SEO – Things to Avoid in Search Engine Optimization

SEO or search engine optimization is the action of optimizing a website to get its natural rankings in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.  It is one of the most important ways of promoting a website online. SEO is so easy and misunderstood at the same time. The basic SEO strategies don’t require much funding and can provide your business some major benefits.

Search engines have some rules and guidelines that must be followed by an individuals and SEO companies.  SEO scams are becoming more popular now-a-days despite the fact that there are many ethical SEO firms and SEO experts.

In order to get the good position in the search engines, you need to follow the guidelines of the search engines and avoid unethical SEO tactics.  Some of the major practices that you need to avoid in SEO include the following.

• Avoid bad neighborhood and don’t link to scam websites.
• Avoid using the automatic linking software as your website can be banned permanently.
• Don’t use the same titles, descriptions throughout your website.
• Avoid keywords stuffing.  Some people use same keywords many times to increase the keywords density.  It can penalize your website from Google permanently.
• Do not participate in the links exchanges and links farms programs.
• Don’t use the tiny or invisible text.  Some people do it in order to get high rank showing more text to the search engines.
• Don’t spread duplicate contents across several pages or several domains.
• Avoid building your website entirely in Flash.
• Don’t use irrelevant keywords in your web pages.
• Avoid doorway pages.
• Don’t check your ranking in Google and Yahoo every day.
• Don’t use black hat SEO techniques.
• Don’t hire incompetent SEO firms.
• Don’t believe everything in SEO that you come to know through internet. You need to do research online learn as much as possible about SEO.
• Don’t over optimize your website.
• Don’t forget to make your website search engine friendly.

Local SEO Marketing Tips

1. Figure Out Your Target Audience
Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? Are they big spenders or are they cheapskates?

In general pick terms that match up with your service, that you think will convert well (conversion is a another five minute discussion altogether btw) and that have good search volume. To get an idea of search volume use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool which can be found here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once you come up with your target keyword list…

2. Update Your Page Titles
The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of Cape Breton SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. No easy trick. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. And if your website developer tells you these are really hard or expensive to change, get a new website developer.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique
It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

The results of this search will show all of the pages in Google that have these words in the title. Once you identify these problem pages you can update the titles to make them unique.

And make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the
h1 tag, which is typically the headline of the page. If you don’t have a page that targets the keywords you are using, add a new page that does.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links
The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more “natural”. For example in some of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page
Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. It would probably be a good idea to list as many location names as possible on the home page too.

6. Claim Your Profile on Merchant Circle, Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.
There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site.

7. Make a Video
Create a Video testimonial for your website. And I am not talking about a multimillion dollar production. Ask your kid to point the camera at you and start talking. Explain your service and try to be charming. Mention your website a lot. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (e.g. “Best Pizza in Pleasanton”). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

8. Add a Blog To Your Site
A blog is just a simple way to add pages to your website. A good, or even bad, web developer should be able to set up a simple blog for you in a few minutes. If you don’t want it super customized it shouldn’t cost that much. Once it’s up start writing. I am not talking novels or even journalism. I am talking keywords. If you want to rank for “Pizza in Cape Breton” write a blog post called “Pizza in Cape Breton: What’s Cooking Tonight At Joe’s Pizza”. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blog search engine. Now every time you write something on the blog it will instantly be added to Google, and each of those posts has a chance of ranking for the term you are targeting.

9. Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Technical Issues
There are a number of technical issues that could be preventing your site from ranking. An easy way to identify them is to sign up your site to Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start. By copying a short line of code to your site you can get an idea of some of the common problems that Google is having with it. Google provides you with some detail about the problem. There is not much you yourself can likely do about these problems, but you can at least show them to your website developer or a SEO guy and ask him/her to figure it out.

10. Get Backlinks
Now none of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any authority backlinks to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend the remainder of your five minutes thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:
– Chambers of commerce/local business groups
– Local business directories/Local newspaper site
– Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)
– Partners/Vendors

Get a Professional Backlinks Company to run a backlinks campaign to rank your site even higher on Google and other search engines.

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. So get familiar with it today so you can master it tomorrow.

Half the battle of marketing is just getting your potential customers attention right?

If you have any more questions about SEO please drop me a line at order @ webdesigncapebreton.com

What Are The Top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors for 2012?

1. Physical Address in City of Search on Place Page
2. Proper Category Associations on Place Page
3. Proximity of Address to Centroid on Place Page
4. Domain Authority of Website
5. Quantity of Structured Citations (IYPs, Data Aggregators)
6. City, State in Places Landing Page Title
7. Quantity of Native Google Places Reviews
8. Quality/Authority of Structured Citations
9. Local Area Code on Place Page
10. HTML NAP Matching Place Page NAP