Top 21 SEO Tips and Tricks

Google says on the record, “Don’t write for Search Engines, Write for your readers/audience/users.” While this may sound ridiculous, there are plenty of reasons to follow the advice. More often, newbie falls in the trap and often gets confused where to start from. Don’t sound to be too harsh, but do not always listen to almighty Google.

We (bloggers & web entrepreneurs) are mere small creatures and we must write for our readers/users while keeping search engine behavior at the corner of our brain! Producing great content that reader’s love is something not everyone’s cup of team. So how would you start your venture as an expert? What are the best SEO practices that you should follow? Without further ado, let me present you top 20 SEO Tips.

Excellent SEO Tips to Follow

I have used an adjective here – Special. These tips are special not because they are something that you have never heard of, but they are special as you have not understood these basic ones quite effectively!

Keyword Analysis inclusive of Competition Analysis

1. Determine Strategy for Keywords

This must be your first and foremost step. You should be clear with your goals that what keywords you want to play around with. This depends on what you want to gain by your online presence and venture. The question in the previous sentence can be answered with information regarding your target audience.

It may look like a flow chart or catch 22 for you, don’t worry, you are right and it is so. We have solutions for it. You can use certain keyword tools like www.keywordspy.com, www.spyfu.com, www.ispionage.com and www.compete.com. In order to get complete market scenario you must look at your competitor’s website. You can enter that website’s URL to any of the mentioned tools and get an estimation of competition.

2. List the Potential Keywords

You have now, different results from different tools as all of them use different methodology. You can collaborate all the results depending on your common analytical sense and list out 50-100 potential keywords. Create an MS Excel sheet for these Keywords.

3. Check Competition of Keywords

Keyword competition is something most newbies/expert ignores. While sorting out bunch of keywords from Google adword keywords tool is the first step to follow, people often forget that the checking Keyword competition is equally important. There are plenty of tools available out there, but we recommend trying out tools like Traffictravis first.

Later, you can go for the premium tools like SEOMoz keyword difficulty and SERPIQ keyword competition analysis tool. Both the tools deliver the great result and cut down considerable work required in doing competition analysis as well as keyword competition analysis.

On Page SEO Tips

4. HTML

Use a content management service such as WordPress, Blogger or Drupal and optimize your HTML tags with the keywords. Make sure you also maintain text to HTML ratio. Always try to keep the ratio high so that Google can understand your content better.

5. Title

Keep the character count under 70 and preferably under 66. Use various plugins available for various content management platforms for SEO. The Word Press beginners should start with WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to make on page SEO as much better as they can. There are also many third-party paid options available in the market, but we do not recommend using them.

6. Meta Tags & Description

Your keyword must be there in your Meta tag and description. Your meta description must be in the vicinity of 157 characters. This is most important as Search Engines read Meta description for understanding the post content.

7. URL and/or Permalinks

Your page URL must contain your key word or keyword phrase. If it is a phrase, words must be separated by hyphens. Use some plugins to remove stop words from the URL/permalinks. It’s always good to minimize the use of STOP word in the permalink

8. First Paragraph

While this is not necessary a big factor in ranking, try to include important keyword in first paragraph, so Google can clearly understand what the topic is about. While there is no hard and fast rule, make sure you include primary keyword within first few words of the article.

9. Content Length

As per Guidelines provide by Google, the length of your content must be more than 300 words. We advise you to write content with word count above 500 words. (It will help to protect you from “Animal Hit”). However, we recommend to go over 600-700 mark whenever possible. Instead of writing a simple post without proper information, you should focus your energy to provide quality content with necessary bullet point and images to back-up what you say.

10. Content Quality

Your content must be unique. Thinly copied contents are also getting Panda Hit nowadays so stay away from copy and plagiarism. Make sure you follow proper internal linking strategy without over optimizing anchor text.

11. Keyword Density

Keyword density must be between 2-4%. It means your keyword must not be repeated more than twice or thrice in each 100 words block so if your are writing a 500 words post your keyword count must not exceed 10-15 repetitions. If it does, then Google will count it as over optimization.

12. Image Optimization

Optimize Image ALT tag with your keyword. It is always a good idea to save the image name with the keyword and upload them on the server with the same name. Also attach necessary ALT tag to the image, so Google can understand what the image depicts. Remember, Google is blind, and you need to supply information to Google to understand the image. Moreover, try to provide a wrap up text to explain what the image is all about. This will increase the relevancy as well.

Sitemap

13. Sitemap Submission

Submit your site to the major search engines. Create an XML site map and make sure the search engines can find your site map. Use Google’s webmaster’s tools to verify your sitemap is being read correctly: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

14. HTML Sitemap

Creating an HTML sitemap is an essential part of your SEO endeavors. This confirms you that search engine crawlers are crawling the site properly.

Back-End

15. Avoid DHTML and Excessive HTML

Search Engines can’t read DHTML menus quite easily, so avoid them in your menu. Also, try to maintain HTML to text ratio. Having too many HTML makes the ratio high which is often undesired. Make sure you provided meaningful insight in each and every paragraph and/or article by providing more text.

16. Avoid Major Content in PDF or Flash

Publish your content in HTML format instead of Adobe PDF and Flash. Valuable content that is locked in these formats cannot be easily crawled and indexed.

17. Robots.txt

Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly to include and exclude the appropriate directories and files on your website. This file instructs search engines that which portion of your site is not accessible to search engines. Often people misunderstand this concept which results in duplicate content or the description is unavailable due to robots.txt configuration.

Off Page Optimization

18. Use Social Media Effectively

Market your content on various social networks and media. Try various titles and descriptions that can engage users with your online venture. Initially, target twitter, Facebook, Google+, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn and Reddit. Google is now giving more importance to social media signals to rank website. Now is the time to utilize social media platform and turn the tale in your favor.

19. Generate Quality Backlinks

There are various techniques to generate backlinks. Guest post on other high authority site from same niche, Commenting on the posts related to your site content, Forum Posting and many more techniques are there which should be used moderately to gain more trust. Well, backlink is itself a big chapter and can cover tons of pages, but we do not want to go that route for the moment.

Please note that Google introduced an update called Penguin to penalize the overly optimized sites, which means that those sites which are having spam backlinks and using black hat Backlink techniques. 

Analysis

20. Use Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website. ( http://www.google.com/analytics/ )If you’ve already done this, use the data from: Traffic Sources > Keywords to find additional keywords you may want to optimize.

21. Keyword tracking

Tracking your major campaign and keywords in the Google will give you clear information about your efforts. It’s therefore very necessary to keep track of your entire keyword ranking. For this purpose, you can use free and paid tools available online. Even, you can manually track the keyword in the Google. We recommend using “whatsmyserp.com” or similar service to check your keyword ranking.

Hopefully, the above SEO tips will help you to start your new venture or website. Make sure you follow each and every one of them closely.

6 Changes Your 2015 SEO Strategy Must Focus On

SEO is constantly changing. New updates are released, new trends are discussed and new strategies are developed. It is something that will constantly evolve.

In 2014 alone, there have already been 13 updates to Google’s algorithm, according to Moz’s change history. These are just the notable and more public ones -- there are refreshes and changes almost daily behind the scenes.

1. Create and optimize for mobile traffic

Back in 2012 ComScore predicted that mobile traffic would exceed desktop traffic in 2014, and they were correct. Google has always said that it feels responsive websites provide the best user experience, and recently starting including a “mobile-friendly” notation next to websites in mobile search results that are indeed mobile friendly.

You can see if your website passes Google’s mobile-friendly test by clicking here. Bing has also stated it prefers a single responsive URL.

2. Optimizing for Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo

Could 2015 be the year that some other search engines begin to take more market share? It seems like this is the million-dollar question every year, but some recent developments suggest that it could be possible.

Firefox kicked Google to the curb and Yahoo will now be the default search engine for the browser. Google’s deal is also up with Safari in 2015, and reports have both Bing and Yahoo trying to secure that spot. The option to switch default browsers in iOS 8 and OS X from Google to DuckDuckGo also exists.

With options other than Google becoming more popular and accepted it will make it important to have visibility across these search engines in addition to just Google.

3. Switch your focus from keyword rankings to ROI metrics

If you or your SEO company is still putting an emphasis on keyword rankings and determining the success of the campaign based on keyword positions, then it is time for a major wake up call. Ranking reports can be made to look pretty and some SEO companies will even target useless keywords just to say, “Hey look -- you are ranking number one!”

If you are a business owner spending money every month on SEO, what would you rather hear from your SEO agency?

“Congratulations, you are ranking number one for ‘buy blue widgets online’ but we aren’t sure what that translates into dollar wise.”

“The infographic that we published last month resulted in earning 67 links and it was also responsible for 45 conversions and $22,480 in revenue.”

Do you want a fancy PDF ranking report or do you want to know what your return on investment was? 

4. More focused social-media approach

Social media was once just a platform to share content, so businesses would sign up for every social platform under the sun and blast their content everywhere. Social media is now a marketing channel as well as a customer-service channel. Your social audience expects your brand to engage with them on a more personal level.

It is more effective to focus on two or three social-media platforms and be very active and accommodating. This not only helps you generate more leads, sales and revenue, but it also helps to build a very loyal following that will share your content. This can introduce new people to your brand and even present opportunities to earn links.

5. Earning links rather than building links

Through all of the updates and algorithm changes over the years one thing remains the same: inbound links are the most influential signal of trust and authority. This isn’t going to change -- not in 2015 or anytime soon.

The days of building links on irrelevant blogs and chasing large quantities of links to game the search results are over. Earning a single link on a high-quality relevant website is valuable for multiple reasons including SEO, attracting referral traffic, leads, sales and branding exposure. Look for traditional PR and SEO to work closer together in 2015.

6. Targeting more precise keywords and search phrases

The days of targeting broad keywords are coming to an end. While they tend to have a huge search volume, they don’t attract highly targeted traffic and they are expensive to rank. Targeting long-tail search queries not only attracts qualified “buyer” traffic, but these terms will typically have much less competition. Keyword research along with understanding the shopping and purchase patterns of the target consumer can help to identify search terms and phrases to go after.

What is Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate for the homepage, or any other page through which visitors enter your site, tells you how many people 'bounce' away (leave) from your site after viewing one page.

So, if the bounce rate from your homepage is 30% (which is relatively low), that means that 30% of your visitors ‘bounce away’ from your homepage.

The concept is designed to tell you how your homepage performs. Keep in mind that different types of resources, for example, products, services, or information, will have different bounce rates and usage patterns.

How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate 

Set Realistic Expectations: Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rates

• Content Websites: 40-60%
• Lead Generation: 30-50%
• Blogs: 70-98%
• Retail Sites:  20-40%
• Service Sites: 10-30%
• Landing Pages: 70-90%

Attract the Right Visitors

• Choose the right keywords to match your content -- not just to attract the most number of visitors.
• Create multiple landing pages with unique content and keywords for your different buyer personas.
• Maintain top rankings for branded terms.
• Write attractive, useful Meta descriptions for search engine users.
• Improve targeting of online advertising campaigns.

Enhance Usability

• Make your text readable through sensible organization and the use of larger fonts, bulleted lists, white space, good color contrast, and large headlines.
• Use well-organized, responsive layouts that allow for quick and easy navigation on all platforms and browsers .

Speed Up Page Load Time

• Use little or no self-loading multimedia content.
• Set external links to open in new browser windows/tabs.
• Don’t let ads distract from your content: Place static ads to sides, and avoid pop-ups and self-loading multimedia ads.

Provide Quality Content

• Have an obvious main message.
• Use clear headers and subheads.
• Tailor content to intended visitors.
• Use stylish copy and images.
• Make your content error-free.
• Include a clear call-to-action and obvious links to next steps.

What is a good/average bounce rate?

It depends.  The average website bounce rate is 40% (source: Google).  But this is completely meaningless, because what constitutes a good bounce rate varies by:

• industry
• brand credibility
• type of site
• type of page
• step in the funnel (where the page is in the site)
• stage of the customer lifecycle
• user intent
• and many other potential factors.

But I digress and would like to give you some high level bounce rate examples for your reference.

Google Analytics Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rate

• 40-60% Content websites
• 30-50% Lead generation sites
• 70-98% Blogs
• 20-40% Retail sites
• 10-30% Service sites
• 70-90% Landing pages

Final Tip on Bounce rate – Segment!

Keep in mind that user expectations and intent varies based on many factors.  To avoid bounce rate from deceiving you, we highly recommend segmenting your data.  In aggregate, the bounce rate can look good or bad, but be just the opposite or be hiding substantial problems.

Here are a few segmentation examples to consider that can help you better evaluate your site and marketing performance.

• Location - If your company is a local business serving San Francisco, you should expect a high bounce rate from outside of California.  If you are a local business, definitely segment your traffic to understand how traffic is performing within your local area and avoid it being skewed by irrelevant visits.
• Device – A desktop user, tablet user and a mobile user often have different intent.  For example, we expect more people to bounce on a mobile device than a desktop/tablet user, because mobile users are often looking for specific info like an answer to a question versus casually browsing or shopping.  Keep in mind that bounce rates are higher on sites that don’t provide a mobile optimized site experience such as responsive design.
• New vs Returning – A returning visitor has different intent than does a new visitor.  It is common for new visitors to have a higher bounce rate than returning visitors since they are less familiar with your brand.  You should segment your traffic to optimize individually for new visitors and returning visitors.
• Medium – People coming to your site from the many possible mediums such as website referral, email, social, direct, organic, paid, display, offline, pr, and etc have different expectations set and will often have substantially different bounce rates.  Segment by medium and you will likely be shocked to see how the bounce rates vary.

HTTP Status Code for SEO

When a request is made to your server for a page on your site (for instance, when a user accesses your page in a browser or when Googlebot crawls the page), your server returns an HTTP status code in response to the request.

This status code provides information about the status of the request. This status code gives Googlebot information about your site and the requested page.

Some common status codes are:

• 200 - the server successfully returned the page
• 404 - the requested page doesn't exist
• 503 - the server is temporarily unavailable

A complete list of HTTP status codes is below. You can also visit the W3C page on HTTP status codes for more information.

1xx (Provisional response) 

Status codes that indicate a provisional response and require the requestor to take action to continue.

Code	Description
100 (Continue)	The requestor should continue with the request. The server returns this code to indicate that it has received the first part of a request and is waiting for the rest.
101 (Switching protocols)	The requestor has asked the server to switch protocols and the server is acknowledging that it will do so.

2xx (Successful)

Status codes that indicate that the server successfully processed the request.

Code	Description
200 (Successful)	The server successfully processed the request. Generally, this means that the server provided the requested page. If you see this status for your robots.txt file, it means that Googlebot retrieved it successfully.
201 (Created)	The request was successful and the server created a new resource.
202 (Accepted)	The server has accepted the request, but hasn't yet processed it.
203 (Non-authoritative information)	The server successfully processed the request, but is returning information that may be from another source.
204 (No content)	The server successfully processed the request, but isn't returning any content.
205 (Reset content)	The server successfully proccessed the request, but isn't returning any content. Unlike a 204 response, this response requires that the requestor reset the document view (for instance, clear a form for new input).
206 (Partial content)	The server successfully processed a partial GET request.

3xx (Redirected)

Further action is needed to fulfill the request. Often, these status codes are used for redirection. Google recommends that you use fewer than five redirects for each request. You can use Webmaster Tools to see if Googlebot is having trouble crawling your redirected pages. The Crawl Errors page under Crawl lists URLs that Googlebot was unable to crawl due to redirect errors.

Code	Description
300 (Multiple choices)	The server has several actions available based on the request. The server may choose an action based on the requestor (user agent) or the server may present a list so the requestor can choose an action.
301 (Moved permanently)	The requested page has been permanently moved to a new location. When the server returns this response (as a response to a GET or HEAD request), it automatically forwards the requestor to the new location. You should use this code to let Googlebot know that a page or site has permanently moved to a new location.
302 (Moved temporarily)	The server is currently responding to the request with a page from a different location, but the requestor should continue to use the original location for future requests. This code is similar to a 301 in that for a GET or HEAD request, it automatically forwards the requestor to a different location, but you shouldn't use it to tell the Googlebot that a page or site has moved because Googlebot will continue to crawl and index the original location.
303 (See other location)	The server returns this code when the requestor should make a separate GET request to a different location to retrieve the response. For all requests other than a HEAD request, the server automatically forwards to the other location.
304 (Not modified)	The requested page hasn't been modified since the last request. When the server returns this response, it doesn't return the contents of the page. You should configure your server to return this response (called the If-Modified-Since HTTP header) when a page hasn't changed since the last time the requestor asked for it. This saves you bandwidth and overhead because your server can tell Googlebot that a page hasn't changed since the last time it was crawled.
305 (Use proxy)	The requestor can only access the requested page using a proxy. When the server returns this response, it also indicates the proxy that the requestor should use.
307 (Temporary redirect)	The server is currently responding to the request with a page from a different location, but the requestor should continue to use the original location for future requests. This code is similar to a 301 in that for a GET or HEAD request, it automatically forwards the requestor to a different location, but you shouldn't use it to tell the Googlebot that a page or site has moved because Googlebot will continue to crawl and index the original location.

4xx (Request error)

These status codes indicate that there was likely an error in the request which prevented the server from being able to process it.

Code	Description
400 (Bad request)	The server didn't understand the syntax of the request.
401 (Not authorized)	The request requires authentication. The server might return this response for a page behind a login.
403 (Forbidden)	The server is refusing the request. If you see that Googlebot received this status code when trying to crawl valid pages of your site (you can see this on the Crawl Errors page under Health in Google Webmaster Tools), it's possible that your server or host is blocking Googlebot's access.
404 (Not found)	The server can't find the requested page. For instance, the server often returns this code if the request is for a page that doesn't exist on the server. If you don't have a robots.txt file on your site and see this status on the Blocked URLs page in Google Webmaster Tools, this is the correct status. However, if you do have a robots.txt file and you see this status, then your robots.txt file may be named incorrectly or in the wrong location. (It should be at the top-level of the domain and named robots.txt.) If you see this status for URLs that Googlebot tried to crawl, then Googlebot likely followed an invalid link from another page (either an old link or a mistyped one).
405 (Method not allowed)	The method specified in the request is not allowed.
406 (Not acceptable)	The requested page can't respond with the content characteristics requested.
407 (Proxy authentication required)	This status code is similar 401 (Not authorized); but specifies that the requestor has to authenticate using a proxy. When the server returns this response, it also indicates the proxy that the requestor should use.
408 (Request timeout)	The server timed out waiting for the request.
409 (Conflict)	The server encountered a conflict fulfilling the request. The server must include information about the conflict in the response. The server might return this code in response to a PUT request that conflicts with an earlier request, along with a list of differences between the requests.
410 (Gone)	The server returns this response when the requested resource has been permanently removed. It is similar to a 404 (Not found) code, but is sometimes used in the place of a 404 for resources that used to exist but no longer do. If the resource has permanently moved, you should use a 301 to specify the resource's new location.
411 (Length required)	The server won't accept the request without a valid Content-Length header field.
412 (Precondition failed)	The server doesn't meet one of the preconditions that the requestor put on the request.
413 (Request entity too large)	The server can't process the request because it is too large for the server to handle.
414 (Requested URI is too long)	The requested URI (typically, a URL) is too long for the server to process.
415 (Unsupported media type)	The request is in a format not support by the requested page.
416 (Requested range not satisfiable)	The server returns this status code if the request is for a range not available for the page.
417 (Expectation failed)	The server can't meet the requirements of the Expect request-header field.

5xx (Server error) 

These status codes indicate that the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request.

Code	Description
500 (Internal server error)	The server encountered an error and can't fulfill the request.
501 (Not implemented)	The server doesn't have the functionality to fulfill the request. For instance, the server might return this code when it doesn't recognize the request method.
502 (Bad gateway)	The server was acting as a gateway or proxy and received an invalid response from the upstream server.
503 (Service unavailable)	The server is currently unavailable (because it is overloaded or down for maintenance). Generally, this is a temporary state.
504 (Gateway timeout)	The server was acting as a gateway or proxy and didn't receive a timely request from the upstream server.
505 (HTTP version not supported)	The server doesn't support the HTTP protocol version used in the request.

What is Click-through rate?

Click-through rate (or click-thru rate) tells you how many people are clicking through to your site from a third-party. For example from a link, search engine, banner, advertising or email campaign.

Your click-through rate tells you the success of your campaigns. Use this knowledge to determine which strategy is the most effective and focus your energy there.

A ratio showing how often people who see your ad end up clicking it. CTR can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads are performing.

• CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown expressed as a percentage (clicks ÷ impressions = CTR).
  
  For example, if you had 5 clicks and 1000 impressions, then your CTR would be 0.5%. Here's how it's calculated:
  
• Each of your ads and keywords has their own CTRs that you can see listed in your account.
• A high CTR is a good indication that users find your ads helpful and relevant. CTR also contributes to your keyword's expected CTR (a component of Quality Score), which can affect your costs and ad position. Note that a good CTR is relative to what you're advertising and on which networks.
• You can use CTR to gauge which ads and keywords are successful for you and which need to be improved. The more your keywords and ads relate to each other and to your business, the more likely a user is to click on your ad after searching on your keyword phrase.

What's A "Good" Click-Through Rate?

This is a hotly debated topic: what constitutes a good click-through rate?

From a purely statistical standpoint, it depends. Take a look at Yahoo's answer to the "what's a good click-through rate" question:

The honest answer to the question is, “It depends.” Click-through rates are naturally going to vary from campaign to campaign, and even from keyword to keyword. Everything involved in the way your ad is displayed plays a part, from your ad copy to the ad’s ranking on the results page.

So while you want to have a "high" click-through rate, there's really no magic number. Average click-through rate will vary by industry, and you’re expected CTR depends on your ad's position, among other factors. Generally speaking, as we mentioned above, you want as high a click-through rate as possible.

Except when you don't.

When Higher Click-Through Rates Are Actually Bad For Business

If a keyword isn't pertinent to your business or isn't going to generate sales, leads, branding gains, etc. then a high click-through rate for that term is actually bad for business. The reasoning for this is fairly clear:

• You're paying for every click.
• A lot of clicks generate a lot of ad spend.
• Sometimes you're generating clicks on keywords that are priced too high, and won't turn a profit even if they convert.
• Irrelevant terms and clicks are just spending money without bringing in additional business.

So you don't always want higher click-through rates: what you want are high CTRs on keywords that are:

• Relevant - Have to do with your ad text, your landing page, and your offering.
• Affordable - Keywords that aren't going to be profit-prohibitive.

So, in a nut shell, a good CTR means first targeting the right words, and then getting as many people as you can to click on those ads.

Achieving Strong Click-Through Rates for Your Ads

Achieving strong click-through rates in PPC, then, depends on:

• Targeted keywords to bid on.
• Cost-efficient clicks.
• Tools and methodology for closely integrating keywords with ad text and landing pages.
• The ability to quickly and efficiently segment keyword groups to generate closer targeting.

Remember, the higher your click-through rate, the better your Quality Scores will likely be, and high Quality Scores are one of the single best predictors of success in PPC.