You just launched your site and now you want to be rich and famous and you may go about it all wrong. The first thing most people do is try to find a way to rank high in search results in a matter of a week or two, but it doesn’t come that easy. Your site must build trust and authority to be considered in search results. The first thing you should focus on is getting your pages indexed in Google and other search engines. In time, you will begin to climb that long steep mountain that us SEO’s call SERP, (Search Engine Results Page).

There are a couple of important things you should understand and I have listed them below for your reading pleasure.

SEO is Long Term

You can’t set it and forget it. This is not cooking; this is a process that takes time. SEO takes time to build upon itself and just because you reach that pinnacle (first page in search), it doesn’t mean you have completed your SEO to do list. Search engines (Google) continually making changes to its algorithm and you want to stay on top of the latest and greatest by visiting the official Google blog or the Google Webmaster forums. One day you may be on top, but the next day you can fall off page one, it happens often. Be a student and try to absorb as much as you can each day.

Adhere to Search Engine Guidelines

Google, and other search engines want to serve up the most accurate and relevant search results and they count on you to follow their guidelines. You can say we make search results better through best practices when it comes to SEO. A better search result makes for a happier search engine user. Search engines are in the business of providing users exactly what they’re looking for. If your site can’t help them do that, you won’t ever rank well. That’s why every site owner should be familiar with Google Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines are your lifeline to implementing effective SEO for your site. You should also pay attention to the not-so-good-side of SEO called “Black hat”. You should avoid black hat like the plague as this will put your site in the sand box which means none of your pages will reside in Google’s index. If you feel your hard work is not paying off or it is moving along slowly, don’t attempt to use black hat tactics to give your site a boost or your site will be penalized.

In addition to SEO, you should familiarize yourself with social networking to build your brand awareness. You can find a lot of excellent information on the internet on how to effectively utilize social networking. One site that comes to mind is Kikolani.com, authored and owned by Kristi Hines covering a wide range of related topics including online marketing, social media, and search optimization.

SEO Resources
Google Webmaster Forums
Google Official Blog
SEO Book
Kikolani.com

Listed below are SEO best practices to increase referral traffic and link building. I provided tools that will help you to achieve good results and keep you out of harms way from bad sites.

Social Engagement Building: This is an affective way to build online reputation. Select the most popular social networks like; Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon and create a profile. By doing this you can extend your network online, connect with your friends, share other websites and blogs with each other, promote your website or blog and build an online reputation. It’s important not to share the same website or blog all the time as this will make others think you’re a spammer.

In the past, many social networks would pass a vote for your website also known as a back link or incoming link. This is a popular way to increase your websites Google Toolbar Rank. Unfortunately many of these social networks now have the no-follow attribute because of the ongoing spam within these networks.

Social engagement is important as a reputation model and shouldn’t be considered as an easy way to build incoming links from external sites.

Blog Commenting: This is the most effective link building method. You can promote your blog/website by posting comments in other service-related blogs which allow links in the comments section that are crawlable by the search engines (these blogs are commonly identified as Do-Follow Blogs).

Directory Submission: This is still a great method to use for link building, but you need to be careful on what directories you submit to. If you submit to a directory that is red flagged by Google, you are putting your website in danger of being blacklisted. It’s important to perform manual directory submissions and never sign up with an automated directory submit bot. It’s important to choose the right category for each directory you choose to submit to. You should also submit your website or blog to the top directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, ZoomInfo, etc.

Forum Postings: This is another great way to build back links. You need to be an active member of the forum related to your blog or website. You can post/reply to a thread in other service-related forums that allow links in your signature which can be crawled by the search engines (Sign up on forums that are “Do-Follow Forums”). This is very time consuming and requires commitment.

Photo Sharing: Publish/share your website product pictures and make them public. Let your friends see them and comment on them too, which will help drive traffic towards your website. The most popular photo sharing websites are Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, etc.

Video Promotions: Like with photo sharing, you can publish/share your product videos, expert opinions, and reviews of your product and make them public in YouTube, Metacafe, etc. This is an effective way to drive traffic to your websites.

Article Submission: Write articles about our services and promotions and submit them to popular article sites like Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, Buzzle, etc. This will help attain some deep links to your website or blog.

Search Engine Submission: Submit your website or blog to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alexa, Lycos, Excite, etc. In most cases this is not that important because Google and Yahoo will already have many of your pages indexed already.

Classifieds Submission: Submitting to classified ads is a great way to advertise your products and services. The method that works best is reverse marketing. This is when you reply to a person who is looking for your products or services. Many classified submissions are free. The most popular is Craigslist.

Answers: Participate in Answers by answering relevant questions within your niche and placing a link to your website in the source section. This is another great way to increase link popularity (Yahoo Answers).

Tools

Search Status Add-on for Firefox: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyzer, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

NoDoFollow Add-on for Firefox: Just a simple extension to highlight links in a page according to nofollow / dofollow status. A link that is blue is dofollow whereas a link that is pink or light red is nofollow. In order to turn this feature on go to Tools at the top of your Firefox browser and click on NoDoFollow.

Web of Trust Add-on: This add on is a great way to see if a site in your search results is safe to explore. This will help identify bad directories when you submit your website or blog to online directory services. MyWot.com provides a Firefox and IE extension. The WOT community has rated millions of websites so you can search, shop online and surf for fun without worrying. There are more than 6 million active users who have rated over 314 million sites!

How to check for all pages in Google linking to your website: To check for all incoming links, open Google and in the search box put the following;

link:yoursite.com –site:www.yoursite.com (Note: Google does not support appending further refinements onto this operator such as excluding links within the same site).

In Yahoo use: linkdomain:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com

Backlink Building Tools: This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.

Directory service for building backlinks: A manual directory submission service. This service is free.

Directory Submission service: Another manual directory service. This service is free.

What SEO Off Page strategies do you practice?

A www and non-www of the same domain are treated as two different URLs. You should maintain the consistency and should always use the same URL version.

When checking backlinks to your site, you may see two different results when using preferred and non-preferred domains (‘www’ or http:// without the www).

To specify your preferred domain

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

You may have to upload the verification html file from Google to your websites root directory to verify ownership. When you change your preferred domain, it will impact both crawling and indexing. In most cases, both versions point to the same physical location.

Note: Once you’ve set your preferred domain, you will need to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain. This will help other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

How to setup .htaccess with a 301

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Need help? Please comment here and I would be glad to help.

It’s very important to keep your page titles less than 66 characters. If you go over the 66 character count, your page title will be truncated in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The character count is also dependent on word composition at the point of truncation. Yahoo! recommends 67 characters as a limit.

Search engines use titles to index web sites, and often display them in search engine results. I recommend that you limit your page title to 66 characters.

There is no penalty for having titles longer than 66 characters, but for the purpose of display and usability, keep it short and simple. I’ve seen titles with more than 20 words that perform just as well as titles that are shorter.

I try to manage my page titles from being truncated, but sometimes it doesn’t work and I am reluctant to go beyond the threshold. If you are not sure what a page title looks like when it’s truncated see below.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown…

The three periods are referred to as an ellipsis (…) and mean a suspension point. In some instances (not Google’s), anything beyond the suspension point is usually discarded due to limitations. As I stated earlier I try to keep my character count less than 66 and it works perfectly. If I have a page title that truncates, I may try to change the words around or remove a word to prevent the loss of the full title.

If you have a WordPress blog, there’s a really cool plug-in that can help titles from being truncated. Slug Trimmer shortens post slugs more intelligently than simply truncating them. It will remove short words like (“a”, “and”) as these words have little importance.

FYI – Google News Publisher guidelines say to keep your article titles within 2-20 words. That’s exceeds the 66 character count.

Always try to keep the most pertinent stuff at the front of your title.

A web page should only be optimized for 2 or 3 keywords, anymore than that you are creating keyword saturation – It’s what I like to call it. You need to remember that you are not the only webpage on the internet; you have competition, and a lot of it.

How do you find the right keywords?

The best and most accurate tool is Google’s Keyword Tool. This tool will provide you with Advertiser Competition, Local Monthly Search Volume and Global Monthly Search Volume. It’s important NOT to choose a keyword phrase that has too much competition and or little search volume.

Fact: Almost 70% of all search traffic comes from long tail keywords also known as keyword phrases.

How to use Google Keyword Tool

In the keyword text box type in a broad keyword phrase that best describes what you write about. In this example I entered “How to remove virus”.

Here are the results

As you can see there are a number of related terms, but I am choosing the keyword phrase that has the highest Local Search Volume. The competition is high, but not at 100%. It’s hard to find the best of both so choose wisely.

You can also save your keyword phrases by clicking on the “+Add your own keyword” in the right sidebar. You can also get an estimate of search traffic for each of the keyword phrases you saved.

Anchor text is the clickable text that a user will see as a link. The anchor tag looks like this <a href=”http://www.techjaws.com/how-to-write-better-anchor-text”>How to Write Better Anchor Text</a>.

It’s very important the anchor text accurately describes the content on the external or internal link pages. If I was referring to an article on link building, my anchor text would look like the following – One Way Link Building.

The anchor text tells users and search engines like Google something about the page you’re linking to. Links on your page may be internal – pointing to other pages on your site or external – leading to content on other sites.

The better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for search engines like Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is all about.

Anchor Text Best Practices

Be descriptive – The anchor text you use for a link should describe the article or webpage it’s linking to. There are many webmasters including myself that make the common mistake by using anchor tags that are commonly known as “click here”, “download”, “page”, “go here”, etc. Avoid using generic text as these are used too often and you will be competing with many websites.

Other things to Avoid:

• using text that has no relation to the content of the page linked to
• using the page’s URL as the anchor text in most cases

How to write concise anchor text – Be short, but descriptive – usually two words or a short phrase is best. Writing long anchor text or sentences will not provide any benefit to the end user or Google. Write an anchor text as if you were searching by using a phrase. In most cases, this will help your pages be found in search results.

Links should be formatted so they’re easy to spot – Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text links. If you are using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and your links look like regular text, change your CSS so that your link decoration is underline.

Use anchor text for internal links – You may usually think about linking to external websites, but internal linking has advantages when it comes to Google Pagerank. Any link within the site that is optimized for a specific purpose is another link that passes value (which may not always be the case with external links providing backlinks to your site).

Anchor away!

I came across an interesting video by Matt Cutts head of Google’s webspam team. I was already aware that hyphens are better than using pipes for blog titles.

What’s a pipe? It is the character or key below the backspace on a standard keyboard. To use a pipe, just hold down your shift key and (|).

The problem with using pipes in the middle of a group of words when someone searches for those words in the exact phrase, the version with pipes will not show up in (SERP) Search Engine Results Page, but the version with hyphens will.

SERP: A search engine results page (SERP), is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query.

Matt Cutts explains more in this video

Here are two examples of a blog title using a pipe and hyphen.

Pipe: SEO Tips | Better Rank
Hyphen: SEO Tips-Better Rank

Now pipe up and start using hyphens in your blog titles!

Keywords are the life blood of writing for the web. The first thing you should do is research and know your keywords. Try not to dominate every keyword in your niche, be selective. Here are a few suggestions about keywords:

• Target a set of keywords in every post, but avoid over using them too many times. I recommend that you use the keywords no more than three or four times on a page. If you use the same keywords over and over, Google can tell that your article isn’t that useful and lacks authority.
• Use a wide variety of words that pertain to your topic. For example, if your blog is about healthy eating, you want to include keywords like – Low Fat, Less Fat and Low Calories. These words are common industry terms, but are very competitive. This is just an example.
• Use synonyms of your keywords in addition to the keywords.
• Don’t stick to a standard keyword density for every article or post. You want your words to flow naturally, and overuse of keywords makes your copy sound forced. It’s important to target keywords relative to the article and not site wide keywords.
• If you’re not sure what keywords to use, try WordTracker. They have a keyword suggestion tool that works well. What I like most about this tool is it provides an estimate of how many searches are performed for each keyword. See screen shot below.

By providing the search engines with good keywords and a variety of them, you’ll start to see good results coming from search.

You want to avoid using FFA (Free For All) pages and link exchange programs as most search engines, such as Google says that FFA sites are an artificial and illegitimate way to increase link popularity. Google considers “link farms” spam, and will ban your site for participating in an FFA or link exchange program.

A free for all (FFA) link page is a web page set up ostensibly to improve the search engine placement of a particular web site. There are many automated programs that will place your link on hundreds of FFA sites, hoping that the resulting incoming links will increase your ranking in Google. This is far from the truth! In fact, you could be penalized by Google. Many SEO experts do not place much value on FFAs. Here’s why;

1. Most FFAs only maintain a small number of links for a short time, too short for most search engines to pick up.
2. The high “human” traffic to FFA sites is almost completely from webmasters visiting the site to place their own links manually.
3. Search engine algorithms count more than link numbers, they also check relevancy which the unrelated links on FFA sites do not have.
4. Another drawback to FFAs is the amount of spam e-mail webmasters will receive from members of the FFA. Using an FFA can be considered a form of spamdexing.

It’s best to manually submit your website to well known and trusted directories. If you’re submitting to a directory, check the directories Google Pagerank. If the directory has a Pagerank between 3 and 9, it means that the directory has sites linking in that are relevant. The higher the Pagerank the better.

What factors make a directory worth submitting to

1. The directory and all its pages are indexed in Google.
2. The directory is linked from high PR pages or many relevant pages.
3. The directory ranks for its own name or phrases which it apparently promotes.
4. Is the directory human edited?
5. What’s the age of the directory? The older the better. This is an indication that it has survived the test of time.
6. A “Similar Pages” search in Google shows other directories. Lets you know if the directory is looked at by Google as a directory at all or not and to some extent lets you know if the directory has a network of other directories which may cause duplicate content, interlinking problems.

We would like to hear your feedback.

There are so many ways to increase traffic to your blog. And in no order, they’re;

• Social Networks – StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, etc.
• Forums and Message Boards – Being an active member with your blog URL in your signature.
• Guest Posting – A great way to build your reputation and gain fans.
• Online Ads – It cost money, but it still is an effective way to bring visitors to your site.
• PPC (Pay Per Click) – Very expensive and should only be used for businesses.

These are just a handful of the most popular marketing techniques to increase traffic to your blog. You can also read this article to help you increase traffic to your blog.

The cheapest and fastest way to drive more traffic to your blog is Yahoo Answers. There are many categories in Yahoo Answers that you can choose from. You should choose a category that you usually blog about and use an article you published as a reference for an answer. I reply to at least 5 questions per day and have received more than 100 visits in one day. I only answer questions in the Computer/Internet and Search Engine Optimization categories.

Here’s how it works

1. Search for questions you can answer and you have an article on your blog you can reference.
2. Make sure you provide details.
3. Check your grammar and spelling.
4. Provide a resource link to an article you have published on your blog where it says (What’s your source?).

It really works, but it takes time to find questions that you can reference one of your articles on.

Answering 5 questions with references to your published article takes roughly 30 minutes. You can potential get more than 100 visitors in one day for 30 minutes of work.

Current Yahoo Answer Stats: Points 1518, Level 3

Please share you experience and results with us!