website famous around the globe with the support of a third party engine, which we called search engine, e.g. Google, Bing (MSN) etc. Today’s modern web-based world, lots of sites are being created and published in different search engines each and every day, millions of sites are based on certain business or products or organizations providing same business solutions. Suppose you have a web design company in Canada, offering all kind of cost-effective web designs. Your aim is to rank your company in the first page of all the major search engines (in SEO this is called SERP ranking). So, the process you have to undergo is nothing but the great ‘SEO’, which will provide you the most satisfactory results you demand and obviously it will broaden your ROI (return of investment) by generating huge web-presence and also by increasing huge traffic.

Process

• Website Analysis & Page Segregation: This step is important if you start SEO for aged domains or re-structuring a website for SEO. Here you have to observe many things which I will discuss later in my Knol below. For the very new domain, this step is secondary and not so highly effective. Page segregation is an important SEO part. Consider you have 15 pages at your site, where 10 pages are important for SEO and another 5 pages are “client login”, “live chat”, “live discussions”, “privacy policy” & “testimonials”, which are not so important in terms of SEO. So at first you have to rule over these pages, so your focus is now more on important pages. 
• Keyword Research & Analysis: This is very sensitive step for your total SEO campaign. Keywords are the unique constrains based on which your next SEO steps would be determined. 
• SEO Friendly URL Structure: SEO friendly URL structure is necessary for the search engine bots’ proper crawling and indexing ability. URL should not consist more than 3-4 words and it should be static rather than dynamic, no query strings and complex queries should be present there in the URL. Search engine bots always prefer static URL for simple structure. For the inner page URLs, you can use ‘dash’ or ‘hyphen’ according to your choice; though there are debates over their usage, different SEO expert like different type, but I think go what you prefer. URL should be like tree structure (a/b/c/d etc).
• Content Optimization: From years back, when SEO industries started to boom slowly, we all are hearing one slogan: “content is king”, yes this is very true in reality. Professional and simple content is very effective part of your SEO campaign and this is the part which you give potential visitors to your site all over the world. If your content is unique, service or product oriented and written based on call-to-action methodology there is very high probability of getting your content sell-able all over. When you write content keep your focus on ‘keyword frequency’, ‘keyword prominence’ and ‘keyword density/weight’. 
• Meta Tag Optimization:  Meta tags are very important attributes for all search engine to give point or valuation to a website. Title, Description & keyword tags are included here and I have put them in decresing order of importance. TITLE is the most important tag because if you get SERP rank, your Title will appear in the result page first. You have to take caution here and put it within 70 characters, put the main keyword and another second most important keyword at the beginning of the Title tag, as all the search engine bots give the first priority to this tag. It’s best practice to put the company name at the end og this tag particularly for the index page.
  Meta description tag is second most important and it’s mainly necessary to generate CTR (click through rate) from this tag and so put your keyword here at the perfect position. Write your Meta description in third person’s voice, don’t put allegorical words (like best, amazing, super etc.) here. Don’t write more than 2-3 sentences and use understood subject (Like, start the 2^nd sentence – Also provides…………. As for example) here.

Common processes you need to develop for the SEO analysis of the site:

• http://knol.google.com/k/30-seo-tips-for-30-days#
• http://thecopypasteblog.com/10-website-seo-analysis-tools

Do's

Deep SEO analysis includes the analysis of many factors. Some of them are within your website and some are off but all of them are of vital importance for the positions you have with search engines. Must have components of a good SEO analysis are as follows:

• Competition Analysis defines your competitors, their positions with the market, the strategies they use. Websites' owners are usually sure that they know their competitors though it's not always true as their sources are word-of-mouth, personal connections, customers feedback and not a professional research. That's why it may be possible (and it is likely) that a website owner has missed some of strong competitors which is inadmissible when finding out the right SEO strategy for your own website.
• Semantic Analysis is working up a list of keywords which are relevant for your website. A list of keywords should include about 100-400 keywords and keyword phrases and not a short list of 10-20 phrases as many webmasters think.
• Website Visibility Analysis tells about the positions you have with different search engines for different keywords. In other words it tells you for what keywords your website is ranked well and for what not so well.
• Website Structure Analysis. Website's structure should be clear for search engines to obtain best possible indexing. It is critical that a Spider (a robot search engines use to index websites) can reach every page of your website you want to be indexed.
• Link Popularity Analysis and Structure represents the quantity and quality of the links your website has within other websites. Search engines often use link popularity as part of their ranking criterion that's why you should constantly monitor and improve your link popularity.
• SEO Strengths and Weakness Analysis is a report on what is good and what is bad on your website from SEO point of view. Actually it tells you on what areas you should concentrate to obtain better positions with Search Engines. (+and what should be fixed or removed from a website in SEO purposes)

Also See

YouTube tutorial video:

YouTube Video

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Link Building Strategies

When you create a website, you've already been told that backlinks from external sources are paramount to high rankings in search engines. But unfortunately, most of the online marketers fail to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to pursuing links.

The following is a detailed breakdown of all link major link building tactics, accompanied by an analysis of return on time investment in addition to the possibility of incurring a penalty from a search engine.

1. Internal Links

Internal links occur within the site itself and offer webmasters two major advantages:

· The ability to help search engine spiders find new content on your site.

· The ability to pass PageRank and develop a set of authorities within the developing website.

Advantage: Internal links are the low hanging fruit of link building and this tactic is frequently overlooked by webmasters. The most effective internal links are blended seamlessly within article, are not navigational, and are not clustered at the end of the content.

Risk of getting penalized: There are actually zero chances of getting penalized from the search engines.

2. SEO Directories

The web directories are the telephone pages of the Internet. A web directory is a listing of websites organized in a hierarchy or interconnected list of categories. No relevance, no ranking, and no human input.

Advantage: With the exception of Yahoo and DMOZ, directories are an enormous waste of time and resources. They're essentially a paid link that passes rank. I've done SEO directory tests on several domains and the results were a bit startling. Of the three sites tested, none improved rankings and two dropped to the third page for top rankings.

Risk of getting penalized: Moderate/high.

3. Comment Links

The concept is simple, right? Find a bunch of article/blog posts that are thematically relevant and start posting links with your keywords in the anchor text.

Advantage: In terms of increasing rankings, this no longer works. The vast majority of blogs are some variation of Wordpress or Blogspot, which set comment links by default to "nofollow," meaning your website won't receive the link juice. Simply put, it's not worth the time.

Risk of getting penalized: Moderate. Depending on the depth of your link portfolio, too many of these links can crush your link variance ratio. Dropping a URL in a comment isn't a big deal, but mixing in some anchor text in the "Name:" section is a spammy signal.

4. Paid Links/Sponsored posts

Paid links are the most common form of traditional link building. This is the process of finding potential link partners and offering them cash in exchange for a dofollow link with the anchor text of the webmaster's choices.

Advantage: I'm not endorsing paid links, which are against Google's Webmaster Guidelines, but they can be one of the most effective methods of building links.

Risk of getting penalized: Depends. Using a text link broker is like stamping a "kick me" sign to Google. Whether or not they penalize your site, the link networks of these brokerage firms often get uncovered and their links are seriously de-weighted (or removed from the index entirely). If you get caught in one of these schemes, it might be time to dust off the old résumé.

5. .Gov/.Edu Extensions

Quite simply, these are the holy grail of links and have a massive impact in helping a page or website rank for targeted keywords.

Advantage: I wouldn't recommend a concerted effort in achieving these links. Political connections can go a long way, but a campaign dedicated to obtaining these links isn't the best use of time and resources.

Risk of getting penalized: None.

6. Social Media

These links are fairly easy to disseminate through channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; however, these links are all nofollowed.

Advantage: While these links might not pass PageRank, the ancillary benefits can be tremendous. One powerful tweet can generate dozens of high-quality backlinks across the blogosphere, which will pass PageRank. In all likelihood, Google will become more active in monitoring and using these social signals as supporting evidence for sites that have suddenly increased their link portfolios.

Risk of getting penalized: None. Just don't turn your Twitter account into a spam zombie.

7. Link Baiting

The process of generating incoming links through the creation of engaging content and tools.

Advantage: Link baiting is the most reliable long-term strategy for developing a high performance domain in search engines. Famous examples of link baiting include the subservient chicken, Radiohead remixes, and Office Max's "Elf Yourself." When creating link bait, follow one simple rule: make your content something an audience will want to share with others.

Risk of getting penalized: None. In fact, Matt Cutts of Google has encouraged link baiting.

8. Press Release Links

Using a press release firm such as PR Web or PR Newswire in the hopes of generating incoming links.

Advantage: This strategy is fine, so long as the press release is useful. When done well, releases can drive quality backlinks from reputable news sources. Tip: be sure to link deep within the site when relevant.

Risk of getting penalized: None.

9. Reciprocal Links

My inbox is constantly flooded with endless requests from webmasters requesting link exchange. To be clear: building an example.com/link.html pages will do nothing for your rankings. Google discounts these outbound links and seriously de-weights incoming links.

Advantage: Don't engage in this strategy and don't play the fool's game of quickly unlinking to make them appear as one-way links; it's another spammy signal that won't get your far. Instead, develop relationships with other savvy webmasters and trade links deep within pages when there's semantic relevance. News portals frequently sign these types of partnership deals.

Risk of getting penalized: Low.

Remember, link building is a constant growing process. One of the reasons to like link baiting is because it's fun and creative. Find something you enjoy creating and use it as a method to drive incoming links. That way, link building will be a part of your daily routine, not another unrealistic marketing resolution.

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Backlinks - A Brief Overview

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Backlink indicates a link from another site to your website. These are also knows as Inbound links (IBL's) and their number indicates the popularity of the website. Backlinks are considered as votes by search engines: more the number of votes (backlinks) your website has, and based on the importance of websites linking back to yours, your site is assigned a trust rank. The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or a webpage. The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better it is.

Importance of Backlinks:

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website's search engine ranking, popularity and importance. Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page X to page Y as a vote, by page X, for page Y. Knowledge of this form of search engine rankings has fueled a portion of the SEO industry commonly termed linkspam, where a company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to their site regardless of the context of the originating site. Search engines are looking for the websites which have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites.

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. This is also a reason why backlinks factor is highly significant into a search engine's algorithm.

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Learn the ABC of SEO - Part 1

SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) is a powerful web marketing technique by which a website can rank better than other websites on a same keyword. A normal user like me or you always prefer to click the results that appears to be in the first page or in simple words we can say that 95% of users click only top 5 results (websites).  To rank better on your keywords you have to use this technique known as SEO.

There are many factors which affect your ranking but firstly we should know the basic thing. The most basic thing that we should know is how search engines are going to index/rank us in their database.

How search engine index/ranks your website?

Daily thousands of website are launching so it is very difficult for a search engine to manually manage all the websites and index it in their database. To solve this problem they have developed their own software called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google).  Initially search engine crawls the web page (basically scans the webpage) and note down the important things or tags and then index it in database.

It is important to understand that search engines are not human and they can't see the beauty  of the webpage, so if you are using Flash, animation, videos or any other fancy items it won't help you in getting indexed or rank better in search results. We need to keep the basic things right and that is the only key to gain popularity for your website.

In next post I will let you know about various different techniques about getting indexed in google or any other search engine.

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