Thursday, March 20, 2014

Tips to Rank a Keyword

 Sound on page SEO builds a solid base for your search marketing efforts. Fading to optimize the key areas we are going to cover below will really reduce the efficiency of your link building efforts, costing you time and money.

Key on Page SEO Factors

Unless you work in SEO, many of you will not have time to optimize every single factor of your website, so we are going to tap on the key areas that you must pick up to gain higher rankings.
Site Speed

Newly Google received a patent on their site speed ranking algorithm but industry professionals have known it is an significant factor for quite some time now. When you are developing a website, the speed of your pages should be a key consideration. Fresh coding improvements allow you to have a visually pleasing site that still loads quickly so there is no reason for a slow site. If you are hiring a web designer, make sure they take load time into consideration when building your site.The bottom line is a slow site is a low ranking site.

Site Navigation

The navigation of your website is very significant for users and for search engines. A proper internal linking structure will permit users to easily reach pages and should lead them to take the preferred action for you website. Aside from helping users, the internal links of your site will give search engines with a hierarchy of your website. If you sell construction services you may have a services page that links to exact services, a very simple example of a hierarchy. Remember, the more important a page is, the fewer clicks it should be from the home page of your site.

Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

Every page on your website should be sole and should have a purpose. The purpose, message, or keyword of each page should be conveyed by the page title. The meta description is a short review of what the page is about and should improve click-through rates. I like to search my target keyword and read the ad copy for the terms. This gives you a number of good ideas for page titles and meta descriptions, most of the time they have been tested and optimized. Send your competitors a thank you card for testing and sharing the best variations with you! 

Meta Keywords

For some reason people still add meta Keywords to pages. They not at all help you rank and are now used by Bing to look for spam pages. Don’t waste your time adding meta keywords.

Creating Content

The ability for your website to rank all starts with on page SEO. Before you begin build your website, you should decide on 1-2 keywords that will be targeted on each page of your website. While the old practice of mentioning exact variations of the keyword repeatedly are not necessary, you do need to take in your primary keyword in the page title, at least one heading and URL if possible. The body content should have variations of your keywords and should make mention of terms associated with the background of your page.

Alt Text for Images

Most websites have a number of images, but people often forget to optimize them. Adding alt text to all the images on your site will help Google appreciate what the image and page is about. While keyword filling is a waste of time, including your keyword on at least one image on each page has been connected with higher search rankings. This is a simple fix, just make sure you add alt text to your images.

5 Effective Link Building Strategies

Before we get started I want to stress that using a grouping on link building methods will always yield better results than a single strategy. Google likes to see a diverse link profile that appears normal so lets play their game.


Guest posting has newly been in the limelight as another passing fad among link builders. If you make a bunch of low quality, useless articles and share them on low authority sites, you are killing your time. Guest posting should only be done on sites that you would post to if SEO did not exist. 

Outreach Link Building

There is nothing new or sexy about this method, but it works. Coming up with a list of sites to reach out to can be tricky, but this is how I do it.

1.    Run a back link analysis of your top 5 competitor sites.

2.    Remove links with a page authority below 20.

3.    Remove any no-follow links (unless they are likely to provide significant referral traffic).

4.    Export your list and sort from highest page authority to lowest and work your way down the list of sites looking for ways to get a link. Finding the link to your competitor and improving the content they used to get that link is the best way to get your own link. You can also look for busted links to competitor sites and offer a new piece of similar content for the site owner to link to.

5.    Send a fast email to the site owner and tell them what you have to offer.

6.    Repeat until you have gone through the complete list, then find sites ranking 5-10 for your keyword and repeat steps 1-4.
Social Link Building
This is a lot like traditional outreach link building, excluding you are going to find link opportunities from social media. I have mentioned this technique before, but it is worth repeating. Here is how to find people who will possible link to your site.

1.    Curate content closely connected to your niche and share it via social networks.

2.    Monitor user engagement and identify content that was heavily shared, liked, re-tweeted, etc.

3.    Create a new part of content closely related but better than what you shared.

4.    Contact everyone who engaged with the curated piece and let them know you have something they would love.

5.    Relax while your new piece of content is being shared, liked, and linked to.

Directory Submissions

Before you leave the page or a spiteful comment, I am not talking about the old school method of blasting your site out to a billion and nine directories. There are a few directories that are still precious to submit your site to but remember, quality over quantity is the key. Here are some valuable directories to get you started.

1.    Best of the Web

2.    Yahoo Directory

3.    DMOZ (they have seen a recent loss in listings)

4.    Business.com

5.    Exact Seek

When you are looking for directories worth submitting to you should look for sites that are human edited, have been around for a while, and are trusted. If you are looking for local directories, here is a list of the top 50 from HubSpot.

Blog Commenting

You are maybe thinking that this method is straight from 08, and it kind of is. The difference is that you are going to comment only on sites directly related to your site. You should leave comments that add to the conversation and hearten interaction from the writer. 



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