How Usability, Experience and Content Affect Search Engine Rankings – The Beginners Guide to SEO The search engines constantly strive to improve their performance by providing the best possible results. While "best" is subjective, the engines have a very good idea of the kinds of pages and sites that satisfy their searchers. Generally, these sites have several traits in common: Easy to use, navigate, and understand Provide direct, actionable information relevant to the query Professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content Despite amazing technological advances, search engines can't yet understand text, view images, or watch video the same way a human can. On Search Engine Rankings There are a limited number of variables that search engines can take into account directly, including keywords, links, and site structure. Signals of Quality Content 1. When a search engine delivers a page of results to you, they can measure their success by observing how you engage with those results. 2. 3. For Search Engine Success
SEO Spyglass: Website Back Link Checker Tool & Link Popularity Checker How To Do Keyword Research - The Beginners Guide to SEO It all begins with words typed into a search box. Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. By researching your market's keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole. It's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated; with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are actively seeking. How to Judge the Value of a Keyword How much is a keyword worth to your website? Even the best estimates of value fall flat against the hands-on process of optimizing and calculating ROI. Understanding the Long Tail of Keyword Demand Keyword Research Resources
Majestic®: Marketing Search Engine and SEO Backlink Checker The Basics of SEO Friendly Design and Development - The Beginners Guide to SEO Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content. A webpage doesn't always look the same to you and me as it looks to a search engine. In this section, we'll focus on specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they are structured for both search engines and human visitors alike. This is an excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers, information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved in a site's construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site. In order to be listed in the search engines, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Seeing Like a Search Engine Many websites have significant problems with indexable content, so double-checking is worthwhile. Whoa! Using the Google cache feature, we're able to see that to a search engine, JugglingPandas.com's homepage doesn't contain all the rich information that we see. That’s a lot of monkeys, and just headline text? Keyword Abuse
Link Building 101: How to Conduct a Backlink Analysis Every day, individuals who are new to SEO need to learn the basics of link building and important concepts and strategies within a campaign. This link building 101 post will continue the education of new link builders, this time on the topic of how to perform a backlink analysis Being able to perform a thorough backlink analysis is a fundamental element to any link building campaign. What's more, running backlink analyses can help develop your fundamental knowledge of links, link building strategies, and link quality. What are the elements of a thorough backlinks analysis: Total number of linksNumber of unique domainsLinking domains vs total linksAnchor text usage and variance – branded, keyword rich, etc.Fresh/incoming linksPage performanceLink quality* *Learned only by experience, running multiple backlink analyses, and manually checking links. The Importance of Link Portfolios A link portfolio (or profile) is a fancy way of saying all the sites currently linking to your site. 1. 2. 3. 4.
SEO Tools and Search Engine Services - The Beginners Guide to SEO SEOs tend to use a lot of tools. Some of the most useful are provided by the search engines themselves. Search engines want webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways, so they provide a variety of tools, analytics and guidance. These free resources provide data points and opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not provided anywhere else. Below we explain the common elements that each of the major search engines support and identify why they are useful. 1. Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. You can read the full details of the protocols at Sitemaps.org. Extensible Markup Language (Recommended Format) This is the most widely accepted format for sitemaps. Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary Easy to maintain. Txt Text File Extremely easy. 2 Robots.txt The following commands are available: Disallow Prevents compliant robots from accessing specific pages or folders. 3. 4.
32 White Hat Ways to Build Inbound Links This is a guest post by Corey Northcutt, who manages a Chicago-based SEO and content marketing agency called Northcutt. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter at @northcuttSEO, and read his SEO blog. There’s no question that building great inbound links to your site is hard work. But link building doesn’t need to be as tough as most people make it. Get Your Blog On 1) Maintain a steady blog. 2) Set up an RSS feed for your blog. 3) Link to other blogs on your blog. 4) Write guest blog posts. 5) Create resource lists. 6) Do some newsjacking. Create Content Beyond Your Blog 7) Create case studies about your most impressive clients. 8) Administer a survey. 9) Write a book review. 10) Conduct a free webinar, and post an archived copy online. 11) Create free tools. 12) Create templates. Whip Out Those Design Skills 13) Create an infographic. 14) Create other forms of visual content. 15) Create a presentation. 16) Create a meme. 17) Speaking of memes, do something funny! Use Your PR Skills
Myths & Misconceptions about SEO and Search Engines - The Beginners Guide to SEO Over the past several years, a number of misconceptions have emerged about how the search engines operate. For the beginner SEO, this causes confusion about what's required to perform effectively. In this section, we'll explain the real story behind the myths. In classical SEO times (the late 1990's), search engines had "submission" forms that were part of the optimization process. Unfortunately, this process didn't scale very well, the submissions were often spam, and the practice eventually gave way to purely crawl-based engines. You can still sometimes find submission pages (here's one for Bing), but these are remnants of time long past, and are essentially useless to the practice of modern SEO. Once upon a time, much like search engine submission, meta tags (in particular, the meta keywords tag) were an important part of the SEO process. Ever see a page that just looks spammy? "Bob's cheap Seattle plumber is the best cheap Seattle plumber for all your plumbing needs. Errors Changes
Link Building Tactics (Complete List) - Point Blank SEO Remember how people say, "it's not about what you know, it's about who you know"? The same goes for the Web. Those relationships will turn into links, both in the short-term & the long-term. Just like with getting people to see you content, I realized a lot of the tactical ways to build relationships aren’t direct ways to get links, I decided to delete that section in this guide, and list all of them here instead. Random acts of kindness - Whenever you can, be nice to people. Give a crap - Actually care about people. Participate - If someone is conducting a survey or testing something, get involved and participate. Local meetups - Whether you find one or start one, meetups are a fantastic way to get to know people close by. User group meetings - A great way to get to know people who think like you is by finding those who use the same products or services like you. Conferences - Seriously, go to them. Call them - Yep, I said it.