Google SEO Methodology - A Step by Step Guide

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on organic ("natural" or un-paid) search engine result pages (SERPs), by incorporating search engine friendly elements into a website. A successful search engine optimization campaign will have, as part of the improvements, carefully select, relevant, keywords which the on-page optimization will be designed to make prominent for search engine algorithms. Search engine optimization is broken down into two basic areas: on-page, and off-page optimization. On-page optimization refers to website elements which comprise a web page, such as HTML code, textual content, and images. Off-page optimization refers, predominantly, to backlinks (links pointing to the site which is being optimized, from other relevant websites).

Phase 1 – Optimize your Landing Page (On-Page SEO)

1. Use keyword phrase in the Title tag. Phrase should end within first 70 characters.
2. Use keyword phrase in Meta Description. Phrase should end within first 156 characters.
3. Use keyword phrase in <h1> tag if there is one.
4. The keyword phrase should be used in the page's text-based body content at least twice. On pages more than 500 words in length, make sure that keyword density is at least 1.5% (but no more than 6 or 7%). Keyword usage should be evenly distributed throughout the page.

Phase 2 – Internal Off-Page SEO

1. Identify additional pages on your site that can also be optimized for targeted keyword phrase.
2. Once the support page(s) has been identified, maximize the link relevance passed on to the landing page by: a) using the keyword phrase in page Title and Meta Description, b) using the keyword phrase in non-hyperlinked body content, and c) hyperlinking one instance of the keyword phrase to the intended landing page.
3. Maximize the number of optimal internal links to your landing page. Vary the anchor text going to your landing page by using slight variations of the keyword phrase (e.g. singular/plural, synonyms, long-tail variations, etc.)
4. This phase can be extended by creating more pages support the landing page. But unless you have significantly fewer pages than your competition, then you would probably be better served to move on to Phase 3.

Phase 3 – External Off-Page SEO (Link Building)

After you have optimized as many of your pages as possible and linked them to your landing page, you should then move on to external link building. There is no simple step-by-step process for this phase. You will have to determine how to make your content more linkable so that you can develop links naturally. You should also research your competition to find the most relevant links to your landing page. Keep the following guidelines in mind as you try to build external links for Google search engine optimization:

• Always seek quality instead of quantity. Focus on finding pages that are relevant for your targeted keyword.
• The optimal link from a 3rd party site is the same as an optimal link from one of your own pages. The targeted keyword phrase will ideally be in the Title and Meta Description, body content and the linking anchor text.
• Avoid site-wide (i.e. global, run-of-site) links in all circumstances. This is an especially important guideline if the site is not keyword-relevant. Your landing page will more than likely get filtered for the targeted keyword unless you have high quality links to legitimize the relevancy.
• Brainstorm link bait or link magnet ideas so that inbound links will hopefully develop naturally.
• Unfortunately, the most relevant links are only attainable by providing an incentive to the site owners. Advertising relationships, partnerships and bartering possibilities should be explored to obtain the most valuable links.
• Do not pay for a link from a non-relevant site unless it has significant traffic potential.

What are Meta Tags?

HTML meta tags are officially page data tags that lie between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document.

The text in these tags is not displayed, but parsable and tells the browsers (or other web services) specific information about the page. Simply, it “explains” the page so a browser can understand it.

Here's a code example of meta tags:

<head> <title>Not a Meta Tag, but required anyway </title> <meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here"> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"> </head>
For more on the history of meta tags, see our post “Death of a Meta Tag”.

The Title Tag

Although the title tag appears in the head block of the page, it isn't actually a meta tag. What's the difference? The title tag is a required page “element” according to the W3C. Meta tags are optional page descriptors.

To learn more about best practices for title tag element, our post “How to Write Title Tags For Search Engine Optimization” tells you everything you need to know.

The Description Meta Tag

This is what the description tag looks like:

<meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here">
Ideally, your description should be no longer than 155 characters (including spaces). However, check the search engine results page (SERP) of choice to confirm this. Some are longer and some are shorter. This is only a rule of thumb, not a definite “best practice” anymore.

The “description” meta tag helps websites in three important ways:

“Description” tells the search engine what your page or site is about: For the search engine to understand what your page is about, you need to write a good description. When Google's algorithm decides a description is badly written or inaccurate, it will replace that description with its own version of what is on the page. Wouldn't you prefer to describe your site to potential customers or visitors using your own words rather than leaving it in Google's artificial hands? Look at this example and judge for yourself:


“Description” helps with click through rates to your site: Writing a good description not only helps keep Google from rewriting it, but also helps you get good more people clicking through to your site. A well-written description not only tells users what is on your page, but also entices them to visit your site. A description is what shows up here in the search engine results. It is like good window dressing. Sites with poor descriptions will get less click throughs and the search engines will demote your site in favor of other sites.
“Description” helps with site rankings: The common belief (based on what Google said in 2009) is that nothing in the description will help you get rankings. However, I have seen evidence to the contrary. Is it heavily weighted? No, but if you want some value on a secondary keyword (say an –ing –ed or –s), use it here.
Two other quick notes on meta description tags:

Empty Descriptions: Can a description be empty? Yes. When it is empty Google and Bing will fill it in for you. In fact, sometimes (e.g., for blogs) you may prefer Google's or Bing's version. (Personally though, I always fill it in whenever possible, preferring my version to theirs, but if you have a small staff, this isn't always practical.)
Quotes: Don't use full quotation marks (“”) in your description. It will likely cut off your description. Use single quotes to avoid this issue.
The Keywords Meta Tag

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the “keywords” meta tag was a critical element for early search engines. Much like the dinosaurs, this tag is a fossil from ancient search engine times.

The only search engine that looks at the keywords anymore is Microsoft's Bing – and they use it to help detect spam. To avoid hurting your site, your best option is to never add this tag.

Or, if that's too radical for you to stomach, at least make sure you haven't stuffed 300 keywords in the hopes of higher search rankings. It won't work. Sorry.

If you already have keyword meta tags on your website, but they aren't spammy, there's no reason to spend the next week hurriedly taking them out. It's OK to leave them for now – just take them out as you're able, to reduce page weight and load times.

Other Meta Tags

There are many other meta tags, but none are really considered useful nowadays. Many of the tags that we used did things like:

Told the spider when to come back
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
Told the browser the distribution
< meta name="distribution" content="web">
Told the page to refresh
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">
Told the page to redirect/refresh
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="x_seconds; url=http://www.yourhost.com/pagetosendto.html">
We don't use these anymore, either because there are better ways (such as schema tagging or server side methods) or because the engines they used to work on are no longer in existence or Google has explicitly told us they are not great ideas (such as redirects at the page level).

NOTE: Schema tagging and rich data snippets are single-handedly the most important (and somewhat quietly announced) change to how your site interacts with the search engines and the search spiders. Learn it. Know it. Implement it.

Robots Meta Tag

The robots tag is still one of the most important tags. Not so much for the proper implementation, but the improper.

The robots meta tag lets you specify that a particular page should not be indexed by a search engine or if you do or do not want links on the page followed.

Believe it or not, it is still common for a site to be deindexed because someone accidentally added a noindex tag to the entire site. Understanding this tag is vitally important.

Here are the four implementations of the Robots Meta Tag and what they mean.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
This means: "Do not Index this page. Do not follow the links on the page." Your page will drop OUT of the search index AND your links to other pages will not be followed. This will break the link path on your site from this page to other pages.

This tag is most often used when a site is in development. A developer will noindex/nofollow the pages of the site to keep them from being picked up by the search engines, then forget to remove the tag. When launching your new website, do not trust it has been removed. DOUBLE CHECK!
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW">
This means: "Do Index this page. Do not follow the links on the page." Your page WILL be in the index AND your links to other pages will not be followed. This will break the link path on your site from this page to other pages.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
This means: "Do not Index this page. Do follow the links on the page." Your page will drop OUT of the index BUT your links to other pages will be followed. This will NOT break the link path on your site from this page to other pages.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">
This means: "Do Index this page. Do follow the links on the page." This means your page WILL be in the index AND your links to other pages will be followed. This will NOT break the link path on your site from this page to other pages.
NOTE: The robots tag may be ignored by less scrupulous spiders.

The Charset Tag

Finally, all sites must validate charset. In the U.S., that is the UTF-8 tag. Just make sure this is on your page if you're delivering HTML using English characters.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

How To Create Quality Backlinks ( Search Enging Optimization tips )

Back links are vital to the health and success of your blog and without them it will be very difficult for a blog to strive. Due to the importance that back links have, bloggers and webmasters have been using various ways and methods to build back links to their websites in other for them to get high Google PageRank and good rankings in search engine result pages (SERPS).

Many of the methods that are employed by bloggers and internet marketers in building back links are often unethical (black-hat SEO) and this is a major concern for search engines, especially Google.

1. Back links from Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the first and foremost method of building safe back links. With guest blogging, you will get a natural one way back link to your site and also some free traffic will surely come with it. Usually, when you are guest posting on a blog, you will be allowed to place a link or two pointing back to your blog with appropriate keywords as anchor text in your author bio that appears beneath your article.

The back links from your author bio are one of the easiest and safest links you can ever get.

Guest posting is not that difficult, though I will admit that it requires some work which can be termed as writing a quality article that you know another blogger will be glad to share with his audience.

After writing your post, the next thing is to find a suitable blog in your niche, a blog that you know will be willing to publish your post and send the blog owner a mail or check out the blog guest posting page (if they have one) for more information about guest blogging on that particular blog. Look for blogs that feature the author bio box, which can give you a chance to earn additional back links to your site.

2. Back Links from Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is my favorite technique for building safe back links to my blogs. I have always been recommending blog commenting to bloggers who are looking to build back links because it has worked for me and it is FREE!!!

When I started my blog in March 2011, my major link building technique was blog commenting and with it I was able to get Google Page Rank of 2 without using any other form of Link Building. Comments left on Comment Luv blogs like this one offer a big advantage because the Comment Luv link will end up sending targeted traffic to your blog as well.

I have discovered blog commenting to be an effective strategy to build back links though it will require time and your patience. Time in the sense that you will have to be visiting blogs in your niche on a daily basis to drop a comment or two and patience in the sense that you will need to read the article on those blogs before you drop your comments.

As you know reading these blog will also help your knowledge, so it’s more like killing two birds with one stone when it comes to blog commenting.

If you are using blog commenting for link building, you should avoid the usual SPAMMY LIKE comments such as: “GREAT POST“, “NICE ARTICLE“, and “NICE BLOG“. Most of the time, these type of comments end up in the trash folder and it will just be like a waste of time and energy on your part.

3. Back Links from Forums

Forum boards are also a great place to build safe back links and traffic to your blog. Virtually all forum boards have a forum signature box under the users profile section where you can enter a short bio and back links pointing to your blog.

You should take advantage of this forum board’s signature feature for link building because most forums have high Page Rank and high daily traffic. So you have the tendency to get a high link juice value and also some traffic along the way.

Apart from the forum signature box, you can also drop links to posts on your blog that can be of assistance or solve a fellow forum member’s problem but don’t turn this into a habit so that you won’t look like a spammer and eventually get banned from the forum.

There are lots of forum boards online; a simple way to find them is to use a search engine like Google. You can get them by using keywords in your niche in the search parameter. For example, I will use something like “Weight loss + Forum” as a search parameter on Google if am in the weight loss niche. So it’s just “your-niche+forum” and hit the search button.

So far, we have discussed three (3) safe ways you can use to build safe back links to your blog. If you are using any of these methods, you don’t need to be afraid of any Google or search engine algorithm updates because you are 100% safe.

Do you have any other White hat techniques for building back links that you find effective? Kindly share them with us in the comment section.

How To Submit your website into Search engine

Search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever for getting your website noticed. You can take the chance that a crawler will stumble on your site, but why not improve your odds by submitting your site directly to search engines? Manually submitting your site to the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing offers a few advantages: it ensures that the search engines will crawl your site, and can help your site get into an index faster. Think of it as moving your site to the front of the search line. Here’s how you do it.

There is step by step description how you can submit your website on major search engine.

  A.   Submit your website on google

Signup of google webmaster https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. 

And Verify your website

Once you’ve submitted your website, you’ll be shown instructions on how to verify that you are, in fact, the true owner of the site.  Google provides a number of different options for you to do this:

 

The program’s recommended verification process involves uploading a custom HTML file to your website’s root domain. Once you’ve added this file to your site (which can be done with any FTP program or your web hosting account’s built-in file management program), simply return to Webmaster Tools and click the “Verify” button.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to go to the trouble of uploading a verification file, Google gives you three different options, as shown below:

 

Optimization

The “Optimization” section of Google’s Webmaster Tools deals with more of the on-site activities that are needed to achieve positive SEO results. As a result, a few of the specific features you’ll want to pay attention to in this area include:

• Sitemaps: If you haven’t yet uploaded your website’s sitemap, take the time to do so using this feature.
• Remove URLs: Use this tool to generate a custom robots.txt file that specifies exactly how the search engine’s automated spiders should read and parse your website’s content.
• HTML Improvements: A quick glance at the information found here will let you know whether or not changes should be made to your website’s meta tags.
• Structured Data: If you make use of microdata on your website (and you really, really should), check this page to track the specific types detected on your website.

Though this section of the Webmaster Tools program doesn’t give you as much actionable information as the “Traffic” toolset, you’ll still want to check these features regularly to ensure that your on-site activities are being carried out correctly and detected by Google.

  
B.  Submit website on Yahoo/Bing

With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!.

Step 1 : Sign into bing webmaster tools http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/

In order to sign into bing web master tools use your MSN or HotMail Id

Step 2 : Once you logged in successfully click on the Add Site button

 

Now enter desired URL in the box and click on submit then you will be directed to another window which looks like this

You have two different modes to verify your ownership one is by adding meta tag to your index pageand other is by adding XML file to your web space where your web sites is hosted.

Choose the best way that is comfortable with you. If you are using wordpress blog then it is recommended to save XML file in server space as it won’t make any problem if u change the template of your web site.

Once you have done with this step click on the verify button. This will helps to verify your ownership, it takes at least 24hrs to update your blog in the web master tools so visit to the webmaster tools once again and make sure whether site is added or not. If there is any errors in adding your site follow the screen instructions and correct the errors.