Looking Ahead to the SEO Challenges of 2014 

2013 has been a tumultuous year for content marketers and SEO whizzes. The expansion of Penguin and Panda coupled with the launch of Hummingbird has shaken up much of the conventional wisdom regarding SEO marketing and shattered many of the shortcuts and tricks used in years past. With 2014 right around the corner, take a moment to assess the previous year’s efforts and reflect on what changes may still be in the works:

Mobile Technology vs. Massive Content

Google’s constant SEO updates do more than toy with SEO marketers. Ultimately, Google wants to provide the best return link for a user’s question. This goal means that more detailed data reaches the upper echelons of search engine returns. A study done by QuickSprout founder Neil Patel found that copy that ran around 2,000 words consistently landed on the first page of search results and, anecdotally, longer copy generated better leads and more response.

In many ways, the emerging importance of mobile content runs contrary to quality, in-depth content production. Mobile users need short, snappy content that can easily be navigated on a small screen. While full blown recreation of content into smaller bites for mobile users seems time consuming and like unnecessary work, bridging the gap between emerging technology and full screen marketing is a challenge marketers will face in the coming year. SEO marketers in 2014 will need to balance the importance of in-depth content with the short attention span and small screen size of mobile users.




Embrace Google+

While Google has chosen not to disclose the exact system for ranking webpages, the importance of Google+ and Google Authorship became ever more obvious in 2013. The unique URL provided to content published on Google+ creates more backlinks to work with, and the respectability of Google Authorship increases the amount of clicks produced from a search.

Climb of Visual Media

The way Internet users are gathering and sharing information has shifted slightly in the past few years. No longer is straight content enough; instead, sites like Pinterest and Instagram deal in visual content. While this, at first, seems outside the realm of content production, marketers need to continue developing links between content and pictorials.

Topic over Keyword

Hummingbird’s release also coincided with Google’s switch to a 100 percent secure search. SEO marketers who hadn’t responded to the increasing return of “keywords (not provided)” seemed blind-sided as a longer start date was expected. Still, the launch of Hummingbird fully switched all successful SEO marketers into thinking about organic keywords and informative topics rather than trying to punch a keyword into an article 20 times.

In this new year, this switch will only become more prevalent and important. No longer will information-scarce but keyword-rich content be highly regarded. Instead, marketers will need to provide quality content that fully explores the topic without a focus on a specific word.

Guest Blogging Still Rules

Guest blogging has grown from a sometimes hobby of niche blogs to a verified SEO marketing strategy. Despite the time and effort it takes to form relationships and seek out willing participants, guest blogging will continue to grow in 2014. The importance of links for rankings and the positive results seen from expanding an audience makes guest blogging the most straightforward route to search engine success.

While the catch up game has been extensive in 2013, SEO marketers in 2014 can at least rest assured that all search engine updates are moving in a specific, easily defined direction. While past years have required marketers to relearn the game, 2014 should be a year of gentle transitions to get content more in line with the ultimate goal of providing quality information to specific user questions.

Article from: sitepronews

SEO Tips and Best Practices to Generate External Awareness

 
1. Identify Your Core Keyword Phrases

Start by identifying your top 10-15 keywords by thinking about the phrases you wish you would show up for when people look for your company. Think beyond your company name to specific products and services prospective clients might be trying to find. You can use tools like Google Free Keywords and Hubspot to help you brainstorm ideas.
For example, we specialize in event and trade show registration, but people who don’t know us would not know to search for “Expo Logic”. Instead, we identified opportunities to rank for services and products people are searching for like “trade show registration” and “lead retrieval scanner.” Focusing on service and product specific phrases has provided a significant jump in our keyword rankings, with 24 of our main keywords ranked in the top three, and 42 ranked in the top 10.

2. Create Compelling Content

To get the most from your SEO strategy, it’s important to know the difference between paid and organic results. Paid ads are a good tactic for a time sensitive campaign when you want to create quick awareness. New product launches, holiday promotions and specials work well with paid placement. For the long haul, it’s best to focus on organic results.
The most effective way to improve your organic SEO is to create compelling content around the keywords you identified in step one. Publish regular blog posts on your site, keep your social media profiles updated with relevant information that leads back to your site, and develop fresh site content focused on your target phrases.

From our organic SEO efforts, we’ve doubled our Twitter followers and steadily increased the number of site visitors each month.



 3. Stay Organized

The best way to stay on top of your different SEO efforts is to create an editorial calendar for your content.

Look for topic ideas by monitoring news about your industry through Google alerts.  Subscribe to your competitor’s RSS feeds to stay on top of trending topics.  Ask your sales team the top questions they hear from prospective clients and plan to answer them in your blog.  Schedule your content out about a month in advance.

4. Monitor Your Rankings

Lastly, make sure you have a good stats system set up to monitor your SEO success. A tool like Google Analytics or Hubspot can help you review keyword rankings, site traffic, social media leads and other important measures to see what SEO efforts are generating the most awareness.

Article Source: By Jeff Cooper, an EO Philadelphia member and president and CEO of Expo Logic

7 Basic SEO Techniques All Webmasters Must Know

Technique #1 – Optimize your title tags

Every page on your website should have its own unique title tag. However, not all title tags are created equally!

From an SEO perspective, a good title tag should:

Be no more than 70 characters (including spaces)
Include both product- or service-related keywords and your company’s brand name
Be both intriguing and informative enough to prompt search engine users to click through to your page (as title tags are typically used in the snipped displayed in the natural search results)
To see what this all looks like in real life, let’s look at a hypothetical example of how this and the following SEO techniques could be put into practice…

Suppose you run an auto body shop in San Francisco, CA. You’ve recently launched a new website which includes a page on your current specials. After conducting your keyword research, you’ve decided to target the phrase “auto body coupon,” along with location modifiers that put your website in front of consumers in your city.

In this case, a good title tag could be:

“Auto Body Coupons and Discounts | Frank's Auto - San Francisco, CA”
In addition, as you’re crafting your title tags, avoid “keyword stuffing” these important fields. Title tags that are no more than a string of all your website’s target keywords (in this example, something like “Auto Body Coupons, Auto Body Discounts, Auto Body Savings”) frustrate visitors and can lead to over-optimization penalties by the search engines.

Technique #2 – Create compelling meta descriptions
Along with your title tags, the section of every page on your website should contain a customized meta description. These brief page summaries should be no more than 150-160 characters long and should include at least one mention of your page’s target keyword phrase.

Following our previous example, your meta description could read something like this:

“Need quality auto body repair work done at a discount price? Check out the latest auto body coupon codes from Frank's Auto of San Francisco, CA.”
While meta descriptions don’t hold nearly the SEO weight that they used to, their presence in the snippets found on search engine results pages plays an important role in your site’s overall click-through rate (CTR). By writing your meta descriptions in a way that captures search users’ attention, you’ll increase the number of visitors who choose to click on your listing compared to your competitors’.


Technique #3 – Utilize keyword-rich headings
Both the title tag and meta description should be included in the section of every page on your website – but what about the rest of your page’s content?

When it comes to your pages’ body text, one of the best things you can do to improve your overall SEO value is to include <h2> and heading tags containing your target keyword phrases in your content. Not only do the search engines place added weight on the words found in these particular tags, the visual relief they provide to your website’s readers will help them to move more efficiently through your site’s content.

Technique #4 – Add ALT tags to your images
If you choose to add images to your web pages, make sure to add ALT tags to them as well.

ALT tags originally came about to provide visually impaired website visitors using text-to-speech devises with additional information about the content on their screens. And though this initial purpose is still valid, the content found in these fields is also important when it comes to SEO.

Again, you shouldn’t “stuff” your ALT tag full of target keywords and keyword variations. Instead, use your ALT tags to clearly and accurately describe your website’s images, working in keyword phrases as they occur naturally.

Technique #5 – Create a sitemap
In the world of SEO, the search engines’ indexing programs – commonly referred to as “spiders” – play the important role of analyzing new websites (or new content added to existing websites) and adding their content to the lists of pages that can be displayed in response to user queries.

As a result, facilitating the easy movement of these spider programs throughout your own site is an important part of optimizing your content for natural search traffic.

One of the best things you can do to help the spiders index your website is to create a sitemap – a page listing links to all the other pages on your site. There are plenty of different automated tools that can generate these important pages for you, though you can always create a sitemap by hand if your site is small.

Technique #6 – Build internal links between pages

Another way to help the search engine spiders to catalogue all of your site’s pages is to create internal links that connect your different pieces of content.

As an example, instead of simply linking to your “Contact” or “About Us” page from your navigation bar, consider adding text links to these pages from within the body content found on your home page. Doing so is a great way to help your visitors find the information they’re looking for, in addition to providing a major SEO boost to your site’s content.

Technique #7 – Update your site regularly
One final SEO technique you’ll want to implement is to update your site periodically. Because the search engines’ top priority is serving up the results that will best meet their users’ needs, they prefer to share websites that contain the latest, most up-to-date information. In addition, the more content you post to your site, the more keywords your website will include – increasing your odds of generating search engine traffic.

The easiest way to make regular updating a part of your SEO strategy is to create a company blog or news section. Either one of these tools will help you to connect with your readers, while also appeasing the search engines’ desire for fresh content.

Unfortunately, implementing these seven basic SEO techniques on your website alone isn’t enough to guarantee that your site will reach the coveted top spot in the search engine results pages for your chosen keyword phrases overnight. Realistically, SEO is a process that takes time to deliver results – though many new webmasters find this frustrating.

Instead of getting overwhelmed by the number of different SEO techniques out there, start with these seven basics. Over time and with continued commitment to pleasing both your readers and the search engines, you will start to see results!

Top 10 SEO tips

The purpose of having a website, I am sure you’ll agree is so that people can actually find you on the internet. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the way you help search engines find your site and serve it in the results to people entering keywords for whatever your site is about. With these Top 10 SEO tips your website’s ranking on search engines should improve with certain keywords which are crucial for driving more traffic to your site.

In this article we will cover the basic Top 10 SEO tips that will help your site do better when it comes to SEO as far as content and traffic are concerned. I have written this article in plain English so it can help as many people as possible without going into the small details that wouldn’t be of any good for somebody who is just trying to run a business and needs their site to do better.

1. Website Content

Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Content is king’ when you are searching for any information about SEO on the net? It just happens that it’s an important strategy when it comes to any site that’s trying to do better in the search engine results. With the continuing trend in Google’s algorithms to look for original, original quality content, this should never be underestimated or ignored. Quality content does not mean good spelling or grammar either, it means content which is as informative to the visitor as possible.
The basic rule about writing high quality content is to always think of what the page you are creating is about and stay focused on the topic. Let’s say you are a hotelier and you are writing a page about one of your new services which your hotel will offer for example, a new online booking service. In this case you should stay as close to the topic of ‘online booking service’ as possible and concentrating your content on just that. Staying focused on the topic means, you do not start talking about how wonderful your hotel is and how it has wonderful views from the rooms in a thousand words and only mention the ‘online hotel booking service’ once or twice in content.
You can write about how this new online booking service to explain how it works, the benefits of using it to stay at your hotel and so on. You can of course briefly talk about what the guests will enjoy at your hotel when they book online and provide hyperlinks to pages which specifically talk about the hotel itself.
The above example and content writing tips can be applied to almost any other type of business or topic that your site is focusing on. Writing original quality content is not hard to do if you start with the right frame of mind which targets people not search engines. Always compile your content with a human reader in mind and never write to manipulate Google’s algorithms or signals because it simply doesn’t work any more, even when it did it didn’t work very well in your favour
Just think if your site contains low-quality content and just so happens to have made it to the 1st position in the Google search results. Visitors find it, click on the link in the results to visit it, they arrive to find nothing informative enough on your site or content that grabs them . The chances are, they will simply hit the back button and surf away from your site, never to return. What’s happened back there? for one thing you’ve lost a potential sale and will add another bounce to your site’s bounce rate.
In brief, always write good quality content that is written for a human to read and when writing, ask yourself, would you bookmark the page? does it contain what you were looking for? would you need to hit the back button to look for a better result. It’s hard work but once you start getting more sales or traffic, you will be glad you’ve spent the extra time on content writing.

2. Keywords & Keyphrases
Keywords For Seo When choosing the keywords for a particular page on your site, always do your research first. This means finding out what your competitors are appearing in the search results with and not what you think is the ‘magic’ keyword. The easy way to do this without spending money on software or using any online services is to run a search on Google itself. Once you have found the keyword/keyphrase that is mostly used, focus on it and include it in the content at least 3-4 times. You need to also include it in your page’s Meta title, Meta description and Meta keywords if you still want to use them.

3. Website Design
Web Design SeoAny website design is crucial to SEO as it will determine how visitors will behave and feel like once they land on your site. A badly designed site that is cluttered, has a bad colour scheme and hard to navigate around is more likely to make the visitor hit the back button to get out of there as soon as possible. Good quality website design is also important when it comes to SEO as far as the size of the pages. Filling your site with none-optimized images and an excessive number of them will only make your site bring up red flags for the Google bot. As a rule, heavy and slow loading sites are considered to be a bad user experience when it comes to how Google views your website. With much of the emphasis being based on user experience when it comes to the Google’s algorithms, a badly designed site will do less better in the results.
Here is a good free online tool called Pingdom which will help you analyze your site’s loading time and content.
Always think how a user would feel when they are made to wait a whole minute or close for your site to load and only to find they’ve been waiting for a cluttered site. Make your site’s navigation as simple and clear as possible. Avoid forcing the visitor to make an excessive amount of clicks to reach the information they were looking for in the first place. It’s fair to say that if you frustrate your visitors with navigation that’s intentionally designed to force them to pass by content they were not looking for, they will leave your site.
 
4. Text & Styling
Website Text SEOInclude the important keywords and keyphrases you are targeting as close as possible to the beginning of your articles and make them bold maybe two or three times. The use of heading tags is also important because they are a way that a search engine spider checks to see if your keyword is included in a page’s heading for example. This is how a search engine will verify the relevancy of what your title is about and if your keyword is included in the page’s Meta title, Meta description and in the h1 tag, it would consider your page as being a successful match and yield it in the results.
There are of course other h tags which go down to h6 with the h1 being the most important and h6 the least important. It’s worth mentioning that when using the tags, use them on your content in the same order they come without skipping any. So if you have a heading and you’ve wrapped it in the h1 tag, your next use of the tags should be the h2 and so on. This is a sign that your page’s content is well structured and organized for the visitor.
Keep your site nice and uncluttered avoiding the use of too many colours and the point for this is that once the visitor comes to your site, you want them to feel like staying. The last thing you want is for a larger percentage of your visitors to hit the back button, this is bad news for your SEO. Sites with a high bounce rate will be considered as a bad result served in the search and will suffer when they are served less in the results. A badly designed site will basically loose you traffic.
 
5. Hyperlinks
Anchor Text  SEOThe importance of good linking methods will prove invaluable when it comes to SEO and this means traffic. A site that has good hyperlinks that points its visitors to the correct page in the least number of links will keep the visitor for longer. Anchor links as they are also known as are great for SEO when you include your keyword in them too for example, ‘Book Limousine Online’ as the hyperlink which will take the visitor to your ‘Book Limousine Online’ page. Include hyper links of your most important pages somewhere on the frontpage of your site and preferably with the exact keyword as it appears elsewhere for example in the Meta title, Meta description and of course the content of that page you are linking to.
 
6. Tools & Analytics
Website Analytics ToolsInstall Google Analytics to track how your site’s traffic is performing in the search results. This will help you optimize your site further if you are seeing keywords you had hoped to achieve better results with aren’t doing as well as you had hoped they would. Google Analytics will also help you find out a lot of information about how well your site’s keywords are being found and it will also give you some idea about what keywords people are finding you under.
Get yourself an account with Google Webmaster Tools which will help assess how your site is doing and help you to be informed of any trouble areas on the site. Having a Google Webmaster Tools account is also important for submitting sitemaps as you can analyze how Google is seeing your sitemap and you can also resubmit a sitemap for faster indexing after changes. Another great thing about having this account with Google is that let’s say your site is focused on serving the UK, you can actually tell Google that your site is mainly for people in the UK. The next time you run a search on google.uk for a keyword on your site, you will see the results are better than if you had searched for the same on google.com.
For more control over your SEO, I recommend you install the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin which is one of the best tools for helping you improve your SEO. The Yoast plugin will also allow you to test how your page will be assessed by Google and point you in the right direction of how to fix wrong things.
 
7. Social media
Social Media And SEOAs social media sites are widely used by a huge number of people around the world, it’s crucial your business website has a profile on as many of them as possible. It’s not a must to have an account with every social media site out there but you could of course focus your efforts on the top 3 main players which are Facebook, Twitter and Google plus. By actively using these sites, not only will you be getting more traffic to your site through your online presence, you will also achieve better SEO results when it comes to the social signals.
 
8. Meta Tags
Social Media And SEOMeta Tags are important because they tell Google and other search engines what your site is about in a few short words or sentences. You have the Title and Description Meta tags which are the two important ones you should concentrate on. Try to place your keyword/phrase in both of those Meta tags as this will help your pages being found in the results. Be careful not to put the keyword in those tags when it’s not also included in your content, it will not work and may actually be harmful to your site’s ranking. The keywords Meta Tag is not considered to hold any value when it comes to Google but some search engines still use it and it wouldn’t do your site any harm if you do.
 
9. Video content
Video content and SEOTry to produce short, good quality and informative videos about your business products or services which would help drive you traffic back to your site. As you may have noticed, you will sometimes see some videos from Youtube in the Google search results. This will improve your SEO for sure as more people visit your site.
 
10. Engaging visitors
Engage Site Visitors SEOOnce you have done all the SEO in the world to be found in the search results, what happens when a visitors comes to your site? When a person makes it to your site, is your content good enough to keep them engaged? Is your site offering them something they were looking for? Would they come back to your site?
The above may not sound much to do with SEO but it has a lot to do with it because good content is where we started at the top of this article. So once you get a visitor, do your best to offer them content that would engage them and make them stay longer on your site. Provide good quality content which can include, videos, a blog, a forum, competitions, surveys or basically anything that they would find interesting and informative or entertaining.

Article Source: templatic

Author: Motaz

9 Killer SEO Tips a Content Dominated 2013

Search Engine Optimisation or search engine optimization is the process of boosting the volume and quality of traffic to a site from SERPs. There are two parts of SEO, the on page optimization and off page optimization. Below I will to you best 10 search engine optimization hints for 2013 web marketing:

1. Quality Content

Creating a quality content is one of the most critical elements in search engine optimization. You can not get a great position if you do not have a good and first post as it is what the users are constantly looking for in the internet.

2. HTML Tags
The Name tag, Meta description tag, Picture alt tag, H1 tag and H2 tag are the most important tags for search engine optimization.

3. Article Length

Always take note of that quality is better than quantity. So never writes worthless sentences merely to raise the word count.

4. Other Search Engines

Every search engine has their own algorithm to index web pages. You have to study and research how you can optimize your site to that particular search engine so that you’ll have a chance to get indexed and listed.

5. Link Building

One of the finest off-page optimization is the link building. If this technique is one of your primary tools to get rated then you have to pay attention you to the following variables.

1. Always construct quality backlinks.
2. Never use an automated or script applications to create backlinks. Recall a quality backlinks is more useful than 100 poor backlinks.
3. Create both no-follow and do-follow back links.
4. Do not use any junk method to create backlinks because Google despise this method as it is against their rules and regulations.

The following are the trick you can make use to create a strong and quality back links:

1. Guest Posting
2. Forum Posting
3. Site Commenting
4. Web Directories Entry
5. Post Entry

6. Do not buy Fiverr Gigs

Fiverr is a great place to make money and also buy services for just $5. As a marketer, Fiverr is a very bad idea because more than 95% search engine optimization associated gigs are imitation gigs.

7. Keyword Research

Keyword research determines you success online. You have to meticulously choose keywords that are popular and simple to rank for. You can take advantage of the Google Adword key word Tool to choose the best keywords for you.

8. Keyword Placement

As you have picked you main keywords for your site then you have to place your main keywords in the right locations in the post to get listing in Google.

1. You must add your primary keywords to title tag.
2. You must include your main keywords to Meta description tag.
3. You must include your main keywords to post URL.

9. Add Sitemap to Your Blog

You must add a sitemap for your blog. If your blogging platform is WordPress, use a plugin such as Google XML Sitemaps to create a sitemap.





Article source: hashtagseo

Facebook Likes are good, but Shares are better. That's because a Share means your content is being passed around social networks and creating buzz for your business.

But getting your Facebook content shared isn't as simple as throwing something onto your Wall and expecting the Shares to just happen. You need to create share-worthy content.

To do just that, Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith offers 14 ways to boost your content's visibility and viral sharing on Facebook—all in the following infographic by ShortStack.

Among the tips shared are the following:

Use eye-catching images. Rather than just putting text boxes galore on your Facebook Wall, vary the content by posting infographics, photos, and artwork.
Keep it short. Increase likes, comments, and shares by keeping posts between 100 and 150 characters long.


Offer value. Consider your audience when sharing content on Facebook. Ask yourself, "Will this entertain or inform my audience?"

How to Optimize Dynamic Website or Pages?

Definition of Dynamic Pages :

Dynamic pages are the pages generated "on-the-fly" from a database. It is also known as database-driven pages. PHP, Perl, ASP, etc are using to generate dynamic pages.


It is difficult for the search engines to read the dynamic pages. It is generated when user select variable. It is not possible for search engines to select those variables and this reason these pages cannot indexed.


Dynamic URL's contains strings like &, %, ? and due to these characters problems starts for the search crawlers to read the content. But it is possible to index the dynamic pages also.


Here, I am writing the way through which a dynamic page can be readable by the crawlers :

1. Place links of the dynamic pages on static pages. Further it can be submitted in search engines manually. Most of the dynamic pages will indexed by the search engine by this way.
   
2. Coldfusion and other softwares are available which can replace special characters like ?, %, & with alternative text. 
   
3. Using help of CGI/Perl, we can convert query string in the url with suitable text. Path_Info and Script_Name are environment variables which contains complete URL including strings in dynamic pages.
   
4. Web hosting company also provides module with Apache software that can convert dynamic URL into urls that can be indexed by search engines. The mod_rewrite available for Apache that converts requested url into search engine friendly urls.