7-Under-Hood Optimization Techniques for Rocking SEO

Whether you’re an SEO at the top of your game, or a site owner looking to do more with your SEO, this article is for you.
 
Most SEO advice is pretty straightforward (and worn out): Optimize your title tags! Content is king! Use a sitemap!

I get all that. And that’s fine advice. And you should do it. But sometimes we need a little bit more — those under-the-hood optimizations that can move the needle even further for SEO. I’m about to give you seven of my secret weapons for doing just that.

Just so you don’t get your hopes up too high, I’m not providing any home run hacks that are going to boost you to the top of the SERPs by tomorrow morning. SEO doesn’t work that way. These seven techniques are reputable, slow-but-steady, and hard work.

But they do work.

SEO Tips - Dillip Kumar Barik - SEO Expert

1. Make Your Site Secure

Google has tipped its hand regarding one of their newest ranking factors: Site security.
In the summer of 2014, Google declared that HTTPS is now a ranking signal. Although its immediate impact on the search landscape is marginal, we can expect this signal to grow stronger as time goes on.

Security, with all its massive disruptions of late, is a big deal for users, and therefore for Google. We as SEOs need to understand this. Although we crave data — especially the data that gets snatched away from us (not provided) — we still need to respect the limits of privacy.
If you have the ability and/or resources, add encryption to your site. In addition to being a ranking signal, it is also a user signal. Sites with encryption are recognized in the SERPs with an “https://” preceding the URL, unlike non-secured sites.


This little change in the SERPs alerts conscientious users to the presence or absence of a security layer on a given site, which may in turn affect click-throughs, bounce rates, and dwell time.

2. Add Above-the-Fold Images or Videos With Full Optimization

We all know images and videos can improve a site’s ability to engage users. What we may not realize, however, is that such images can improve a site’s ranking in Image or Universal Search.
The click-through rates for no-image pages are, on average, lower than pages that contain images. Although the first position results gain higher CTRs (20% vs. 10%) for no-image pages, the tables turn in the third through tenth SERP positions. For these results, users show a preference for pages that contain images.
Here is research from Jim Yu in his discussion from Search Engine Land. The chart indicates CTRs for image vs. no-image SERP entries.

To make your images as SERP-supported as possible, you need to optimize them. Here are the most important features for optimization:

• Make the size of the image appropriate to the necessary resolution. Get the file as small as possible to improve page load times.
• Add alt text.
• Title the image appropriately, using keywords if at all possible.
• Use a good quality image. It’s for the users, remember.
• Add supporting Schema for the image.

You can use videos, too, with similar results in the SERPs. The additional effort of adding above-the-fold images and video is that it improves SERP rankings while also adding value for the user. Value for the user means your site visitors will click through more frequently, bounce less, stay longer, and thereby improve your rankings.

3. Create an Image Sitemap

Every search engine professional understands the importance of an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap. I’m suggesting that you create an image sitemap.
So, what’s an image sitemap? And how many sites even have one?
Not many sites have an image sitemap. That’s why we’re under the hood right now. This optimization will boost your rankings particularly in Google’s Image Search.
To create an image sitemap, simply add extra information about images on the page to your existing xml sitemap.
Here is Google’s example of a sitemap with image information:

You can add the following image tag definitions:
<image:image>
<image:loc>
<image:caption>
<image:geo_location>
<image:title>
<image:license>
If you want to gain additional image search traffic and ranking, this is a must-have optimization maneuver. Be sure to check out Google’s support article on the topic.

4. Regularly Review and Request Removals From Your Link Profile

Behind every site lurks a powerful and sometimes ominous force. It’s your link profile.
You have limited control over what sites link or don’t link to your site. You could become the victim of a negative SEO attack, or you could be rewarded by links from a high-authority government (.gov) or education (.edu) site.
But you do have some control. You should exercise this control in three ways:

• Monitor your link profile. Every now and then, scan through the list of sites that are linking to you. This data is available in Google Webmaster Tools. You can also purchase services that will scan your link profile for possible risk.
• Request low authority or spam sites remove their links to yours. A polite removal request is the best solution to spam links. Simply email the webmaster, informing them of the links and ask that they be removed.
• Submit a disavow file. Regardless of the SEO brouhaha over the issue, Google has provided a tool that allows you to disavow any links that you deem undesirable.

5. Create Keyword-Specific URLs

Aren’t ranking for a specific keyword? Check your URLs.
Exact match domains (EMD) are an SEO spam technique of yesteryear, but there is no question that Google still considers the URL to be a significant indication of a page’s relevance, and therefore a ranking factor.
Notice how each of these sites, top-ranked domains for a competitive keyword, have URL pages that use the exact query.

If you are angling for a longtail keyword, I suggest creating a specific targeted page that uses the keyword string in the URL.

6. Use Your Target Keywords Across The Entire Site

One of the lesser-utilized SEO techniques is employing a target keyword throughout the site as a whole. Many SEOs believe (mistakenly) that they can rank for a given keyword by churning out a few blog articles surrounding the keyword. They target a keyword by developing content on one or two pages, but they neglect its presence on the rest of the site.
In reality, Google prefers to see an entire domain that supports the keyword and its semantic variations.

Here’s how you can check this:

• Do a Google search for inurl:domain plus the selected keyword in quotation marks.
• Look at how many results Google provides.
• Compare this to as many domains or competitors as would be helpful.

Let me show you an example. In the screenshot above, I showed you how the website CreditKarma.com is outranking Experian.com for the keyword “what is a good credit score.”
I recently analyzed the SERPs for this keyword, and found that the top organic result has the highest sitewide saturation for the given keyword. I tested several other semantic variations and found it to be consistently true. The site with the highest sitewide occurrence of a given keyword ranked higher.
Look at the comparison. Here’s CreditKarma.com, the top organic result for “what is a good credit score.”

Here is Experian.com, the second organic result for the same keyword.

CreditKarma.com has 3,500% more occurrences of the keyword than Experian. Even though CreditKarma’s domain authority, page authority, and domain wide link quantity are lower, they still rank higher for that keyword.

My informal survey doesn’t prove that top results will always be backed by the highest occurrence of a keyword throughout the site, but it does suggest it is an important factor in Google’s ranking system. Sites that contain semantic variations and/or keywords throughout have a higher chance of ranking in the SERPs for any given keyword in that semantic domain.

7. Optimize Your Brand’s Social Profiles

Google’s Knowledge Graph is a significant aspect of SEO that we can’t ignore. Google recently began displaying the social profiles for brands directly in the Knowledge Graph.
It’s not apparent how this will roll out for small to mid-sized businesses. Most of the results I’ve seen are for large corporate brands.
My sense is that Google will continue to refine KG settings to bring up a full array of information for most brands that have optimized social profiles. It’s worth giving some optimization effort to your social accounts.

8. Add Schema Everywhere

According to a study by Searchmetrics, Schema markup shows up in more than a third of all Google’s search results. With this huge SERP preference for Schema, you’d think that sites would be flocking to implement Schema snippets wherever they could.
Well, apparently not. A mere 0.3% of Internet domains are using Schema integration.

This definitely falls into an under-the-hood optimization technique. Learning schema isn’t that difficult, and it will certainly look familiar if you have any coding background or awareness of structured data.
Google has even given you some help with their Structured Data Markup Helper.

Conclusion

No matter where you are at on your SEO journey, there is always more to do. You can spend months optimizing, optimizing, optimizing, and never actually reaching a pinnacle of perfection. However, these under-the-hood optimization techniques will bring you closer to perfection than most sites.

Blogging Inspiration, Top Blogging Ideas for Business Blogs

Even if you have the best intentions in the world, coming up with a constant stream of new ideas for blog posts can be pretty intimidating. All too soon, the corporate blog lies empty because the company has run out of ideas. Don’t let that happen to you! From company brainstorms to new ways of planning copy, we are going to provide you with some great tips on how to generate ideas for blog content.

WARNING: This is a long post, but we think it’s worth the read (and hopefully you’ll agree). If you really don’t have time then there’s a list of our top tips at the end!

Use your Colleagues

Brainstorms can be a brilliant way to come up with interesting blog ideas. Don’t limit yourself to asking only the PR or SEO teams though, invite people from across your business to contribute to a brainstorming session. They might not have the skills needed to write good content, but they may have insights and opinions that will help you generate great ideas.

Speak to your partners, colleagues, and employees, and listen to them to decide what would best suit the needs of your company. Then, come up with something you can write about which takes this on board.

You might even want to talk to some of your regular and trusted customers, to find out what they’re interested in, as there’s a good chance other potential customers will share those same interests.

Remember why you’re blogging. In the case of a corporate blog it’s usually to generate business – so put your audience first and write for them, not for your own interests. You might be delighted to finally have a platform to rave about your travels, but your corporate clients won’t care.

One key consideration is to make sure everything you write is both useful and interesting. That’s the best way to maintain a high standard for your blog.

Become a Serial Killer

Serializing your blog posts can be a great way of producing killer copy over the medium term, rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket. By producing a series of posts on the same topic, you increase the apparent relevance of your site for that subject – and give your readers some other pages to click onto.

Serial articles can help keep people interested in your blog and encourage them to return for more useful content on a relevant subject. You could consider writing a series of how-to articles, or reviews of products, industry publications, or even Twitter accounts from within your sector.

At its best, this approach can encourage readers to come back for the next instalment, creating a steady flow of visits. So, if you’re relying on serial posts to get people back to your site, you might want to stick to a regular schedule for maximum effect.

One caveat – don’t flog a subject to death. There is nothing worse than reading a series of posts which do nothing but re-iterate the same ideas over and over again. If you have nothing new to say on a topic then it’s time to find something new to write about.

Please Read.......

Simple enough to be summed up in a single word, ‘read’ is one of the best pieces of advice that can be given to any writer. The more you read other people’s blogs – even if they’re not relevant to your industry – the more you’ll understand what makes for engaging content.

You also need to read people’s blog comments and take on board what they’re saying, both on your blog and other people’s. This will help you to understand which sort of posts are good and which aren’t.

Once you’ve gained this understanding, as well as gathering some new ideas, the trick is to turn them into something that is not only engaging and entertaining, but which also meets your marketing or lead-generation needs.

Remember, it’s not just new ideas that you can pick up by reading other blogs – you might also improve your grammar and style along the way.

Invite Guest Bloggers

Consider asking an industry influencer if they’d like to contribute to your corporate blog. They are likely to be flattered, so it could be good for networking, and they will publicize it to all their Twitter followers and online circle, which can lead to some new traffic for your blog.

Just one word of warning: agree how you’ll edit their copy in advance. People can be very protective of their work and may not be happy if you’ve gone through it with a red pen. Edit their work lightly and send it back to them for approval before publishing.

Break the Rules.......

Finally, a fallback option is to go out and break all the known rules about corporate blogging. But, if you take this option, on your own head be it! Every so often you will find a corporate blog that has almost nothing to do with the company that publishes it, but focuses on something like environmental sustainability or charity work instead.

You might also see ‘corporate’ blogs that are purely for entertainment purposes, filled with jokes, or comic strips, or pictures of cats. When you’re this far outside of the box, there are very few hard and fast rules left to break, but get it right and you could give your brand a huge boost in positive perception as a result.

The only caveat to this is that it’s always wise to have plenty of plain text along with any images, info-graphics, videos, and so on. If you can get some relevant language into it then so much the better, even if it’s just ‘After a hard day working on our new landlords’ insurance document, we’ve been relaxing with some polecats. Enjoy!’

That way, even if you’re giving your visitors something fun to look at, you’re still delivering the search-visible text content that will help to get you into the search engine results.

However, I wouldn’t recommend this as a good way to write a corporate blog. Nine times out of 10 it’s not a clever quirky marketing strategy, it’s down to ego, and it brings little benefit to the business.

Five golden rules.......

Ultimately, there are just five things you need to consider when writing corporate blogs.

Your posts need to be:

-- Relevant -- Timely -- Frequent -- Personable -- Useful

These are the golden rules for great blog content so never publish anything without considering those first.

Top Blogging Tips......

If you’re still struggling for blog ideas, try some of these top tips:

1. Look at current trends, extrapolate them, and make a prediction for the future of your industry.
2. Do an introduction to 10 of the best up-and-coming bloggers in your field.
3. Find a current topic of debate and express your own, new, different view on the issue.
4. Make a list of common myths and misconceptions about your industry and then debunk them.
5. Satirise a well-known personality – it can be someone inside or outside your industry.
6. Look at a big brand, and analyse both their good and bad points – show where they’re using best practise techniques and where they’re making mistakes.
7. Find a recent piece from a high-level personality in your industry, disagree with it, and prove them and their opinions wrong.
8. Do a case study of something that went wrong in your business. Analyse the mistakes and explain how you fixed them.
9. Break some news about your company, e.g. revealing a new product.
10. Write a list of the vital web tools and software people in your industry can’t do without.
11. Compare the old and new ways of conducting your business.
12. Write an allegory about your idol doing your business e.g. “How Steve Jobs Would’ve Done SEO” or “The Bruce Lee Approach to Marketing”.
13. Go to a trade fair or industry event and report on it.
14. Do a comparison of your national market to markets abroad.
15. Review a book which deals with your industry – particularly if it contains some interesting outside the box thinking.
16. Find out about something new for your industry – a tool, a website, a method etc. – and write about it.
17. Identify industry leaders in your area and ask them to do a guest post.
18. Write a code of business ethics for your industry.
19. Conduct an interview with a prominent or rising industry figure and write it up.
20. Check Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Quora to find out what’s most popular right now, and what questions people are seeking answers to. Then provide the information they want on your blog.

Matt Cutts of Google Talks About Parked Domain Content

Google has released a new Webmaster Help video. It's another one of those in which Matt Cutts answers his own question. This time, it's:

I have a parked domain and want to launch a new website on it. Are there any pitfalls I should avoid? Should I keep my domain parked or put some sort of stub page there?

"Google does have a parked domain detector," says Cutts. "You've probably seen this” where you land on the page, and there's the lady with the backpack smiling at you, and it's like, 'Click here to learn about whatever,' and those pages aren't as useful. Users don't like to see them, and they complain when they do see them, so we do have a parked domain detector that we run, and then when we detect that a page is parked, or a domain is parked, then we try not to show those pages in our search results."

"The fact is that if you leave your domain parked right up until you launch, it might take a little while for us to re-crawl that page and reprocess it, and for the parked domain detector to really believe that it's no longer parked," he continues. "So, my advice would be, once you buy a domain, if you do intend to put something there (you know, a month, a few weeks whatever, beforehand), just write a paragraph or two or three, and say, 'This will be the future home of xyz. We're going to be the world's number one source of red widgets or blue widgets or green widgets,' or whatever it is that you're planning to do."

"Even if it's mysterious, just make sure that you write a paragraph of text or two," he adds. "It's not just an empty page or like a completely empty web template, because we do try to detect that sort of behavior."

He notes that if there is already some kind of content, Google won't have to learn that the page is not parked, when you're actually ready to launch.

Content Marketing Tips for Website SEO Promotion

Before starting content marketing, you should have fundamental knowledge about your audience, the ways to generate great content and to use those in your websites or blogs for online visitors. For more details you may visit my older posts, but before we dig deeper into succeeding with a content marketing plan, we need to decide what success looks like. The most reliable way to do that is to define and track metrics over time. You’ll not only get a great picture of whether you’re succeeding, but knowing what works and what doesn't will help you do more of the former and less of the later.

First, let’s discuss what metrics we are talking about. At the simplest levels, we are talking about things like:

• Page views, unique visitors, pages per visit, length of visit for websites
• Followers/friends/fans and sharing for social media
• Subscribers and click-through for email

But to succeed in this online market, particularly if you need to defend a content marketing budget to C-level executives, there is more to measure. The metrics listed above are proxies, really. They may not have cost much to create, but the question is “do they return more than they cost?”

That’s why it’s important that business metrics be a part of your success equation, as well. And that means sales or subscribers or generating qualified leads.

There are four types of content marketing metrics: consumption, sharing, leads, and sales. Most marketers overvalue the first two (blog page views and re-tweets, for example) and undervalue the last two (email subscriptions from people who first read the blog and, ultimately, sales from among that group). If you focus your metrics on behavior, rather than on data aggregation, you’ll be measuring points of greater business value.

Don’t discount the importance of tracking how your consumption and sharing are changing over time, but have in mind that those measures are most relevant in relation to how they affect your business goals: this month’s email newsletter click through rate was double our norm. Did sales double that week?

You are probably one step ahead of me already, asking the question, “But how do I know if my sales increase can be attributed to my content marketing?” That can be a tough question for many of us.

It’s easy if your latest email newsletter or social media post has a link to a landing page with a “Buy Now” button on it. But for most marketers, you have to be careful in attributing conversions to your various marketing efforts even if you’re doing things like segmenting leads via gated content links on your website.

The classic example: someone clicks through to a landing page but not ready to buy. A month later, when they want to buy, they mayn’t have the URL of the landing page handy, but they remember your company name. A quick Google search lands them on your home page, and from there they initiate their purchase.

Cases like this make it important to view your metrics in relation to one another and not always individually; content marketing vs. direct mail vs. outbound telephone sales. Yes, you want to evaluate which is most effective, but you also want to leave room for the bleed between efforts that will always occur.

The most important advantage is to know how to interpret the data as important as the data itself.

Make Website more User Friendly Instead of Emphasizing on Backlinks

Making a website more user-friendly with eye-catching look and feel, proper navigation and adequate information with unique quality content is much more important than emphasizing on collecting backlinks. Although link building is a very essential process of search engine ranking algorithm considered by Google; the importance of making a website more visitors oriented can never be underestimated. There are some factors like informative and engaging content, unique quality services and attractive design which able to drive unique traffic for your website.

As the owner of a website you will obviously try hard to create a very good reputation not only for yourself but also for your organization. So it is obvious for people to believe that poor or degraded quality incoming links will lead the particular website is not good.
Also it does not seem to belong to any good neighborhoods and over time this will going to affect your websites ranking and bring it down considerably.

Some other factors which relate to this are the attractive design and appeal of the website, the arrangement and spacing of words, informative content in a particular webpage. Also the navigation and functionality of links present in different web pages or how easily a user is able to identify his answer to a particular query is also as significant.

Links coming from lower quality and free for all websites should not be a matter of concern for you as this is not the only aspect, which Google sees as a condition for judging quality of your website. If your website is attractive, user friendly and of a good structure, then you will definitely score better than others in this respect. A regularly maintained and well constructed and informative website is always appreciated by any user more than anything else.

It is always possible for any owner to not only have a website of high quality but also have back links of good quality. This is always possible in this ideal world. There always remains a concern that a user’s perception about a particular website might get affected or be negative if the user comes to know about the website from a bunch of links, which are actually full of spam.

Now it is advisable to get detached from these links coming from spammy websites. This can only be done if the poor quality links are actually manageable. You should give a try at contacting the owner of the concerned website and personally asking them to remove links pointing your website. It is however to be kept in mind that Google does not perform any such things on your behalf, also they don’t perform content management of any sort, they only perform indexing of any content found over the net.

You should not worry on this for too long because of uncooperative owner. Rather than it will be better to focus and concentrate on things which are under your direct control because as a webmaster you can hardly control links to a website. So it is better to go for website reviews from forums of webmaster, manage your content well conduct usability studies which will help you improve ranking and indexing to a great extent. Also you can take a leaf out from your competitors into what strategy they are employing and why you would visit their website more.

Finally try and remember that links of lower quality will hardly impact you in the long run but factors under your control like a website’s view, organization, and usability will always affect it positively.

Top 10 SEO and Link Building Mistakes

Mistake 1 – Neglecting On-page Optimization:

I think more people are beginning to understand the importance of on-page optimization when it comes to ranking their web pages. With so much focus on keywords and link building though, often I see webmasters focusing too heavily on the “off page” stuff, without realizing what they do “on” their website is just as important. Proper internal linking, keyword density, LSI, image text, no follow tags, just to name a few, are also very important to search engines. There are free plugins available to help you with a lot of this stuff, so do your due diligence and implement whatever strategies need be.

Mistake 2 – Freaking Out When Rankings Plummet:

SEO Tips - SEO Services India

Go onto any internet marketing forum and you will see this every single time. People are literally freaking out when they see their rankings drop. Most often this is due to a thing we call the Google dance. All new websites go through what is called a “honeymoon” period where their websites rank very well at the beginning, but after a couple of weeks they settle in the search results… usually at a much lower ranking, again, this is natural. 

If your websites have age and have dropped in rankings, you may need to work harder to get your position back. You may need to update your content more often, you may need to build more backlinks or you may need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. Google’s algorithm is changing frequently these days so it’s important to find out what they want, and go give it to them. The days of gaming the system through black-hat techniques is coming to an end.

Mistake 3 – Writing for the Search Engines:

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see being made day in and day out. Webmasters are writing terrible content that is keyword stuffed for the bots. While it is important to have a certain keyword structure within your content so that the search engines know what your content is about, it is very important that you write for the human visitor FIRST. Some say for every 100 words, you should have your keyword inserted once. So, if you have a 1000 word post, you will put your target keyword into the article 10 times. I think this is a good rule of thumb to follow.

Make sure that when you read your article out loud, that it sounds natural and not robotic like. Always remember if inserting your keyword too often into your post takes away from the natural flow of the article itself… then do not do it. Google is clamping down really hard on over optimized websites. Always write with your target human visitor in mind.

Mistake 4 – Building Thousands of Low Quality Links:

I cannot believe this is still going on with all of the changes Google has made. There are still idiots out there blasting thousands of links to their money sites in the hope of climbing the SERPs. I was offered 10,000 free links the other day to my website and I told the person to take a run and jump. Those kinds of links are going to have an adverse affect on your ranking. It has to be bloody obvious that Google hates these kinds of links and, if your business is solely dependent on this kind of strategy, then you are playing the fools game. One solid PR5 backlink from a relevant site will be far more powerful than a million links from low quality, non-relevant crappy sites.

Mistake 5 – Not Being Aware of No-follow and Do-follow Links:

When I first started out in this industry I had no idea about these two terms. I built a lot of links to one of my first websites and it was taking forever to gain traction in the SERPs. After a bit of investigating I found that almost all of my backlinks were placed on web pages that were no-follow. Needless to say, those links were just not as effective for rankings as the do-follow links I needed. I’m not saying that no-follow links don’t have their place. In fact, it’s important to have diversity in your linking structure, but most of your links must be do-follow to gain maximum benefit.

Mistake 6 – Expecting Quick Results:

I know when I first started online, I expected to make a lot of money fairly quickly. Boy was I brought back down to earth over the next 6 – 12 months. I almost threw in the towel on more than one occasion because it became very frustrating, trying to make this thing work for me. I built website after website, built a hell of a lot of backlinks, wrote hundreds of articles and participated in all the social media sites, but, it just wasn’t happening as quick as I was led to believe it would.

I realized later on that NOBODY makes money online quickly. They all have to put in the hard work. Your progress can be accelerated if you are willing to spend some cash and outsource a lot of the grunt work, but in my experience, expecting to make money very quickly online usually works against you in the long run. The failure rate is so high because people find this out the hard way.

Mistake 7 – Not Being Consistent:

If you are serious about making money online then you must be consistent every single day with your efforts. This can be the biggest stumbling block for many. It almost was for me. You can work very hard to get top search engine rankings for a particular keyword, but even after the fact, you still have to be consistent with your efforts, else your competitors will overtake you fairly quickly. Everything you do in regards to your online business has got to be consistent. You must put the work in everyday if you are to see the results you’re after.

Mistake 8 – Not Diversifying Your Link Building:

To make your link building look natural, it’s important to gain backlinks from many different sources. Backlinks from just article directories and no other places for example, do not look natural and can hurt your rankings. You need to get links from social media sites, article directories, blogs, blog comments, forums etc. Diversifying your link building looks natural and can put you ahead of your competitors in the search results. A naturally good website will get links from many places, not just one or two.

Mistake 9 – Not Getting High Page Rank Links:

Every day you are back linking, you should be looking to place your links onto high PR websites. Google values links placed on higher PR websites exponentially higher than low PR websites. These links are obviously harder to get, but that is exactly the point. The harder it is to get a link, the more valuable that link is likely to be. This is why all these push button software programs that can get you thousands of links are crap. You will not come across a software program that gets you high quality backlinks with the push of a button. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or a moron.

Mistake 10 – Not Updating Your Content Often Enough:

Obviously the more high quality backlinks pointing to your content, the higher your search engine rankings will be. You will then get lots of free traffic. While this is the basic approach that everybody uses to climb the SERPs, there is another way. Google loves websites that update often. I have built a website that has very few backlinks pointing to it that gets me 10,000 visitors a month from the search engines. The reason for this is because I regularly update my content.

I see webmasters spending so much time building backlinks to their websites every day. This is important of course, but if they actually spent an hour each day writing a new post for their website, they would get far more traffic further down the line. I know this works because I have used this approach many times in the past. With all the Panda’s and Penguins about these days, I have found my websites gain higher search rankings, simply because I always have fresh content on my sites. If you do not want to write every day, then write at least 3 times a week – it helps.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Concepts for Better Website Ranking

Sometimes another form of language and imagery is required in order to communicate vast ideas for common consumption. This is one of such instances where an array of algorithmic functions will be given a conceptual vehicle to map their role in the creation of a top 10 search engine ranking.

Since the concept of the universe is a great model, we will borrow concepts originating from planetary forces ranging to universal phenomenon like gravity, orbits, the concept of the internet being a giant nebula of computers sharing virtual space and employing data retrieval, etc. Bear in mind, this is only an interpretation.

If you can visualize your website as a dot and each keyword as its own orbiting sphere of concentric influence, you have to create a series of eventful transactions (like creating content over time, building links, having a supportive format for internal linking) that classify and elevate your website as a candidate for relevance within the center of the sphere of influence for that keyword.

By viewing each keyword as a cumulative objective (like peeling away the layers of an onion) once you reach the center, your site radiates a beacon in all directions whenever a broad match or more general search is conducted with those keywords as search queries.

When you first start a website, since the site is empty your relevance is also at zero. As you continue to add content to your site (like filling up a glass with liquid) the site begins to take on a particular persona based upon what content is contained within the site.

As a result, your site creates its own orbit and gravitational pull where the content and subjects traversed within the context of your pages become beacons that attract similar orbiting keywords, concepts and semantic variations.

The analogies presented are to elaborate on the function of search engine algorithms which essentially consolidate each site into a type of conical tube that best describes the subject matter it contains. Then based on the vacuum created when someone actually invokes those qualities (through a linear search) the search bridges the gap and projects through all of the other spheres of influence (from the web) to extract the most relevant pieces of data and reformats them for communication via retrieval.

In order to appear as the most relevant result, your site must have enough supporting relevance from external clusters (others sites) that also contain the same type of data cloud (a collective summary of the sites content) which can change forms (like a liquid to a gas, a gas to a solid) and act as a homing signal to create continuity between its own orbit (on the micro level) and serve as a piece of the puzzle for the main theme in the index (as a part of the whole like a planet in the solar system, which belongs to a galaxy, etc.).

The Job of search engines is to be able to index, retrieve and create order from all of the orbits created from each websites signature as it occupies the cloud of online space (data shared across multiple servers), gauge a metric and then determine the usefulness of the metric and how it applies to a query (which like a vacuum) is seeking the most relevant result.

Just think of a search as pure potential that does not exist until executed, then on assembly its purpose is to seek out the most likely orbit (website) using the nebulous data cloud (the web) to bridge the gap using a vacuum that through traversing aggregate links and other sites (through assessing their relevance score) until it finds the most suitable supporting environment.

If you can use this visual map as a blueprint, then you understand that rankings are all a result of how strong the broadcast signal is, signal strength in this capacity is based on relevance, continuity and popularity. In order to produce a ranking of such magnitude (such as a competitive keyword) you must move from the outermost bounds of the keywords sphere of influence, into its center to attain the top ranking result.

The stages involved are research, planning, execution, testing, refinement, collaboration and strategy.

If any of the steps are excluded in does not mean you still cannot create top 10 placements for your website, it is just that if reproducing the phenomenon is important to you, then understanding the proper chronology and strategy behind the tactics should concern you. For example, topical relevance, site synergy / persona, authority and orderliness all impact placement for your website.

1) Research - You need to research the appropriate keywords to develop the appropriate gravity in your own site to attract the search engines crawlers (who index the content and include the site approximation of relevance score).

2) Planning - After finding your semantic base, create topical fields of information (multiple keyword-rich pages) within the site (using a content management system) or supporting site architecture. If search engines cannot retrieve the data (based on crawling errors from bots, poor site architecture or otherwise) then you is automatically excluded from participating with other forms of life contained in digital space (the web).

3) Execution - Build links, either through internal linking (if you have an authority site that is enough) or through external links from other sites (data clusters with relevance) that have similar signatures containing the topical relevance shared by your own site.

The closer the relevance between things like (a) is the site from the same industry or niche (b) is there related content between the sites (c) what keywords are used to link to and from the two sites (the vacuum) and (d) where each site resides in the overall relevance model for each of the overlapping keywords they both share, gives the target site the opportunity to receive a jolt of authority through osmosis and synergistic infusion. The bottom line is the quality of the links, but topical relevance also adds even more weight to the orbit of the site receiving the link from an external site.

4) Testing – Test the results, ping the site from using a beacon in the nebula, use a search engine to determine how close to the center of the keywords your site has become. If you targeted 10 keywords for example and dedicated an ample amount of time, effort and energy to build a coherent series of pages on the site, created strong internal linking and then found at least 5 sources for links to each page (with a wide array of IP diversity) in other words not from the same series of sites, then you should have created enough orbital relevance as well as made a strong impression on the ethers in the data cloud (your sites algorithmic counterpart) to appear as a relevant result.

5) Refinement - If your website did not make the grade (is not ranking yet) then you can always (1) wait for all of the factors to settle a bit more and then re-evaluate the keyword saturation (2) build more content and shore up your main subject or subjects or (3) look for other sites with authority that can augment your sites reputation online (in the nebulous data cloud known as the web).

6) Collaboration - Moving a website closer to the center of a series of keywords requires understanding. You need to know that each time you add a page or a link it changes (1) the sites internal topical relevance and orbit / signature and (2) how other sites and keywords within the web react to it based on the search engines algorithm. The translation here is, by viewing each keyword as a cumulative apex, you can set in motion a series of events to create a chain reaction to close the gap for those keywords.

More competitive phrases may take many months to a year or more, other phrases in the nebula (the web) may only take a few hours or a few days at best to acquire. The point being, your websites orbit is entirely up to you, how others link to it and the collective blueprint it leaves on its environment in the nebula however is another part of the equation that you have to sculpt over time through releasing consistent information on a topic to reinforce the basis of its existence.

7) Strategy - the strategy is simple, rank for as many keywords that either funnel relevant traffic to your site or overlap with a series of other keywords that have latent potential down the road. The web is all about multiple layers overlapping and linking through internalization and expression. These two dynamic attributes are responsible for moving from site to site or from page to page within a website. Depending on your ability to see beyond the immediate goal (which is to create relevance) the real goal is to create a hub where your site literally overlaps with thousands of keywords and then refines each branch to delve deep into the long-tail as well as hit the high notes with the most sought after two word phrases as well.

By using the concepts such as topical relevance, gravity, orbit, continuity, the query-based vacuum, the nebulous data cloud and information retrieval in a way that anyone can understand, creating a systemic method for creating relevance is a by product which means multiple top 10 rankings to claim as trophies that increase website traffic.