December 29, 2013

How to Audit Website? An Ultimate SEO Audit Guide

If you are doing SEO for website, the first thing is to examine website thoroughly for technical issues. The technical issues should be crawling issues, indexing problems, duplicate pages, broken links etc. Website audit helps to identify what is going wrong and what need to be fixed.

Let’s Get Started

Webmaster Tools and Analytics

When you start the audit process, the first step is to make sure that the website is registered on webmaster tools of major search engines (Google, Bing etc.) and in Google Analytics or other website monitoring tools.

WMT is the easiest way to find out the issues and the general health of the site.

Keyword Analysis:

Using some keyword research tools like ubbersuggest.org to find out appropriate keywords for your website and target it to your website’s Meta tags and content. Then after monitor which keywords doing performing well for your website through Google Analytics.

URL Structure:

URLs describe a website or webpage to both search engines and visitors as well. Keeping them appropriate, compelling, and accurate is the key to position well in search engines.

The URLs need to obey the following rules:

• Make your URLs simpler and easy to remember.
• Make URL shorten as possible. Avoid using stop words, the fewer the words are more value each word receives from a search engine spider.
• Do not use CAPITALS words in URLs.

If your website does not succeed to fulfill these criteria, you may have to change them. If you do, make sure you redirect the old URL to the new URL to maintain any of the link juice streaming to that URL.

Website Meta Data:

1. Title Tag:

When I do an SEO audit, the first things I check is the <title> tag because title tag is the main text that describes a webpage and has the most SEO power of any tag on the page for establishing keyword relevance.

The Title Tag need to obey the following rules:

• Must be unique and not longer than 70 Characters
• If it makes sense, use the target keyword for that page twice.
• Title tags must be written to be descriptive of the content on the page.

2. Description Tag:

Meta description does not help in ranking, but it is extremely important to improve CTR (click through rate). Mata description should be compelling that a searcher will want to click.

The Description Tag need to obey the following rules:

• Meta descriptions on each page be unique and compelling
• Keep meta descriptions between 150 and 160 characters.
• Use the target keyword smartly in description that makes sense.

3. Heading Tags:

The heading tag H1, H2 and H3 are used to represent different sections of webpage content. It has an effect on both the SEO and usability of your website.

The Heading Tag need to obey the following rules:

• Heading tag should only contain text – no images please
• H1 tag is the main heading tag gives users a quick overview of the content.
• Place heading tags for each section that make sense.

Content:

Make sure there is enough content (should have minimum 300 words) across the webpage. Add some more content, if any of the pages don’t. Just add useful & engaging content that fulfill the needs of your real visitors.

Image Optimization:

Having “Alt tag” is must for every image. It describes image to search engines. You can use keyword that is relevant to the image because it has slight impact on search engine ranking. While doing audit, you should also take care of file size, file name and captions.

Rel=Nofollow Tag:

Use the nofollow tag on site wide external links, blog comments and anywhere else where you do not want to lose link juice. Using the nofollow attribute is one of the best ways of ensuring that your outgoing links doesn’t harm your website.

Sitemap:

Sitemap provides search engines spider to index all the pages on a site. Create sitemap and then submit it to search engine’s webmaster tools.

Redirects:

Redirect is a way to send users and search engine to a different URL. 301 redirect (permanent) and 302 redirect (temporary) are two types of redirects.

Duplicate Content:

Search engines don’t like duplicate content if it is sense less, keyword rich and low quality. Google’s panda algorithm especially works for identifying sites with duplicate content. There is one way to deal with is to rewrite the content.

Broken Links:

Broken links, whether internal or outbound, can hurt the usability of a website – which also can hurt SEO efforts. When crawling a website, if search engine spider comes across broken links, it will stop the crawling and indexing process and leave. If the search spider finds too many 404 error pages, it alerts a poor user experience, which decreases the value of the site.

Page Load Time:

Use Google page speed insights to identify solutions for page load speed. If the load time is high, there are a number of actions you can take, such as

• Browser caching
• Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
• Image optimization
• Minify JavaScript

Incoming Links:

Use some backlink checker tools to extract the data of inbound links. This will allow you to get a good idea of what kind of link-building activity that has been performed on the site.

Check link profiles one by one and search for spammy or low quality links. It may be that certain links are having a bad impact on the website’s capability to rank, and you may need to use the disavow tool.

Social Media Mentions:

Social signals have an effect on website ranking, and it is very important to evaluate the number of mentions the site has. Here are simple ways to increase the chances of acquiring social signals.

• Add social media sharing buttons on the site or on any blog posts
• Create content that is worthy of sharing, and reach out to people to ask for reviews.

Hope, that will help. And don’t forget to bookmark so that you can come back as and when you need to. Leave your comments below, if you have any comments.

December 18, 2013

Step by Step of Launching a New Website: Starter Guide

website launch

Before you go live with a new website, you need to spend time in planning and perform tests at each level to minimize problems and to avoid SEO disaster. The following is the complete website launch guide that I have categorized into TWO:

1. Before the Launch:
2. After the Launch:

Steps are Taken Before the Launch

1. Benchmark Your Current Site Stats

Before launching a new website, benchmark how your site is currently performing in Search Engines. Domain authority, number of paged indexed by search engines, cache date, crawl errors reported in GWT are very important and will allow you to observe essential analytics during the launch process.

benchmark table

You can note down the updated data by creating a table in excel after the launch.

2. Register in Webmaster Tools

You should register the new website with Google Webmaster tools and Bing Webmaster tools, in order to increase the process of being indexed by major search engines -- Google and Bing. By registering the website you can track crawl errors & optimization issues quickly.

3. Canonicalization

Choose the best URL for content when there are several options on a webpage. Following example URLs that most people consider for the same webpage:

http://xyz.com
http://www.xyz.com
http://www.xyz.com/index
http://www.xyz.com/home

You have to select domain with www. or without www., because technically all these URLs are different and creates site-wide duplication issue. To fix this issue, you need to pick the preferred URL and redirect (301) all content and links to the preferred domain. Google does not have features to choose which URL is best, just provided that you are reliable with it.

4. Create a 'Coming Soon' Page

Upload a 'coming soon' page on your new domain with some content that explain about you, before you launch a new website. By doing so you allow Search engines to start to crawl and index the new website. Basically you are telling search engines that your site is real and not just parked and this should be finished 7-8 weeks earlier to the website launch.

5. Upload Unique Content to Your New Website

The next step is to write unique content for each web page of your website and upload it. You can use relevant and appealing images that will make your webpage more attractive and understandable.

6. Create Unique Title and Meta Descriptions for Each Page

Create title tags, Meta description and H1 tags for each page and make sure all tags are unique. Using some tool, you can view missing and duplicate metadata as well as short or long metadata to ensure your site is optimized for search engines.

7. Set Up Google Analytics:

Set up Google analytics by placing tracking script before closing tag to monitor website’s traffic. Google Analytics has many important features like event tracking, goal tracking, site search, webmaster tools integration, e-commerce tracking etc.

Steps are Taken after the Launch

1. Check for Broken Links

Check website for broken links using reliable tools like broken link check and fix the broken links that are reported. You can also check GWT for crawl error.

2. Submit XML Sitemaps

Create xml sitemap for your new website and submit to webmaster tools. You can also include the sitemap in robots.txt file.

3. List Website in Local Listings

Add your new website to local listing directories that will provide backlinks and also help to get local traffic as well. Google+ local page, Yelp, DMOZ, Yell, Get listed are popular sites.

4. Promote Website on Social Media Websites

Promote your new website on popular social media channels such as facebook, twitter, Google+, pinterest etc. Social media is the great resource for referral traffic that helps spread your launch website.

5. Test Your Website Speed

Test you website speed, using Google’s page speed insight tools. Improve your website speed score up to 90 out of 100 by following instructions given.

6. Make Responsive Design for Mobile View

Mobile users are increasing day by day so it is very important to make your website mobile friendly. Responsive design is the best option in place of buying mobile domain.

Thanks Hope it helpful to you.

December 17, 2013

Duplicate Content is not Really Treated as Spam: Google’s Matt Cutts

duplicate content

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a video today about duplicate content and the effects of it within Google’s SERP.

In the video, the question was asked, "Can having duplicate content on your website affect ranking in Google’s search results?" Matt answered that somewhere 25% to 30% of the content on the internet is duplicate.

When Google sees duplicate content it try to group it all together and treated as if it is just one piece of content. Google does not treat duplicate content as spam, but takes all the content and group them into a cluster and shows the best result for the user.

Matt said if you do duplicate content in an abusive deceptive religious or manipulative way, we do reserve the right to take action.

Here is the Video:

December 14, 2013

SEO Changes Should Be Predicted for 2014

prediction for 2014

SEOs, well 2013 the year is going to be end with so more algorithm updates. Google has gifted a new algorithm called Hummingbird this year. Now what about upcoming year 2014! Here I have predicted some points that might be changed in 2014.

1. Rise of Authorship:

I thing authorship is going to become more essential as Google works hard to differentiate the quality good content from the bad. Over the next year, I really think that digital firms take authorship and status into account when recruiting for their team, with candidates who have yet to set up an author profile, authority and following (think tweets, followers, Google+ Circles) falling short.

2. Semantic-Influenced Content

In its 15th birthday, the search giant Google shocked us by introducing a new algorithm called Hummingbird. We all know that the main objective of this new algorithm is on relevance, perfection and better understanding user intent.

I think we are going to see brands start to push out more and more semantic-influenced content in a bid to catch more traffic and SERP in 2014. I think it’s all going to come down to generating more specific, lengthy type content (which furthermore comes back to content mark-up) which response more long-tail detailed search phrases. As sites look to produce more content and pages that answer queries, there’s a chance a lot of doorway-style pages could be produced which do not really content good quality content and that do not provide that much of a purpose.

3. Schema and Data Mark-Up

Google’s been forcing data mark-up on us for a while now – but this year they have really stepped things up with the release of article mark-up and the new structured data markup helper tool, so it seems sensible that they are going to place more focus on it going forwards.

The main thing to keep in mind about data mark-up is that it gives details to Google about what your website is about and what each page is about – and so it helps Google to rank sites more appropriately.

4. The End of Guest Blogging

I think Google finally going to red eye on low quality guest blogging and guest blogging for link building’s benefit. Why? The reason is with a guest blog you do not necessarily earn the link out of merit. It’s no secret that Google thinks you should only get really get links if you have “earned” them – and they have already given us a pretty big sign they are not thrilled with the idea of guest blogging by suggesting you “nofollow” your links in your guest blogs.

I think Google introduce a major Penguin update in the first three months of the year that is going to partly target guest blogging (particularly low quality guest blogging on random sites) – so be alert.

5. More Innovative Link Building:

Thanks to Google Penguin Update, link-building has definitely stepped up a gear with regards to creativeness this season – and I think that is only set to proceed in 2014 as link-building techniques which are currently working well (guest blogging, infographics, superficial content marketing etc.) fall under the glare of Google. I think link-building might drop more in range with creative PR and Bid data next year as brands start to dig into their data more in a bid to present real, interesting, appropriate news and comments that will actually add something to their industry.

So, here is my five SEO prediction for upcoming year 2014. If you think something is missing than write comment or tweet me @searchenginenos

December 11, 2013

What Should Avoid While Doing Guest Blogging?: Google’s Matt Cutts

guest blogging

Recently posted webmaster help video, Google’s Matt Cutts talking about guest blog posts "What should I be aware of if I'm considering guest blogging?"

Matt Advices:

1. Guest Blogging should not be only the part of your link building strategy
2. Do not send thousands of mass emails offering to guest blog
3. Do not use the same article twice
4. Do not change an article over again and recycle it so

In short, avoid low quality, automated, posting the same article on multiple sites, spinning articles and other tactics that not pass editorial value.

Original Video:

December 9, 2013

Avoid Content Stitching: Google’s Matt Cutts

copy paste

In a new webmaster video, Google’s Matt Cutts suggested that “content stitching” is a bad idea.

Avoid copying fragments of articles from multiple sources to create an article that looks more like a compilation of resources instead of an innovative piece, coz this practice is not add value and that is probably going to be higher risk area.

Original Video:

December 8, 2013

Beginner Guide: Best SEO Strategy for Newbie SEOs

seo tips for beginners

If you have a new website chances are that you're trying to get traffic for it and if you're trying to get traffic, you've probably already heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you're new to it then SEO can seem extremely complicated and trying to research how to do it yourself can leave you lost in a bunch of technical jargon that makes your brain hurt.

It's not uncommon for beginners to get fed up and think that they need to hire an SEO expert or company in order to show up in the search engines, but that isn't true.

"The experts do a lot of the same things you can do all on your own. Here is the best SEO strategy for entrepreneurs and those just beginning with SEO."

Start With a Good Design

Whether you use a template, pay someone to create your design, or do it yourself, you need to have a good website in the first place. Make sure that your design is attractive, not too busy, and loads quickly. Most importantly, make sure that your site is reliable and not likely to go down without warning or suffers from an overloaded server. This comes from having a good host. Compare some of the best ones here.

What this does is makes sure that people can reach your site and that they will not immediately be turned off. If traffic can't get to your site, of if your guests immediately leave, your site isn't going to rank very high no matter what you do.

Have Good Content

"It's important that your site provides something to the viewers that will make them want to stick around."

These days most businesses are including blogs on their sites that provide related content that people will want to read. Make sure that your site has engaging, well-written, related content and people will not only stick around for awhile, but they will come back.

Make sure that whether you have a blog or not, you are providing updated, intriguing information so that people want to bookmark it. The more that you get returning visitors, the higher your ranking will be in the search engines.

Learn about Meta Data and Keywords

This is where you really start to get into the main part of SEO. Keywords are what the search engine crawlers pay the most attention to when they comb your site. The words that are specified in the meta data and repeated throughout the page will be the ones that will be most likely to turn up in searches related to your content.

Use specific keywords related to your content in the title of it, in any links to it, and within the content. Don't pad the content with just keywords, however. Make sure that it's natural, which should happen anyway if you are keeping your keywords related to the same topic that you're writing about.

Use Links Well

There are three important ways to use your links.

1. Link to relevant, interesting content that your readers are likely to find valuable. Choose sites that may also be likely to notice and link back to you, but make sure the value to your readers is your most important criteria.
2. Get links to your site on other, similar sites with a good reputation and a lot of traffic. Take a look at this article from Microsoft that talks about link building and how to do it.
3. Link back to other content on your site. If you are using a blog, link to older posts that you think your readers may find interesting. This not only gets them navigating around your site more, but also shows them content they may have never seen before.

Use Social Media

"It has gotten to the point in this day and age that having a presence on social media is almost a requirement for the success of any business, particularly up and coming businesses."

Social media gives you another platform to reach potential business, to relay information, and to interact with your customers. This article by Anita Mirchandani gives some excellent tips for how to build your social media presence.

Not only should you create a strong social media presence, but you should also allow your existing presence to spread out to social media. Include buttons that will allow people to share your site and your content on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Each and every time that someone shares something from your site your business is exposed to each and every one of their hundreds or even thousands of friends. Also make sure that you share new updates and content on your social media accounts each time since this brings more people to it.

Communicate

Visit other sites that are similar or market to the same kind of customer. If you have a blog this is highly important. You want to post regularly on other blogs that you like, make sure to follow them, and get to know the people behind them. These are potential business contacts that can earn you important link backs and positive attention for your business. This will lead to more traffic coming from these similar sites which will, of course, lead to higher rankings in the search engines.

It's That Simple

These are the main bases you need to cover for good SEO. You want to provide something that people want to see which means good content and a good website that performs well. You also want to drive as much traffic both to your website and through it which is where link building, communicating with other businesses and social media comes in.

If you employ these strategies you will begin to see a rise not only in traffic, but in your position on the search engines and you can do all of it without having to pay a lot of money to someone else to do it for you.

Article Author: Allan Watson The Article was Published in thenextwomen.com

The Biggest Myths of SEO Ever Told

SEO has changed a lot; the new algorithms, guidelines, and tools are introduced so quickly. This regularly changing search landscape is rife with gossips and misconceptions – and here I have pointed out the most common myths and assumptions about how SEO works, and debunk them for you so you are not wasting your precious time that simply don’t matter for SEO in 2014. Let’s get began.

Myth #1: Top Position

There are n-numbers of resources that place great importance of websites being the first in SERPs. This is not actually true. Although being the first on the site allows building traffic, it does not guarantee that visitors will want to check out your website. Apart from search engines, there are so many functions that are used to give positions. This means, you need to be careful and consider other methods of advertising like social media, as you wait for search engine ranking to be the best.

Myth #2: Submit Website into Search Engine

In traditional SEO times, search engines had “submission” forms that were part of the optimization process. Webmasters and online marketers would tag their sites and webpages with keyword information, and “submit” them to the search engines. Soon after, a bot would crawl and include those resources in their index. Simple SEO!

Unfortunately, this process did not scale very well, the submissions were often spam and the exercise gradually provided way to simply crawl-based search engines. Since 2001, not only has search engine submission not been needed, but it is actually almost ineffective. The search engines all publicly not that they rarely use “submission” URLs, and that the best exercise is to get links from other sites. This will expose your content to the engines naturally.

Myth #3: Mata Keywords Improve Ranking

I’m so sick and tired of hearing about meta data. Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete pointless. Meta tag keywords help provide data to search engines about a webpage, and back in the day, were actually used by some search engines as ranking factors. But are they still used today? The answer is NO. In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts has made it publicly known that “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

Myth #4: More Links is Better than More Content

This myth can be especially risky if the focus of the link-building techniques is quantity, not quality. Focus on having appropriate and diverse sources that links to relevant pages. When you focus on content, it can be used as website pages, blog posts, lead generation offers and guest posts on other sites -- all things that will bring more links with it over time.

Myth #5: Being a Google Adwords Advertiser Helps Your Organic Rankings

This is one of the oldest misconceptions. Google search and Google AdWords, are completely separated from each other. It is essential for all of them to remain completely independent. Changing your Google AdWords budget will not have any impact on getting your site out of a penalty or change the algorithmic evaluation of your website.

Myth #6: Exact Match Domains Rank Higher

Buying exact match domains for your top keyword and key phrase (i.e. rank higher. “seonews.com”) actually used to work for a little while – until spammers started buying them up for the only objective of providing ads. Now, you can no longer get strong rankings solely based on your domain name.

Myth #7: Anchor Text is Dead

While anchor text may not be as important as it was in the past due to link spam, it is certainly not dead and is still an essential aspect for position.

Myth #8: Google PageRank is Everything

Also incorrect. Google has not updated their PageRank, a public measure of a website’s authority, yet this year. There is actually remours that the search giant is about to totally stop working this evaluate.

Myth #9: H1 Tags are an Important On-Page Element

The H1 is part of your CSS that a designer puts together to reference what font styling and size will be applied to a particular piece of content. This used to be something that was more essential, but search engines are smarter these days, and unfortunately people spammed this to death. So really, it does not matter what header tag you use as long as you present your most important concepts up front and closer to the top of the page. Don’t forget, you are optimizing your page for users first.

Myth #10: Links in Press Releases are Bad

In July 2013, Google has declared that links from press releases were considered “PAID” links and therefore, part of a “LINK SCHEME”. This creates waves of panic through the industry, as many believed they now be punished by Google for placing links in their press release.

However, this turned out to be wrong, while Google says that links in press releases should be “rel=nofollow”, they have also gone on record saying they have “identified a lot of the top Press release sites and ignores the links but does not punish those who are using them.”

Myth #11: XML Sitemaps Help in Rankings

XML sitemaps help search engines to find and index your content faster and more efficiently. But, while they are a best practice, they will not help you get higher positions.

Myth #12: Schema is a Ranking Factor

Schema markup helps search engines to better comprehend your content, whether it is video clip, or a recipe, or other type of content. However, according to Google, it will not improve your SERPs positions.

Myth #13: Hummingbird is a Game Changer

Hummingbird is a Google’s new search engine algorithm that is based on semantic searches – for example, mobile queries that as questions; “Where is the best place to get burger?” When it was rolled out, the SEO community waited with bated breathing for the expected impact on search results – but that impact never occurred. In fact, the change was hardly recognizable.

Myth #14: Update your Home Page Every Time

This is not something that should be done compulsorily. You will not rank a higher position basically by doing this at all periods.

Myth #15: SEO and Social Media Have Nothing In Common

This is never true. SEO and social media platforms work completely well together and with the best social media platform following your website can be ranked higher.

Myth #16: AuthorRank

AuthorRank is a way that Google will rank authored content by an author in search results based on their authority on a particular topic. However, the Authorship rich snippet does not currently have a very wide adoption (only 3.5% of Fortune 100 companies have adopted it) – which is required before AuthorRank can even be rolled out.

Conclusion:

So -- now that you know what the common SEO myths are. Debunking these SEO myths will make you both more effective, and more efficient with your organic search strategy.