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Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a set of techniques to improve the ranking of the site in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL. Practicing SEO supports to make your site appear in the best locations on the search engine (i.e., Google/Bing; what viewers are using) for words or phrases (keywords) that people really are looking for.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving internal and external aspects of a website or blog, to increase its organic visibility in search engines. SEO includes editing the HTML code and content of the site to make it more search engine friendly and then promoting the site to increase its relevancy on the web.

Once search engines are alerted to the presence of their online websites, they will scan the code and content of your site to index the information. Search engines scan the content of the site to determine when and where your site will appear on a search engine result page.

The content page (text appearing on a web page) should be inviting, comprehensive and - within reasonable limits - containing as many keywords as possible. (Discover how to find long-tail keywords using google keyword planner)

Some search engines, including Google, pay close attention to the number of websites that link to your site in determining the importance and ranking of your site. These external links are called backlinks.

Why should I care about SEO?

You have heard the phrase, "strategic location!" And its importance when buying commercial properties. The same goes for placing your website on search engines result pages. According to research, the higher your site appears as a search result, the more traffic you'll get.

Quality traffic means an increase in tickets and more advertising. Search engine traffic can lead to success or failure of an organization.

The goal of an SEO is to place your website on the first result pages in search engines. Is not easy. It takes a lot of time and a constant adjustment to increase your rankings in search engines.

Principles of SEO

A search engine provides a list of pages, each sorted according to its relevance to the user search query. Search engines typically use a search agent (an automated program or task that scans the World Wide Web) to detect and index pages. One of the essential functions of web programmers is to ensure that search engine crawlers can find and index information on a page so that users can reach the page from a search query.

Unlike Search Engine Marketing (SEM), where the site owner pays to promote a site in a search engine, SEO improves the ranking of a site based on the rules that search engines use to rank the sites Pages (a process often referred to as "organic search"). Pages optimized for search engines follow coding procedures that provide information relevant to search engines quickly.

Organic and paid search engine

Most search engines show a combination of organic and paid search results when answering users' questions.

Organic are the primary results often labeled as "Web Results" or something similar. Paid lists appear separately on search result pages and are generally listed as "sponsored" results.

What is organic search engine optimization?

Organic results returned by a search engine given a keyword that is generated through a complex ranking calculation that determines the relative importance of the web pages listed in the search engine index about the word (s) along with a multitude of other factors. 
These organic results are the "real" medium of the calculations that make up the algorithm of a search engine classification. A high organic search engine ranking can only be achieved through effective search engine optimization (SEO). Sometimes, certain websites are ranked very high automatically for certain non-competitive keywords.

What is paid search advertising on the Internet?

The site owner pays to search engines to promote his content in some particular keywords. Search advertisement shows on very top of the viewars result page, and below the organic results. Paid search marketing offers pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-click (CPC) both options to promote marketers contents. The most popular search advertising available in the market is Google AdWords and Yahoo Bing Network. 
PPC ads allow advertisers (i.e., owners or website companies) the opportunity to get the best classifieds through a given keyword. The advertiser placing the highest bid ensures the highest ranking for that keyword until a better bid is made. The second highest bid will provide classification number 2; The third highest bid will occupy the 3rd place, etc.


If you're willing to pay it off and even commit to bidding wars with other advertisers - in this case, the PPC can be a very attractive option. Many large-scale e-commerce companies relied on a paid combination and targeted SEO.

SEO Factors 2016: Search engines reward pages with the right combination of ranking factors or “signals.” SEO is about ensuring your content generates the right type of signals. I recommend you to read this article about google SEO Factors 2016 what I wrote a few months back: 18 Google SEO Ranking Facts in 2016

The new year has started and as always presents you in the SEO industry, the question: "Which SEO ranking factors will be especially important this year and where does the journey". 
Therefore, I deal in this article with the most important SEO ranking factors 2016 and inform you about what special attention should be from the perspective of the scene to lay the groundwork for an optimal ranking this year. In this context, I have summarized the main findings of the SEO scene and the lessons to be drawn for you.

Overview of the article "SEO Ranking Factors 2016":

1. Google Ranking Factors in 2016 based on the current correlations in search results.
2. SEO Ranking Factors 2016 - Different weighting of the individual factors by keyword and page type? 
3. Are Meta Description and Comments 2016 again ranking factors?
4. Be more SEO Trends in 2016 that affect the ranking 
5. SEO Ranking Factors 2016 - Conclusion, Summary and learning
   

Google Ranking Factors in 2016 based on the current correlations in search results

Brian Dean (Backlinko) and Eric Van Buskirk have investigated the following question to answer a million search results:

"What correlations exist at sites entwine in the top 10 of the search results?". were tested not only OnPage SEO factors such as. Title, Meta Description and headlines but also the content, the backlink structure and the loading times of the top twining websites. Learn how to add meta description to your blog.


These factors were measured with different SEO tools and data sources on the basis of correlations in search results. Although these results can provide a meaningful orientation, extent what SEO factors in 2016 appear to be particularly important, I must at this point clearly emphasize that this does not imply directly that Google and calculates the rankings exactly according to this pattern. The operation of Google's algorithm can only be based on field trials, guess past experience and striking correlations. 
Below I summarize the results of the SEO study in 2016 by Brian Dean and Eric Van Buskirk:

• Backlinks are still the most important ranking factor. However, it is here that backlinks come from as many different domains. Many links of a single domain are worth less than links from different domains. (Read here: How to Get High PR Backlinks for Free)
• If pages which show a higher Domain Authority, all other sub-pages entwine better. This means that links to strengthen individual sub-pages other bases, because the Domain Authority is Total strengthened.
  
• Content, the deeper describes an issue that often entwines treated better as a content of one or more subjects superficially. (8 Ways to Content Marketing can work with SEO)
  
• Long texts entwine significantly better. The average at sites entwine on page 1, according to the study by Brian Dean and Eric Van Buskirk was 1,890 words. 
• HTTPS (encryption) actually has a measurable positive impact, but the effort in switching to encryption is not always justified. 
• Schema.org or schematic Award have no direct influence on the ranking. 
• Content with at least one image entwine better than content without image. 
• The correlation between ranking and keyword in the title tag is lower than expected. 
• Speed ​​is a significant ranking signal. Websites with shorter load times often entwine better. 
• Despite Penguin updates - exact matching anchor texts / link texts have a strong impact on the ranking. 
• A low bounce rate correlates with better rankings. 
• Short URLs entwine better than long URLs.
  

SEO Ranking Factors 2016 - Different weighting of the individual factors by keyword and page type?

Even Martin Missfeldt from tagseoblog has dealt with this topic. However, he uses a different approach. While the results of the above study based on the percentage correlation of the data of different SEO tools give, based his theory on its own experience. It assumes that arise for different types of keywords, sites and depending on topicality of different ranking calculations. In his opinion in 2016 continues to be the most important SEO ranking factors to optimize the title, the contents, the headings (h1-h3), the URL and Authority, Trust and unique media. 


On this subject, he has published an infographic that different weightings of these factors depending on the type of query, the page, the keywords and relevance of the topic (QDF = current trend topic). The larger the bar is, the more important factor. Ranks with many great bars are more difficult to optimize, because you must satisfy all Terms Security. In contrast, rows with many small beams easier to optimize. This is described in his article.

www.seohorizon.com has published an Infographic on Local SEO Factors for small business owner which actually basic need to make sure your website is well optimized. Here is the infographic
 


In the Infographic they described what to do to improve your local SERP (Search Engine Result Page) Rank. To be in the first place or first page you should follow those above tips mentioned. There are Top 10 Most Important Local Search Ranking Factors for small business owner. Please note those are not only for local SEO, you should use it for improve your website SERP in google, Bing and all other major Search Engines. 

Bing SEO Factors are very different from any other Search Engine. You should Learn about Bing Giant. Yahoo! Bing search engine optimization is needed for your blog or business website. Bing works in a total different algorithm than google. The algorithms are very different, just compare search results for the same term and you will quickly see what I mean. A lot of people do not pay attention to Bing SEO or ranking factors and purely focus on trying to rank in Google and nothing else. Optimization

Why Bing Matters

“Yahoo and Bing represent nearly a third (29 percent) of the U.S. search market.” In fact, the Yahoo Bing Network has approximately 149 million unique searchers each month and 5.2 billion searches a month.
Most interesting, however, is how Bing and Yahoo have fared with specific demographics. Based on an audience study, the Yahoo Bing Network tends to be favored by the following groups:

• College graduates and graduate school students
• Mature age group of those 35+
• Slightly more women than men
• Households with children
• Households with incomes more than $75,000

Even more startling is how the Yahoo Bing Network has cornered certain audiences.

Get Indexed in Bing Search Network

As Bing clearly states, “being indexed is the first step to developing traffic from Bing.” To do this, you just simply submit your site to Bing and play the waiting game – Bing apparently doesn’t update their index as much as Google, so be patient.
To take advantage of the Bing Webmaster Tools, don’t forget to also sign-up for a free account – or use your existing Windows Live ID. 

Bing Webmaster Guidelines

First of all you should have a read of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines and get yourself upto speed.
It is no way near as long/complicated as Google’s guidelines so it won’t take you long to read and absorb.

Bing Webmaster Tools

The Bing Webmaster Tools is superb – if you haven’t got your site setup in there yet do it now.
It provides an awesome suite of tools including a backlink explorer! You can also see exactly which keywords you rank for, how your site indexes, diagnose problems and much more.
As of right now you will also get $100 of free advertising credit to play with – sweet!

Bing SEO Analyzer

The Bing SEO Analyzer is also a great tool to discover if your pages are following Bing SEO best practices.
Just enter your URL and it will return a list of suggestions to improve your rankings across Bing & Yahoo.

What is Yahoo-Bing Search Engine Ranking Factors

• Social Signals Do Matter: There is a lot of debate on whether social signals impact Google search rankings. I can categorically tell you with 100% certainty that they do and I’ve been using them to rank consistently for the past 2 years. I revealed exactly how at the recent BHW/UnGagged conference.
  So rather than getting caught up in the change debate you should be making social signals a core part of your SEO strategy now. It affects you rankings in Google and it affects your rankings in Bing.
  However Bing actually return posts from Facebook & Twitter embedded directly into search results that stand out from normal web results.
  Bing has a much stronger reliance on social signals than Google – use that to your advantage and you will see benefits in both search engines.
  

• Backlinks are of less importance. It is important to note is that backlinks are less important in Bing then they are in Google.
  If you compare the search results between Bing & Google you will notice that the top ranking sites in Bing have noticeably less backlinks.
  However Bing does favour ‘editorial’ type links from within body content rather than coming from a sidebar, footer or list of links and site relevancy does matter.
  
• Inbound anchor text matters more. The quantity of quality inbound links might be of less importance for Bing but the anchor text certainly matters more. Actually, since anchor text is one of the measurements of the quality of inbound links, it isn't much different. Get quality anchor text and you will do well in both Bing and Google.
• Link spamming won't do much for you on Bing. Since the quantity of backinks (even if they are of supreme quality) seems to be of less importance to Bing, link spamming will be even less effective than with Google.
• Onpage factors matter more than with Google. This is one of the most controversial points. Many SEO experts disagree but many also think that onpage factors matter more with Bing than with Google. Still, it has nothing to do with the 90s, when onpage factors were definitive.
• Bing pays more attention to the authority of the site. If this is true, this is bad news for bloggers and small sites because it means that search results are distorted in favor of older sites and/or sites of authoritative organizations. Age of domain is also very important with Bing – even more than with Google.
• PR matters less. When you perform a search for a competitive keyword and you see a couple of PR2 or even PR1 sites among the top 10 results, this might make you wonder. On Google this is hardly possible but on Bing it looks quite normal.
• Fresh content matters less. Bing looks a bit conservative – or maybe it just can't index sites that quickly – but it seems that fresh content is not so vital as with Google. This is related to the age of domain specifics and as a result you will see ancient pages rank high (but these ancient pages are relevant to the search query).
• Bing is more Flash-friendly. Optimizing a Flash site for Google is a bit of a SEO nightmare. It is too early to say but it looks like Bing is more Flash-friendly, which is good news to all sites where Flash is (still) heavily employed. 

• Content & Keyword Density Is Important: Bing prefers sites that have lots of unique content. They place much higher value on longer more engaging content than shorter content. Just like they are behind Google in how they process language in anchor text, the same applies to your content as well.You need to feed Bing the specific keyword you want your page to rank for. It is much better to focus on 1 page per keyword with Bing, but again be careful you don’t trip Google Panda by offering duplicate content. Also Bing trys to eliminate duplicate content at the point of indexing. Redudant content is recognized and eliminated from search result pages but may still be available in the index.

Google may appear to have a stranglehold on the search engine market, but that doesn’t mean that online surfers are neglecting Bing. While the Yahoo Bing Network may only not have Google-like numbers, it’s still makes up a third of the search engine market that is preferred by certain demographics.

What sense does it make to have a beautiful theme and a killer portfolio that isn’t search engine optimized?  Google, Bing, and Yahoo could care less about your pretty photos and web design.  They care about things like alt tags, file names, keywords, and hundreds of other really, really boring tech things.  Understanding those “boring tech things” might bring you new success.  Misunderstanding them could help to put you out of business.

Also Read: Five Simple Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic

What is Search engine optimization (SEO)?

SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to your website from search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results in search engines. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and so on.

The following ten tips are those that we think are either often overlooked or common mistakes.  This is not a top ten list.

10 simple tips to get 10x time noticed by the Google, Bing, Yahoo:

• Content is the best optimization. Any type of optimization is effective only in combination with high quality and unique content. Ideally, the text contains keywords that highlights the overall theme of the post.  The content should be understandable and readable. Use your  keywords wisely. Text should be written primarily for visitors, not for search engines.
• Exchange backlinks with other relevant websites relating to your topics and with high authority websites (websites with high page ranking). Also link between pages within your website, but do this with caution and only if it’s relevant.  Don’t link every page to each other.
• Think of a good name for your image files. Google also draws images in the calculation of the ranking. Google displays both text and images on it’s search results page, drawing on relevant images contained in the post itself, which are linked to the corresponding page. Implement keywords of a specific subject in your file name, instead of DSC93948.jpg use Tennis-Andre-Agassi-New-York.jpg if you have a picture of Andre Agassi in New York for example. Don’t forget to use the alt tag and title tag for your images, which also provide better usability and optimization for your search ranking.
• Use short permalinks, including keywords. Use an understandable permalink.  Instead of http://yourwebsite.com/page-id?495/ use http://yourwebsite.com/andre-agassi-new-york/. Please note that only the first four words in a permalink are relevant.  Google doesn’t care about any succeeding words in your permalinks.
• Use search engine optimized themes. Some themes use a lot code to create the layout and design. Google will wade through the source code to find the relevant content. The more code you have, the less content and keyword density. Fast performing themes are good for your Google ranking, since the performance of a website is one of two hundred criteria that determine your ranking.
• Create a sitemap in XML format. With WordPress and plugins like Google XML Sitemaps it is a very easy task.  Google has a variety of other useful tools, too, such as Website Optimizer and Webmaster Central.
• Highlight informative content or keywords on your website. Use h1-h6 to highlight headings or subtitles of an article or important sentences. Use the strong tag, too. But please don’t overdo it!
• Add your posts to social networks. But please don’t only promote yourself.  Promote other posts and websites you like.  People will honor your kindness and link back to you.
• Don’t use black hat techniques or mirror html sites. If you try to trick Google, they will find out.  Promise.  Recently, some pretty high-profile portfolio sites were recently punished by Google for such practices.  Being sneaky will do more harm than good.
• Don’t use flash. Flash is virtually invisible to search engines.  Use WordPress.  Period.

One of the quickest and easiest way to optimize your page ranking is to download and install an SEO plugin, like wpSEO.

Meta description and tags (dynamically optimized by wpSEO), how active the website is and many more criteria.
Last but not least, don’t try too hard!  Concentrate on publishing unique, relevant and quality content. If you do that, everything else will be a cake walk.  Content is King!

We gathered some of the most creative SEOs out there and asked them to put together a list of essential hacks any business should implement in 2016 2017. They shared some of the strategies that worked for their campaigns and explained concisely how they can be carried out so that it can be a useful effort for others as well. Find Some Do-Follow Backlinks here.

You Must Know: How Do Search Engines Rank Web Pages?

1. Reverse engineer competitors content
2. Drive traffic through less competitive keywords
3. Long tail keywords can send massive amounts of traffic when this strategy is approached in the correct way
4. Piggyback on the popularity of the latest news and events in an industry or location
5. Use images and video more efficiently
6. Collaborating with clients more to leverage digital PR opportunities
7. Ego baiting is a very simple, fast and easy to execute SEO strategy
8. Detect and delete hidden spammy links on your website
9. Create content marketing pieces using data which is readily available 
10. Focus on long tail keywords that converted!

1) Reverse Engineer Competitors Content

The internet is the perfect place to learn from the mistakes and successes of others. Many people try to reinvent the wheel which is often a complete waste of time. Most online activities carried out by successful online marketers leave a trail. This means I can find a successful online campaign such as a content marketing campaign and quickly reverse engineer it.

Also Read:  How to Double Traffic for Your Small Business Site

Most successful content campaigns have a range of social signals that indicate that it’s success. A large number of positive comments and sharing on various social media platforms is a clear sign that a competitor’s content strategy is working.

2) Drive Traffic Through Less Competitive Keywords

The quality and relevance of content continue to be a huge factor in successful online marketing campaigns. You read 10x content by Rand Fishkin. This is where we are going.  Two effective ways to do this in 2016 include focusing on long tail keywords and trending news and events in an industry or locality.

3) Long Tail Keywords

It may not be possible to rank highly for shorter, more popular keywords in the search engines.
However, long tail keywords can send massive amounts of traffic when this strategy is approached in the correct way. Simple ways I have achieved this in the past include adding location names or dates to the end of keywords. Long tail keywords give those with fewer resources an opportunity to get traffic larger competitors ignore. In many cases, the traffic generated by a long tail keyword strategy is more targeted than high level, expensive keywords too.

4) Piggyback on the popularity of the latest news and events in an Industry or Location

Working in an industry or niche which provides local, national or international updates on a regular basis gives a website owner or internet marketer an opportunity to rank highly for popular keywords. By adding keyword rich articles to sites about this news, trend or event, it’s possible to piggyback on the popularity of the latest news, trends, and events associated with your industry.

This results in traffic competitors may not have considered.

5) Use Images and Video More Effectively 

The popularity of pictures and video will continue to increase. These formats should be used to pre-sell websites, products, and services in the coming year. Encouraging more likes, shares, tweets, pins and other sharing activities will be essential as more people realize how powerful video and images are.

More competition will exist online in 2016. However, using the hacks and information I’ve described above has the potential to improve the SEO activities of businesses and online marketers who wish to increase website traffic in the next twelve months.

6) Collaborating with clients more to leverage digital PR opportunities

A strategy that we’ve been developing and implementing more and more at Screaming Frog is collaborating with our customers more to leverage digital PR opportunities. Folks in SEO have been talking about the similarities between PR and SEO for some time now (indeed did I, several years back), but not all understand how to think like PRs do and how to spot (or generate!) opportunities for press attention. Some of the most valuable links you can get are from mainstream media and news websites – these links are great for SEO as well as referral traffic, brand awareness, and trust signals. ‘PR’ is great because it can mean some different things, at least one of which will be right for your business;

•       Corporate news flow
•       Profile pieces and interviews
•       Internal customer data
•       Surveys
•       Industry press
•       Media requests
•       Linkbait
•       Newsjacking etc.

Whether starting small with local, industry or niche publications or going in for a big fish in trying to make national and international news, PR is a great way of acquiring valuable, trusted and relevant links. Whatever your strategy or approach, my recommendation would be to try and push the boundaries of creativity, to make your angle as bookable as possible. There are many other PRs and SEOs doing the same thing all day, every day, so your ideas need to be creative, have a hook and be able to cut through the noise. Don’t make people happy, make them ecstatic; don’t make people angry, make them furious; don’t make people smile, make them belly laugh!

7) Ego Baiting is a very simple, fast and easy to execute SEO strategy

The process of ego baiting as the name suggests is to boost the ego of a site owner with the intention of receiving a backlink in the process. This can be accomplished by just composing a Top 20 or Top 50 or even Top 100 sites or blogs in X Industry.Ego Baiting is a very simple, fast and easy to execute SEO strategy that will allow any site in any niche to gain links from important, authoritative and relevant sites within the same industry.

Only write a description for each blog that you like within the Industry your client or your site is in and rank them in order of brilliance. Include a link if you wish to each blog, publish the post and then send an email to each blog owner letting them know of your position so that they can stroke their own ego levels and share a link to the post on their site and social media profiles.

You can take this approach a bit further if you wish by making the post into an awards celebration and physically sending each blog owner a reasonably priced award in the post. The backlinks will follow, and these relevant authoritative links will give you a gradual rise in organic search traffic that will just keep rising and increasing in the long term.

8) Detect and delete hidden spammy links on your website

If you are using WordPress for your site, you know this CMS is often updating its service. And if you manage a lot of websites, it may happen that you forget to update your WordPress. Those situations can lead to SEO issues and for instance to spams. Today, I’m sharing tips to get rid of these spammy links. Even if Askimet is not bad at detecting those links, hackers get better and better at spamming WP sites.
First, crawl your website.

You can use an onsite SEO crawler like OnCrawl to analyze your links performances and get quick results. It displays the repartitions between internal and external links. Depending on your linking strategy, repartitions between internal and external can seem quite fair. But you need to focus on your external links.

9) Create content marketing pieces using data which is readily available

One thing which many companies don’t always realize is that they are potentially sitting on a great content marketing piece using data which is readily available to them.  In a company’s CRM, there lies a lot of data which can be used for content marketing ideas. For example, a jewelry company will have data on the types of the ring they sold, how much the ring was, what gemstone it was, when they sold it…the list could go on. From this, you could derive a really great piece of interactive content marketing which shows which part of the country spends the most on engagement rings, or which stone is the most popular in a given region. Because the piece would be data driven, and the data is from a credible source, this kind of piece is likely to get some high authority links pointing back to it.

High authority domains such as press websites are also likely to link to survey-led pieces. One example of this is the Hayes & Jarvis “UK’s Favourite Cocktail” section, where 1000 people were asked what their favorite cocktail is. This data was then reformatted to make it look good, and it was revealed that the Pina Colada was the UK’s favorite cocktail. The data also found that the Pina Colada was most popular among females, and the most modern city was Manchester. The piece was subsequently linked to by some press websites, including Metro.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk, but one of the reasons behind this is because the data came from a survey company which many publications use and trust. If data doesn’t come from a reputable source, the high authority domains are unlikely to want to link to it, because they can’t be sure that the data is accurate.

10) Focus on long-tail keywords that converted!

It’s a simple concept but often overlooked: build your strategies around long-tail, no volume keywords that you know have converted, instead of making plans based solely on keywords with the most search volume.

Also Read: 18 Google SEO Ranking Facts

How to do it (part 1): There are two approaches you can take. First – do you have any historical data before (not provided)?

• For one of our clients, we had been creating content around their highest volume target terms, and it drove traffic, but none of it converted (fail!).
• So, we flipped the script, and instead pulled a years’ worth of data only on the organic keywords that actually resulted in a conversion and created content based only on these terms.
• We did this despite the fact that these terms showed no monthly search volume (according to Keyword Planner) and drove only a handful of sessions each month.

The result: The new content we created brought in a little traffic, but nearly all of it converted!
How to do it (part 2): What about 2016 when you don’t have organic keyword data from Google anymore?!
Of the keywords we found that converted for our clients, they all had these similar traits:

• They were very long tail: containing at least 5 to 7 words within the search query
• They were this long because they were often intention-based and semantic searches (e.g. someone speaking their query into a mobile device ‘how do I buy…, where do I buy…, best place to buy…’, etc.)
• Because visitors were searching such complex terms, they were often further along in the conversion funnel and as a result, more likely to convert!
• Although Google claims these terms have no volume – they often appeared repeatedly in Google’s ‘searches related to’ section, and in Google Suggest (indicating clearly someone is searching for them!)

With these commonalities in mind – you can find these high value no volume target keywords for your own site by doing the following:

• Export your queries report from Search Console for the max 90-day date range

• Use the LEN function in Excel and pull the character count for each query

• Narrow down to only search queries made up of at least 20 characters or more

• Organize this closed list from A-Z to find common themes (for example: how do I…, where do I…, I want to…, etc.)
• Then – make content around these themes!
• HAVE NO FEAR! Even though most of these terms will show little to no search volume in Keyword Planner, they are potentially likely to bring in at least some traffic that will have a much higher intention of converting.
• Enjoy having less traffic, but more conversions and more money!

Improving the Online Marketing presence of an Ecommerce website is usually a very challenging task. This is because the Online Marketers & SEO Professionals have to optimize the website in order to achieve better rankings on Search Engines, they must improve the user experience, they have to use all the available channels to promote the Online business and above all they have to find ways to increase conversion rates & boost the sales.

Few weeks ago we published a detailed SEO Checklist with 50 essential checks that need to be done before launching a website. In this article we list 60 important SEO tips and Online Marketing techniques that can be used in order to improve the Online Marketing presence of an ecommerce website. The list touches upon several different parts of the optimization process and thus we group the various tips & techniques in 8 large categories.

Link Structure

1. Use SEO Friendly URLs which contain the important keywords of each product or category.
2. Choose carefully your categories and use a tree-like link structure.
3. Prefer the “example.com/product1” URL structure over the “example.com/cat1/procuct1” structure if you have multiple categorization. The second one can create duplicate content issues.
4. Link directly from your homepage to your best selling products.
5. Watch out for duplicate content and use canonical URLs. Don’t create multiple landing pages for minor product differences (color, size etc).
6. Eliminate all the Dangling & Broken links by using the Link Structure Tool.

On Page Optimization

7. Conduct Keyword Research and find out how people search for your products.
8. Use targeted, compelling and unique Page Titles.
9. Usually you should use singular over plural (example camera vs cameras). Check the trends in your industry to see which is more popular.
10. Don`t use generic manufacturer product descriptions to avoid duplicate content issues. Write meaningful & useful descriptions for at least the best selling products.
11. Optimize your pages for the targeted keywords and check their Keyword Rank with Keyword Analyzer tool.
12. Don`t create thin content and pages that are not needed. Panda is watching you!
13. Produce compelling SERP snippets to increase CTR.
14. Use schema.org to label the product details and prices.
15. Update your content regularly to keep it fresh.
16. Optimize your images (filenames, alts, surrounded text) to increase the traffic that you receive through Image Search.

Link Building

17. Use targeted anchor texts by using the keywords that appear on the title of each product/category.
18. Analyze the link building campaigns of your competitors and try to acquire links from the same high quality sources.
19. Use text hyperlinks to link between your products and categories.
20. Build links that point directly to the product landing pages and don’t focus all your link building efforts only on homepage.

Design & User experience

21. Use properly the call to actions. Keep them clear and place them strategically on your pages.
22. Create a compelling, user friendly, professional design.
23. Use “security badges” (McAfee, VeriSign, Better Business Bureau or Direct Marketing Association) to gain the trust of your visitors.
24. Don`t confuse the visitor with 1 million options. Steer his/her attention to the call to action.
25. Offer all the cool features such as “Add to wishlist”, “Send Email alert when product becomes available”, “subscribe to Newsletter” etc. They are good for the users and they can help you increase conversion rates.
26. Use several images and videos featuring the best selling products.
27. Ensure that your website is cross browser.
28. Keep your check-out and payment process simple to increase your conversion rate and reduce the Shopping cart abandonment rate.
29. Reduce the loading time of your website by minimizing the size of css/js/image files and by using caching mechanisms.

Website Structure & Architecture

30. Choose carefully the Ecommerce platform that you will use. Ensure that it is regularly updated, that it has lots of plugins, that it is supported by an active community or a serious company and that it is SEO Friendly. Don’t select the platform only based on its cost.
31. Create HTML & XML sitemaps and submit them to the various search engines.
32. Avoid using AJAX, Flash and other non SEO Friendly technologies for important parts of your page.
33. Ensure that the session IDs do not appear in URLs. This can create a duplicate content issue.
34. Mind Pagination and the order of the products in those pages. Ensure that the most important/best selling/popular products appear first on the list.
35. Create a product RSS feed.
36. Offer to your users the ability to search for particular products based on their name, brand, price and characteristics.

Social Media & Promotion

37. Add the social media buttons on a strategic place of your page.
38. Use product reviews and ratings.
39. Organize contests to generate positive Buzz for your company.
40. Create a blog within your website and write reviews for the best selling products.
41. Use PPC advertising to get highly targeted traffic.
42. Use Email Marketing campaigns and keep in touch with your loyal customers.
43. Sign up on Google Merchant Center to have your products appearing on Google Product Search.
44. Check if affiliate marketing can help you boost your sales.
45. Don’t use spammy methods to promote your website (spam mail, comment trolling, etc)!

Monitoring

46. Track user behavior and see how he/she navigates through your website.
47. Identify your good clients, request their feedback and reward them by offering discounts.
48. Identify the trends and the best selling products.
49. Focus on conversion rates and make the appropriate changes to improve your sales.
50. Use A/B and Multivariable Testing to improve user experience and sales.

While there’s always been lots of debate as to what criteria Search Engines use to rank web pages in their search results, what there is little debate about is that appearing high up on the Search Engines Results page has become of key importance to most businesses. Why? Simply because currently, Search Engines are the preferred research tools in today’s marketplace.


As a result, Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO) has developed into a thriving (if often maligned) industry as organizations, both large and small, strive to gain higher positions and greater visibility in the Search Engine results pages (SERPs).

The other thing that has become increasingly apparent is that blogs (and business blogs in particular) have a number of attributes which help them rank highly in the Search Engines, making them an important or even, dare I say, a key part of Search Engine Marketing. To understand why, first let’s have a quick reminder of how Search Engines work.

Search Engines: a few basics

The main Search Engines – I’m thinking here primarily of Google, Yahoo and Live – collect information from websites using electronic programs called “robots” or “spiders”. They find new sites and content generally by following links and then reading and indexing the code which creates the individual pages (and hence the text they contain). This is all stored on their servers so that when a search is submitted, the Search Engine sifts through all the relevant pages in its index and then ranks them in terms of relevancy using a mathematical algorithm. The result of all this is what we see on the Search Engine results page.

They determine this relevancy using over 100 different criteria, if we are to believe the experts in this field, though some criteria are obviously considered more “valuable” than others. Those considered particularly important include the text itself, the inbound and internal links, focus and relevancy of the information and some key onpage elements such as the Title tag. It is also worth reminding ourselves that search engines rank individual pages rather than whole websites when they create their results pages.

So how can we apply this to blogs?

Armed with an overview of what Search Engines are looking for to rank pages highly, it’s clear that blogs do in fact fulfil a number of these criteria perfectly, which goes a long way to explain why they rank so well. Specifically:

• Text: Business Blogs tend to be focused in their content and that is ideal for what Search Engines look for when they are searching for pages which fit with specific search criteria;


• External Inbound Links: the overriding philosophy in the blogosphere is to reference other blogs by linking to relevant sources; so blogs offering good (and often specific) content are likely to attract a greater number of links;


• Internal Links: blogs are automatically structured in such a way that the internal linking is excellent with highly relevant anchor text (the words that actually form the link) which is an extra bonus;


• Up to date information: the most successful blogs are generally ones which are regularly updated and hence offer a growing resource of recent and relevant content;


• Onpage elements: good blogging software has excellent flexibility which gives you the opportunity to have specific onpage elements (such as the Title Tag) for each individual page.

Blog Search Engines, Pinging and Instant Indexing

Although blogs appear in the main Search Engines like any other online site, they also have their own set of Search Engines which focus primarily on blogs. This is important because the way that these Blog Search Engines find new content is different to the main Search Engines.

If blogs are set up correctly, they will automatically “ping” these search engines – this is the digital equivalent to a ‘tap on the shoulder’ telling them that there is new content for them to index. This happens instantly and, with one of these Blog Search Engines belonging to Google, this means that Google’s main index can pick up your post almost immediately – my best is 6 minutes.

Of course, if the blog is part of your main website then there is also the greater chance of the rest of your site being indexed more frequently too, let alone all the pages benefiting from the value of the inbound links coming into the blog, linking to your new articles! Ah, is there no end to the benefits!!

Conclusion: keep developing your Business Blog

If, like me, you already use a blog for your business, then these Search Engine benefits will not be anything new – no doubt you will have already have seen the sort of great results that you can achieve. If you haven’t, then we really need to talk! However, they are particularly impressive when you consider that you are probably writing your blog with your readers uppermost in your mind and these benefits are merely a welcome (albeit very beneficial) side effect.

Business blogs however are not a magic solution and nor should they be used in isolation – they are at their best when used in conjunction with other marketing activities, both online and offline. Equally, they are not trying to manipulate Search Engines – an accusation sometimes levelled at SEO companies. Simply put, well written and focused blogs give Search Engines exactly what they want to provide for their users – good, specific and up to date information on the subject matter that they are searching for.
And providing that is of course where both the challenge and the benefits lie!Tweet

Alright all you Blogger users, this one’s for you! I know I’ve talked a lot about adding plugins to aid in SEO (search engine optimization), but obviously Blogger doesn’t have that capability. So, today I’ve got some suggestions on how to optimize your posts so you get more quality search engine traffic.

Search description

Add a site description under Settings > Search preferences. This is what will pop-up when someone searches for your site. Make sure to include keywords relating to your site’s content.

Custom post descriptions

When you add your site description you’ll also see the option to ‘enable search description.’ Click yes and you’ll be able to add a custom description to every one of your posts. I highly recommend doing this for new posts, pages, and for older posts which received a lot of traffic or shares. Not only does it help your posts rank higher, it also makes users more likely to click. Instead of a random piece of your post they’ll get an accurate description of the post’s content. You can add a description in the post editor under ‘post settings.’ Try to keep it 150 characters or less.

Swap your post titles

The standard Blogger set-up for titles is blog title first, then post title. But for SEO ranking, the title of your post is actually more important than your blog’s title. You can change this by swapping your post title to be first, so it would read “SEO tricks for Blogger”

To do this go into Template > Edit HTML and find…

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

and replace it with

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == “item”‘>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> </b:if>

If you get an error from copy/pasting this, re-type the ‘ and ” 

Custom perma-links

This is another great way to add a few keywords into your post. On the right side of the post editing screen you’ll see Post Settings. You can change the permalink from xosarah.com/seo-tricks-for-blogger to xosarah.com/best-seo-practices-for-blogger-or-blogspot-blogs. Now search engines will find keywords in your title and url.

No-follow tags

You can add rel=”nofollow” to external links or links that may have a lower ranking. This will tell the search engine to not follow that link as it crawls your site.

Sub-headings

See how I’ve broken up this post using <h4> tags for each subheading? Search engines look for heading tags because they generally have important information regarding the content of the post. Use them!

Labels 

I’d stick with one to three labels per post and make sure they are descriptive of the content. Stick with labels like ‘blog design’ over ‘things I really like thinking about’ and ‘puppies are cute but so are kitties too.’ The former will be much more appreciated by search engines AND your readers!
 
And of course all these things should be done after you’ve written an SEO-friendly post title, added internal links, alt-tagged your images,etc.