What Social Media Can Teach Us About Seo
HERE’S THE One Thing THAT FORCES GOOGLE TO Give you Top PRIORITY AND BYPASS YOUR COPETITORS:
link building campaigns
Search engine optimization--the canny use of keywords along with other techniques created to shoot a web site to the top of a search--is the make-or-break factor for many new businesses.
It's also the web's unfolding, and unregulated, frontier. You will find countless Search engine optimization strategists, consultants and self-professed specialists who will claim they are able to beam your website up into Google's leading 10 search results--for a price, of course. Consultants commonly charge upward of $200 an hour, and most will pressure you to sign a contract that keeps them on retainer for months--at prices as steep as $12,000 a month. Unscrupulous Seo firms not just make promises they cannot keep, the worst of them also use shady practices that may produce no traffic, deliver the wrong traffic or even get you banned from planet Google.
Why Should You Learn About Search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization isn't only for on-line marketers. As a web designer or frontend developer, most on-site Seo is your responsibility.
If your website is not search engine friendly, you might be losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even conscious of. Keep in mind, besides visitors typing in "www.yourwebsite.com" and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can discover your site.
You will find many advantages of getting a high ranking site. Let’s use ndesign-studio.com for example. I have, on typical, about 14,000 visitors a day. About 40 - 45% of that traffic comes from search engines (about 6000+ referrals a day). Envision, without search engine referrals, I could be losing thousands of visitors everyday. That indicates, I’m risking losing potential customers too.
Seo is also a value-added service. As a web designer/developer you can sell your Search engine optimization abilities as an extended service.
How Search Engines Work?
First, let's look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a "web spider" or "web crawler" that crawls the web. The primary purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the info collected into the search engine’s database known as the index.
When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.
What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question whenever you perform a search. That’s based on what’s known as the search engine algorithm that is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your page ranks for these elements (yes some elements are more essential than other people) than the greater your page will get displayed within the search engine result pages.
Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorithm can affect your search result position, and this is what Seo experts are hired for. An SEO’s job has two aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.
On-Site Seo: are the things that you can do on your website, like: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, website structure, etc.
Off-Site Seo: are the things that you have a lot much less control of, like: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your website.
This is really a guide for designers and developers. The main concern is the On-Site aspects. Secretly although, if you do your job right… and design a stunning site… and/or produce helpful content… you will get Off-Site backlinks and social bookmarks with out even lifting a finger.
here are a few items we adore to see websites performing. While none on their own will vault you to the leading of the rankings, they remain best practices you should look to engage in. These are not in any order of priority:
RSS feeds - get them up and running and keep them clean. By following your feeds, it's simpler for the engine to get your newest content. This means we see it quicker, so indexing, ranking and showing in the SERPs can occur quicker. Wish to really impress Bing? Get into your Bing Webmaster account and insert your RSS feed URL into the sitemap submission flow.
Mark it up - check out the suggestions presented at www.schema.org. This jointly supported protocol (Bing/Yahoo/Google) enables you to "mark up" your content, essentially embedding tags into your page code to assist us better understand your content. This can range from videos to images, recipes to geolocation info. Lots of tags are supported today, so hit the schema.org site to see what's applicable for you. Again, this helps us better comprehend your content, and the better we understand it, the much more most likely we are to be able to return you for matches to queries.
Wonderful UX - sites that have an outstanding user experience tend to rank much better. Why? Because people like them. Yes, it is that easy. Whilst you should work on a lot of signals to be effective in search, you also have to find a balance. Page load times are a perfect example. Some websites take this 1 signal to the extreme, paring down their site to an absolute minimum hoping PLT will vault them up within the rankings. The trouble with this approach is that by removing things from the page to speed page load times, you erode the user experience in most instances. Whilst machines calculate page load times in fractions of a second, humans are much more forgiving. Stay focused on pleasing your human visitors first and foremost. You shouldn't ignore PLT, but taking PLT from 1/2 second to 1/4 second will be largely lost on your visitors. The engines will appreciate it, but if you had to remove content or functionality to save the 1/4 second load time, now your UX for the humans has suffered. Balance, ...with humans initial.
Social love - manage social or social will manage you. That's a reality, Jack. Plan your approach to social carefully and execute consistently. Build your presence so that followers see you as an authority and a resource. Again this is really a balancing act, but one you can get attuned to rapidly enough. Just make sure you bring value to your followers consistently. People like links in their inbound tweets and wall posts - don't disappoint them. Fill your social program to the brim with value and folks will love you. Pssst...we see all this happening and it helps us determine the sentiment surrounding your pages, products and services. Great is good, bad is bad. Even if you’re not active socially, you still have to monitor social spaces to comprehend what other people are saying about you. Are happy shoppers spreading the great word about you? Are unhappy shoppers telling their stories to the world? These are issues you should know.
Before we wrap up, how about a few things you should steer clear of?
cloaking
link buying
like farms
link farms
three-way linking
duplicating content
auto-follows in social media
the thin content approach
Google Webmaster Tools allow you check the crawl statistics of your site. If you haven't been using this great tool yet, login to the Google Webmaster Tools, then add and verify your site.
After you have verified your site, you can find out:
When was the last time Googlebot crawled your site
HTTP errors
404 Not Discovered errors
External link counts
What key phrases people are using to link to your site
What are the top search queries to your site
And more.
The tips I share in this Seo guide are based on self-taught knowledge and years of web design experience.
Good Luck.
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