5 SEO Strategies and Tactics
But you know, despite the techno-R2-D2 dialect things that the dudes from an SEO department throws at you such as SEMs, Page Ranks, Keyword stuffing or density, Algorithms, SERPs, Alt Tags, Anchor Texts, Inbound or Outbound Links… SEO is as simple as it gets. It’s as simple as it’s called – Search Engine Optimization, and all you have to do is to optimize the website for search engines to find it easily. The only thing about it is that it involves a lot of work. But if you look at it on a different point of view, it’s quite enjoyable.
But what does SEO do actually? Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche – you’ll naturally want your site or content to be at the top of the líst. That is what SEO does for your website. Keeping the traffic in and letting it do that for as long as the website stands. Now, isn’t that a good thing?
To let you know what SEO companies do on an SEO campaign, let me give you the top 5 techniques and tactics that the dudes from an SEO Company usually do on their campaigns.
Keyword Research
Knowing your keyword is very important to achieve the highest rank in search engines. SEO Companies usually use software tools such as Wordtracker and Seobook to research for their keywords. These tools give them a rudimentary number of searches. Relevance is also very important in keyword researching. The design of a website must be relevant to its keyword. Another thing that SEO Companies do is doing some deep-linking to these pages on their sites. SEO companies usually find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to their home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition is something to consider as well. This way, it’ll be a lot easier to achieve higher rank.
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On-Page SEO
On-page optimization and web design factors play a very major role in SEO campaigns. These are the first things that search engines look for in a website. It’s important for an SEO company to make sure that their website is as SEO friendly as it can. Also, SEO companies make sure that all of their pages are easily reachable from their homepages. This is easily done by a strategy called navigation bars or menus. Navigation bars lead to other webpage in a website.
Sitemaps also play significant roles in SEO. SEO companies generate XML sitemaps and upload them to their website. This technique makes the search engines very happy, because this makes it a lot easier for search engines to crawl your website through that.
SEO companies prioritize website’s title and description as well. The title and description should contain some of their selected keywords. Dudes from an SEO Company also make sure that they use them to draw and attract interested visitors to their site and content, and not just the search engine. They also make sure that their title and URL contain keyword relevance for maximum effect. Having some of their major keywords in a domain name also makes this a lot easier for search engines to visit their website.
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Link Building
There are many strategies and tactics developed within the SEO, and Link Building is still the most popular and most effective way of boosting a website’s rank on any search engine. Backlinks from relevant sites are as important as the keywords themselves. An SEO company makes it their top priority to make sure that the ‘anchor text’ is related to their keywords, while making sure that the text and overall quality of the content linking to their site is relevant. These guys make sure that they link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in their niche.
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Article Marketing
Article marketing, though not as effective as link building, is still a well-established way of getting some quality backlinks or inbound links. Doing a 500-800-word article with backlinks included within the article itself or on the resource box is still an effective method to receive a lot of traffic. Longer, more informative articles also work for many SEO companies. This is by using intensive network of press releases and distribution in article submission sites like SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters, and other major online press release sites. While doing all that, SEO companies still make sure that they’re also talking to users, users whom might become their clients. So these guys make use of their imaginative juices to make their article SEO-friendly and reader-friendly.
Blogging and Social Media
Search engines are inlove with Blogs. Blogs are the most favorite spot that search engines visit. Newly updated entries, articles, live comments, and chain of communities, these blogs are what’s making SEO more and more fun. SEO companies usually use WordPress blog software for their blogging purposes. Most of these guys use WordPress because it’s extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easier to install on a website even if they do not have any knowledge in installing server-side scripts. Other SEO Companies also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blog hosts to help distribute content. Search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging.
Social bookmarking is becoming very important on the web. Social media sites such as Friendster, MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter and media news such as Digg, SlashDot, Technorati are now among the targeted media that SEO companies use. SEO campaigns include joining these sites and using them to their advantage. Though very time consuming, SEO companies are still using this strategy because of its great benefits and conversion.
But apart from those things I said earlier, planning is still the heart of an SEO campaign. Planning is the foremost important part of an SEO campaign. In our every undertaking, planning is the least element that we would want to forget. Planning and strategizing is very important in every SEO campaign. Understanding what SEO strategy to use is integral. This way, we wouldn’t run into some major problems where we would have to resort to resetting our efforts and start again from scratch. Now, that would be very costly and time consuming.
But first, you should take into mind that SEO is not complicated. A lot of work yes, but not complicated. As I had said, with a right point of view, SEO efforts are very enjoyable, especially when it comes to blogging, article writing, link partnership, and social media efforts. When used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffíc you’re seeking. Just do what we do and you’re on your way to success.
How To Work With A SEO Company
An innocent site update may jeopardize an SEO’s efforts. Webmasters may overlook the fact that their website has been recently optimized and in the process of updating they revert to an un-optimized version of the site. Clients should be more conscious and sensitive about the fact that SEO technology is built into their site’s framework and may fall down like a house of cards if they carelessly tinker with their site’s inner workings. By no means is it suggested that clients should let their site’s contents rot.
Instead, clients should consult with their SEO providers how to go about in updating their sites contents. Clients may think that this may make them entirely dependent on their SEO, but this is not necessarily so. Once the client’s webmaster knows how to go about tinkering with the sites without affecting the SEO structure, they may go ahead with their usual business. After all, the strength of an SEO scheme lies in it being a one time thing and requires very little maintenance.
Clients should also understand that SEO providers are neither magicians nor illusionists who can turn around their client’s stats without modifying to a certain extent site content. Website content is part and parcel of an SEO site and clients that demanding in no case shall their content may be changed are not likely to hire a decent SEO provider. Ethical SEO firms need to alter to a certain extent a site’s content so that such can be optimized and anything short of this may call for the violation of a search engine’s TOS. Only mediocre or less than reputable SEO firms would agree to such conditions.
Another caution to clients and SEO companies alike, seeing how an SEO works does not make the observer an expert. Clients embarking on their own SEO tinkering in the given sites may result in the sites going kaput. It may even destroy whatever optimization the SEO has already adopted and integrated into their client’s sites. In this worst case scenario both the client and SEO firm is left with a rather unsightly mess to clean up and loss of whatever search ranking the site has already reached. This is an echo of the elementary principle to let experts do their work, but unfortunately many clients still lose sight of this fact.
Linking to other sites likewise affects site rankings but a client should be careful of the way they conduct their linkages. Search engines have recently been cracking down on sites that engage link trading and if caught such are often penalized. Clients should only link to sites which offer genuine help to their visitors or at least cover relevant content. Moreover, one could not be accused of being overly careful if they ask their SEO to review the link so that the latter may find out if the link does not engage in questionable SEO practices.
Any information regarding change given to a company’s marketing department should be immediately forwarded to the SEO provider. SEO is as concerned with the changes and flux with their client’s marketing situation as the in-house marketing department. This is so that the SEO may immediately adopt and implement the necessary changes in their client’s site so that the latter’s patrons are informed of the latest news and updates.
With all the things mentioned above, it may seem like the SEO scheme is overly delicate and is likely to crash with every little change coming from the client’s side. This is not so. Acting on anything with very little understanding regarding the thing or situation is an invitation to disaster. SEO frameworks are no exception to this. Even a basic understanding of how SEO works for the client can prevent any problems from arising and would allow companies to reap the full benefits of SEO marketing. SEO firms are their client’s partners in making online advertising work and as such, an understanding of how each one works is absolutely necessary to achieving in their joint endeavor.
Top 15 SEO Terms
I will try to give you a top 10 list with the most important terms meet in the SEO business.
1. Anchor Text. The anchor text is very important in SEO. It means the specific text for a hyperlink. Try to use as anchor text your most targeted keywords.
2. Ethical SEO. You can think about Ethical SEO as the opposite to Unethical SEO. It is SEO made without using any illegal activities that might get your site banned in the most important search engines.
3. Inbound links are links that point to your site. This are some kind of votes in your sites favor, from the search engines point of view. The more of these the better, obviously for traffic reasons, but also because they help build link popularity.
4. Keyphrase is a group of keywords.
5. Keyword is a word that is very important for your site. You keywords and keyphrases are the search terms that you want to rank high for.
6. Keyword Analysis means to analyze all the keywords that are related to your site and see which of them have more searches on search engines. You should optimize your site for related keywords that have the highest search rates.
7. The Link popularity is one of the most important thighs when it comes to SEO. Link popularity means the amount of links that point to your site. The link popularity while raise your site in the eyes of the search engines depending on the quality and quantity of the links.
8. META tags are special tags included at the top of a HTML page. Their purpose is to provide extra information about the web page. The most influential tags for search engine ranking are the Keywords tag and the Description tag.
9. Natural Links. SEO can come from natural ways too. This means that a webmaster on the net finds your site likes it and decides that it’s quite useful for his visitors and links to it. This kind of links are called natural links and this are one of the most powerful links.
10. PageRank. It’s some kind of ranking system invented by Google. The only real problem with PageRank in SEO is that is given much more attention that it deserves. The PageRank can bee seen with the PageRank meter included in the Google toolbar. You can think of it as a tool that measures the popularity of a wesite but only in the eyes of Google. PageRank is important but there are many other factors that are more important in the SEO process for the ranking of a website.
11. BlackHat SEO - is generally referred to as search engine optimization that abuses and goes against the terms of servic set forth by each inidividual search engine’s policy.
12. Spider Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that scan the web. They vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
13. Spam – In the SEO vernacular, this refers to manipulation techniques that violate search engines Terms of Service and are designed to achieve higher rankings for a web page. Obviously, spam could be grounds for banning. Alan Perkins has published an excellent white paper on Search Engine Spam that is highly recommended. Here are some definitions of spam from the search engines themselves: * Google * Yahoo * MSN
14. Robots.txt – Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.
15. Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the ‘benefit’ of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.
SEO Services
The aim of search engine optimization is for websites to have a high ranking during searches. This is so that more traffic will be directed to their site and more business and income will follow for the site owner and the SEO Services Consultant.
SEO Services Consultant: Scope of Service
An SEO Services Consultant should be able to provide various services to the client at a reasonable cost. The services usually offered by an SEO Services Consultant includes but may not be limited to keyword or key phrase research along with checking out the competition, SEO web design for your site and other web pages connected to your site, working with the necessary codes and content for the site, build link popularity for the site and website SEO maintenance for the particular site.
Other services of a particular SEO Services Consultant may be excluded by other consultants. Other services which may be included are submission to search engines, looking for optimum URL’s or domain names for your site and providing content for the site.
Keyword or key phrase research entails researching the optimum words or phrases that are widely used during searches. These keywords and key phrases will then be integrated into articles that are relevant for the site by the SEO Services Consultant. Relevance is important because many crawlers look for this when they go through a site.
The date and information that robotic spiders seek out need to be relevant to the site they are connected to. These will help in the efficient and proper indexing of the site and will help to rank the site. This is why content is important to a web site. It holds the keywords and key phrases relevant to ranking. By keeping the competition close, the SEO Services Consultant will be able to see what methods work for similar sites. This means less trial and error when picking out keywords and phrases and other methods of search engine optimization.
The SEO Services Consultant will need to be vigilant regarding the changes in trends of keywords and key phrases since these changes can be seasonal. This is where SEO maintenance work comes to fore. The job of the SEO Services Consultant will continue well after the website is established if this is part of the agreement between the SEO Services Consultant and the client.
SEO web design for the client’s site is also a big influence in the ranking of the site and the popularity of the site to human browsers. This is because SEO web design makes the site a lot easier to navigate and load. Easy navigating and quick loading are some of the reasons why visitors to the site might want to go back to it.
The SEO Services Consultant will most likely suggest to the client several easy ways of optimizing the web site. Among these suggestions will be scaling down the larger pictures to enable quick loading and making the site more navigable to users.
Having relevant content is also a must since relevant content is what browsers are looking for when they visit a site. A site that does not meet the requirements and needs of the searcher will be abandoned promptly upon the discovery that the site is irrelevant.
The SEO Services Consultant must also make sure that web pages connected to your site are easy to reach and that there are also relevant links in the site to promote it with other similar sites. Link building will help promote and build popularity for your site. There are many other sites that wish to use links as a way of getting their ranking to rise.
Site maintenance is a necessary service of an SEO Services Consultant. In order to achieve higher ranking during searches, a site must be continually maintained and primed to meet the demands and needs of users and that of the search engine. Some SEO companies use underhand methods to achieve this goal. Using black hat techniques to get higher rankings will eventually lead a search engine to ban the site and maybe also the SEO company or SEO Services Consultant who employed black hat methods to achieve higher ranking.
Due to the numerous possibilities of manipulation during search engine optimization of web sites, many search engines have instilled rules and regulations which will control and manage the sites being submitted to them. Website submissions are included in what an SEO Services Consultant will do for a client.
Employing black hat techniques to ensure higher ranking can be dangerous for both the client and the SEO Services Consultant. This can lead to being banned from the search engine and its services and being branded as a black hat SEO Services Consultant.
The Three Types Of SEO Services
Black Hat SEO Services
Black Hat SEO is known as SEO spamming. From the second term itself, you may have an idea of what this kind of SEO service offers. Black Hat SEO is centered on creating sites that are targeted at manipulating or tricking search engines for better site ranking. Black Hat SEO relies heavily on automation to come up with large numbers of substandard pages and pulls links from other sites which are actually irrelevant. Consequently, this SEO approach usually gets poor or irrelevant search engine result pages or SERP quality. What is advantageous with Black Hat SEO is that it can get your site on the top of search engine rankings in a matter of a short span of time. However, this is not a wise SEO services strategy in terms of web design perspective. Worse, once search engines find out that your site maligns their results; your site may and will run the risk of getting banned or crashing on view. So if you want to get on top of search engine listings in a matter of days and are willing to take the risk of flouting some site behavior guidelines, Black Hat SEO services should do the trick for you.
White Hat SEO Services
For every black, there is always a white. The same is true for SEO services. White Hat SEO services, on the other hand, relies on the advantages of putting in relevant and quality content as well as effective marketing strategies to place sites on top of search engine rankings. SEO services providers that offer White Hat SEO will focus mostly on your site contents. White Hat SEO providers will help you come up with contents that will attract people, and not search engines into your site. You should know that content is a very important factor in SEO building (if not the most important). With good content, White Hat SEO services will be able to get you more inbound links from other relevant websites. White Hat SEO is definitly considered to be the better SEO tool. It will not put your site in the risk for getting blacklisted and does not violate any search engine SEO guidelines. Most importantly, visitors who check your site will most likely be converted easily with your great content.
Grey Hat SEO Services
Grey Hat SEO is mid-way between the two tools above and is all about the balance between risk and reward. There are actually a wide number of SEO services solutions categorized under this. Some Grey Hat SEO services may tend to use more dubious strategies and take even bigger risks to produce fast and high search engine rankings. While many Gray Hat SEO services methods obey search engine guidelines, others might put you at risk. If you opt for SEO services using Grey Hat, be sure about what you are exactly subjecting your online site to.
Which hat should you choose?
According to major search engines such as Google, White Hat is good SEO; Black Hat is bad SEO, while Grey Hat is for the most part, dicey. Those using Black Hat SEO services might tell you that White Hat is too ineffective and Grey Hat may be safe but not as effective. Those who prefer Grey Hat may claim that White Hat SEO Services is only effective only when no Grey or Black Hats are involved. White Hat SEO services providers may tell you that Black Hat SEO users are cheaters and those providing Grey Hat are quitters.
Through all these varying opinions, know that it is still up to you to choose the right type of SEO services that you want. It is your objectives and goals that will determine which type of hat you should wear. From my point of view White Hat is better and more cost effective if you are serious about your business… and serious businesses exclude: gambling, adult, and pharmacy sites.
