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Getting Your Site’s SEO Right



BWMagic’s Internet Marketing News


Getting Your Site’s SEO Right




Google Spot!





Getting Your Site’s SEO Right
Titus Hoskins Copyright 2010.


While probably every webmaster or online marketer knows in order
to get top rankings in the search engines you have to have quality
one-way backlinks from other high ranked keyword-related sites.
This will more than likely be the main determining ranking factor
for most search engines, especially the all important Google.

You simply need good quality one-way links and plenty of them to rank high.

However, there are many more SEO factors which come into play, especially
if you’re in a very competitive niche and targeting highly cherished lucrative
keyword phrases that bring in the big bucks. Then in these competitive
situations, you must get all your SEO ducks lined up proper if you want to
be a player.

Some of these SEO factors may be minor but in very tight keyword races, it
could possibly mean you get ranked above your competitor. Believe me, for
some very lucrative keywords, just moving up a few notches can make a
significant difference in your traffic and sales. The number one spot is
what you’re aiming for, but even landing or moving up to the top five
can make a big difference.

But you probably already know the significance of getting top rankings for
your site and marketing, it can simply make or break your online endeavors.
So here are some SEO on-page or on-site factors which you should have in
place if you truly want to compete in the ranking wars.


Search Engine Optimization


1. Place your main keyword phrase in your Domain Name and over time you will
see higher rankings for that phrase and keywords related to it. With Google
going to Instant Search, I believe you will see these keyworded domains playing
a much greater role in what is listed first. You still have to get those quality
back-links but having a good keyworded domain will be half your battle.

2. Place your keyword phrase in the URL for your webpage. Place it in the title,
description and in the HI tags on your page. Also place this keyword phrase and
variations of it throughout your page, including at the very bottom. As for
keyword density, try to keep it under 6%, this is the limit that Ezinearticles
puts on their contributed content, go above this percentage and they won’t take
it. I usually aim for around 2% to 4% but don’t get too hung up on this issue,
just write helpful easy to read content for your visitors.

3. Place related keyworded interior links on your page. That is, keep all your
content and links keyword-related to one another. This makes it easy for the
search engines to index your pages and content. I like building keyword-related
traffic hubs or sections on my sites, for example I could have a whole sub-directory
just on all the “affiliate marketing” info pages on my site. These would be all
linked together and back to the homepage.

4. Make sure you have an XML Sitemap which the search engines can use to quickly
index your new pages. I also like adding an HTML sitemap which goes into more
detail and lists all the pages and their content. This is not only for the search
engines but to help your visitors more easily navigate your site; never leave
a visitor stranded.

5. Make sure all your pages load quickly. Reduce down any large images which
you have and break content/articles up into different pages to reduce load times.

6. Make sure your site handles 404 mistakes and your visitors are directed to
your sitemap or another page on your site. If you don’t know how to correct
this problem just do a Google search for “how to set up a custom 404 file
not found page”.

7. Don’t have duplicate content on your site. Do a proper 301 redirect for
the www and non-www versions of your site, as this may fool some of the search engines into believing you have two versions of your site, one with www and one
without the www in the URL. For Apache servers, I simply place this bit of code
in the .htaccess file on my server.

Code example from non www to www:


RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

8. Link out to other high-quality keyword related sites. I don’t believe
webmasters use this very much, but linking out to high-quality sites have
helped my rankings. Search engines, especially Google, want to see you’re
connected to quality content and besides, pleasing your visitor is what
it’s really all about.

9. Keep all your interior site navigation as simple as possible. Make it
extremely easy for your visitors to find their way around your site. I usually
don’t have any pages more than three clicks away from my homepage. All main
categories or sub-categories of my site are not only listed on my home/index
page but also on every page of my site. Again, never leave your visitors or
the search engines stranded.

10. Don’t know if this is a ranking factor or not, but I like placing my YouTube
videos on my content pages, sure you will lose some visitors to YouTube but it
also connects your content with this very popular site which is owned by Google.
We all know Google says it doesn’t promote its own interests, but what publicly
traded company doesn’t? In that same light, I like using many Google products
such as Google Analytics, Google URL Shorter, Google Profiles… and the list
goes on. Completely inter-connecting all your pages and content with the countless
Google programs will insure your content won’t be missed.

There are probably many more on-page factors but these are the major ones which
I can think of at the moment. If you want to check the SEO quality of your site
or page, here is a handy site which will check some common SEO factors:

www.pearanalytics.com



and for checking out your keyword density try this one:



www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/




Helping You Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
Titus

http://www.bizwaremagic.com

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How Well Do You Know Your OWN Site?

BWMagic’s Internet Marketing News



How Well Do You Know Your OWN Site? Your Competitor’s?
These Handy SEO Tools Will Reveal All!

Needless to say, if you have a website, you will already know
it is becoming very competitive on the web. If you’re in a
lucrative niche market you will have probably already felt this
competition, not only from webmasters like yourself, but also
from major multi-billion dollar companies who have wised up
and SEOed up to take advantage of all this free organic traffic
coming from the search engines.

The competition is getting brutal.

For example, in some of my niche markets, I am competing to
get on the first page in Google for keywords that have over
220,000,000 competing pages. Hitting those first 10 spots is
where the money is located. You have to get onto that first
page in order to see your best results. And it is becoming
harder and harder to stay in those top 10 spots.

Of course, one marketing tactic is to simply NOT compete at
all, and go for the “long-tail keyword phrases” which have
less traffic but also less competition so you can get on the
first page of Google within a few days. This route will save
you a lot of frustration and sleepless nights.

However, if you’re like me and have held some lucrative keywords
on the first page of Google for over 4 or 5 years… seeing other
webmasters and especially big corporations come in and bump your
listing off the first page – totally ticks me off!

As the competition gets harder, you have to get smarter. Especially
if you have a small site with limited resources to spend on building
links and creating unique content. So you have to try and outwit your
competition.

Now if you know me, I am always pushing the “knowledge” button.
The more you know about your competition, the more able you are
to compete with them. And to a certain extent, the more you know
the more able you are to even beat your competition.

Over the years, I have used countless tools and software programs
to really get to know my competition. Thankfully, there are many
free programs you can use to discover most of what you should know
about your competition.

First, simply using the Google search engine will tell you who is
listed on the first page for your chosen keyword or keywords.
It will also tell you how many pages you’re competing against.
Now if you have a multi-worded phrase put quotation marks around
the “keyword phrase” and do an exact search in Google, which will
tell you the number of webpages which has this exact phrase
on them. This is probably your true competition.

Then you have to take a close look at your competition. Here is
one free tool that has been around since 2005 and you don’t even
have to sign-up to use it.


www.reactionengine.com

Just type in your site’s URL + a keyword and this tool will analyze
the SEO factors for you. They will even give you a “grade” for your
page!

But most importantly, they will give you some very valuable
information about your own site or your competitor’s site. You
can use this information to better design your site to hit all
the proper SEO signals which the search engines use to rank your
site.

In a recent WebProNews video interview, Matt Cutts said Google
has over 200 signals which it uses to rank pages. Now these
are the ranking factors that Google uses to rank your pages.

But really they are signals… give off the wrong signals and your
page will go down in the rankings. You really want all your
on-page SEO signals to be done right – simply because this is something
you have total control over.

For example, if you use the link above, it will tell you how
well you’re using your site against a certain keyword:


– is your main keyword in the title?

– is it in the meta tags?

– is it in the heading?

– is it in the body?

All these things do affect how well your site ranks in the
search engines. So it might be beneficial to take a look at
your site and see how will it does. And make any appropriate
changes.

Once you have taken a really close look at your site or page,
then you have to examine your main competition. Take a look at
how their site performs for your chosen keyword. What are
they doing differently from you? How are their pages optimized
for the search engines? See how they are ranked?

Now, look at how you can improve your site to better compete
with your competition. By first getting all your on-page SEO
factors/signals better optimized will help you compete better
with your competition.

Of course, there are many different sites like the one above
which you can use to find out more information about your
competition. I also like using:

www.compete.com
www.seotoolbook.com
www.iwebtool.com

Plus, as you probably know, I am a long-time user of the
Firefox Toolbar Add-on from

SEO Quake


This handy SEO toolbar gives me all the important SEO pointers
about a site while I am surfing. It does slow down your browser
a bit, but the information you get is as they say: priceless.

When I am checking out a site – either my competitor or when I
am looking for search partners, one thing I always check out on
this toolbar is the “SEMRush SE Traffic Price” this tells me the
worth of the search engine traffic this site is receiving each month.
If they had to pay for this traffic – that’s how much it would cost
them. Someone with $500,000 worth of traffic coming in each month,
probably knows what they’re doing when it comes to keyword positioning.

And another one is Alexa.com which I like to use to see the
traffic numbers, but also to check some of the links my competing
sites have. One marketing tactic, go out and try to get the same links
as your competition. If you want to truly compete with your competition
and beat them, you have to “out-link” them.

You also have to take a really close look at their whole site and
how it is constructed. What social network/bookmark sites are they
using? Are they using Twitter? Are they using Facebook? Are they
using Adsense? How many pages do they have indexed in the search
engines?

All of these things will add to your “knowledge” about your
competition. The more knowledge you have, the better you will
be able to compete…

Anyway, this is just some of the things you can do to check out
how well your site is optimized for SEO and also some ways
you can check out your competition. Go get ’em!


Helping You Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
Titus

https://www.bizwaremagic.com

Did you find the above information helpful? If so, why not
help spread the word – recommend this content by using
the social bookmark sites below. The SEO Gods will Thank You!