Google says on the record, “Don’t write for Search Engines,
Write for your readers/audience/users.” While this may sound ridiculous, there
are lots of reasons to follow the advice. More often, beginner falls in the
trap & often gets confused where to start from. Don’t sound to be harsh,
but do not always listen to almighty Google.
They (bloggers & web entrepreneurs) are mere little
creatures & they must write for our readers/users while keeping search
engine behavior at the corner of our brain! Producing great content that reader’s
love is something not everyone’s cup of team. So how would you start your
venture in 2013? What are the best SEO practices that you ought to follow?
Without further ado, let me present you top twenty SEO Tips for 2013.
Excellent SEO Tips to
Follow in 2013
I have used an adjective here - Special. These tips are
special not because they are something that you have never heard of, but they
are special as you have not understood these basic ones effectively!
Keyword
Analysis inclusive of Competition Analysis
1. Determine Strategy for Keywords
This must be your first and
foremost step. You ought to be clear together with your goals that what
keywords you require to play around with. This relies on what you require to
gain by your online presence and venture. The query in the earlier sentence can
be answered with information regarding your target audience.
It may look like a flow chart or
catch 22 for you, don’t worry, you are right and it is so. They have solutions
for it. You can use sure keyword tools like www.keywordspy.com, www.spyfu.com,
www.ispionage.com and www.compete.com. In order to get complete market scenario
you must look at your competitor’s net site. You can enter that website’s URL
to any of the mentioned tools and get an estimation of competition.
2. List The Potential Keywords
You have now, different results from different tools as all of them use different methodology. You can collaborate all the results depending on your common analytical sense & list out 50-100 potential keywords. Generate an MS Excel sheet for these Keywords.
3. Check
Competition of Keywords
Keyword competition is something most newbie’s/expert ignore. While sorting
out bunch of keywords from Google ad word keywords tool is the first step to
follow, people often forget that the checking Keyword competition is equally
important. There are plenty of tools available out there, but we recommend trying
out tools like Traffictravis first.
Later, you can go for the premium tools like SEOMoz keyword difficulty
and SERPIQ keyword competition analysis tool. Both the tools deliver the great
result and cut down considerable work required in doing competition analysis as
well as keyword competition analysis.
On Page
SEO Tips
4. HTML
Use a content management service such as WordPress, Blogger or Drupal and
optimize your HTML tags with the keywords. Make sure you also maintain text to
HTML ratio. Always try to keep the ratio high so that Google can understand
your content better.
5. Title
Keep the character count under 70 and preferably under 66. Use various
plugins available for various content management platforms for SEO. The
WordPress beginners should start with Word Press SEO plugin by Yoast to make on
page SEO as much better as they can. There are also many third-party paid
options available in the market, but we do not recommend using them.
6. Meta
Tags & Description
Your keyword must be there in your Meta tag and description. Your Meta
description must be in the vicinity of 157 characters. This is most important
as Search Engines read Meta description for understanding the post content.
7. URL
and/or Permalinks
Your page URL must contain your key word or keyword phrase. If it is a
phrase, words must be separated by hyphens. Use some plug-in to remove stop
words from the URL/permalinks. It’s always good to minimize the use of STOP
word in the permalink
8. First
Paragraph
While this is not necessary a big factor in ranking, try to include
important keyword in first paragraph, so Google can clearly understand what the
topic is about. While there is no hard and fast rule, make sure you include
primary keyword within first few words of the article.
9.
Content Length
As per Guidelines provide by Google, the length of your content must be more
than 300 words. We advise you to write content with word count above 500 words.
(It will help to protect you from “Animal Hit”). However, we recommend to go
over 600-700 mark whenever possible. Instead of writing a simple post without
proper information, you should focus your energy to provide quality content
with necessary bullet point and images to back-up what you say.
10.
Content Quality
Your content must be unique. Thinly copied contents are also getting
Panda Hit nowadays so stay away from copy and plagiarism. Make sure you follow
proper internal linking strategy without over optimizing anchor text.
11.
Keyword Density
Keyword density must be between 2-4%. It means your keyword must not be
repeated more than twice or thrice in each 100 words block so if your are
writing a 500 words post your keyword count must not exceed 10-15 repetitions.
If it does, then Google will count it as over optimization.
12. Image
Optimization
Optimize Image ALT tag with your keyword. It is always a good idea to
save the image name with the keyword and upload them on the server with the
same name. Also attach necessary ALT tag to the image, so Google can understand
what the image depicts. Remember, Google is blind, and you need to supply
information to Google to understand the image. Moreover, try to provide a wrap
up text to explain what the image is all about. This will increase the relevancy
as well.
Sitemap
13.
Sitemap Submission
Submit your site to the major search engines. Create an XML site map and
make sure the search engines can find your site map. Use Google’s webmaster’s
tools to verify your sitemap is being read correctly: http://www.google.com/webmasters/
14. HTML
Sitemap
Creating an HTML sitemap is an essential part of your SEO endeavors. This
confirms you that search engine crawlers are crawling the site properly.
Back-End
15. Avoid
DHTML and Excessive HTML
Search Engines can’t read DHTML menus quite easily, so avoid them in your
menu. Also, try to maintain HTML to text ratio. Having too many HTML makes the
ratio high which is often undesired. Make sure you provided meaningful insight
in each and every paragraph and/or article by providing more text.
16. Avoid
Major Content in PDF or Flash
Publish your content in HTML format instead of Adobe PDF and Flash.
Valuable content that is locked in these formats cannot be easily crawled and
indexed.
17.
Robots.txt
Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly to include
and exclude the appropriate directories and files on your website. This file
instructs search engines that which portion of your site is not accessible to
search engines. Often people misunderstand these concepts which results in
duplicate content or the description is unavailable due to robots.txt
configuration.
Off Page Optimization
18. Use
Social Media Effectively
Market your content on various social networks and media. Try various
titles and descriptions that can engage users with your online venture.
Initially, target twitter, Facebook, Google+, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn and
Reddit. Google is now giving more importance to social media signals to rank
website. Now is the time to utilize social media platform and turn the tale in
your favor.
19.
Generate Quality Backlinks
There are various techniques to generate backlinks. Guest post on other
high authority site from same niche, Commenting on the posts related to your
site content, Forum Posting and many more techniques are there which should be
used moderetly to gain more trust. Well, backlink is itself a big chapter and
can cover tons of pages, but we do not want to go that route for the moment.
Please note that Google introduced an update called Penguin to penalize
the overly optimized sites, which means that those sites which are having spam
backlinks and using black hat backlink techniques. I will explain you in
detail how it will identify the spammers, see if there is a site on Diabetes
(Health Niche) and the site site owner purchased a bulk of backlinks for the
anchor text “diabetes symptoms in children” to rank for that
keyword.
This can get a red flag and can get penalty because if that is a
genuine quality site/article then there should be lot of variations in the
anchor test linking to that particular page, because it is a common sense that
not everybody in the world will link to the exact anchor text right ? …
Yes, that is not at all possible 
because they may link to
that via various anchor texts like
because they may link to
that via various anchor texts like- diabetes signs and symptoms in children
- diabetes in children
- children and diabetes : signs and symptoms
- what are the symptoms in children with type 2 diabetes
- type 1 diabetes symptoms in children and adults
People (SEOs) even identified alternatives for this as well to spam
Google which I am not interested in discussing publicly and if you are
interested in knowing them then you can contact me
Analysis
20. Use
Google Analytics
Install Google Analytics on your website. If you’ve already done this,
use the data from: Traffic Sources > Keywords to find additional keywords
you may want to optimize.
21.
Keyword tracking
Tracking your major campaign and keywords in the Google will give you clear
information about your efforts. It’s therefore very necessary to keep track of your
entire keyword ranking. For this purpose, you can use free and paid tools
available online. Even, you can manually track the keyword in the Google. Hopefully,
the above SEO tips will help you to start your venture in 2013. Make sure you
follow each and every one of them closely.
Sivanagardens.com
Sivanagardens.com
