What are your essential SEO techniques?

1. Check google adwords for your preferred keywords - ensure you optimise the site not just for these terms, but the associated terms identified in the keyword search

2. Register the site with search engines - sounds obvious, quite often it's neglected - you can do this for free just google "search engine registration" and find a site that enables you to submit your URL to all search engines

3. Develop links - forums, blogs, and partners - wherever possible get a link up and reciprocate if you can

4. Use Social Networking - LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are obvious places to maintain a presence

5. Regularly update content - stale content is no use to anyone

6. Make sure the website is speedy to load, the latest (the low weighted) criteria for a better place on the list

Try to get them links from their existing partners.

Have their management team engage in as many speaking events as possible. Good PR and trusted bio links...

Not an inclusive list by any means, but this is a start:

1. Have them do a Google Profile. Yields real SEO benefits
2. Be active on social networking sites (Focus, Linked In, Twitter, FaceBook)
3. Do a small-budget Google Adwords and/or LinkedIn SEM campaign
4. Include partners on their site and ask for reciprocation if appropriate
5. Do a monthly press release via a web-based tool like PR Web
6. Launch a YouTube "channel" or at leas a couple of videos, fully keyword tagged

There's lots more but this should help..

Many people say SEO practices are to please the search engines, I don't agree with this judgement. I believe doing SEO is to please yourself. If the search engine know your site, it will please the visitors. And if your visitors are pleased by finding what they need, you get satisfied in the end (you achieve your online goals, don't you?). It makes a lot of senses.

In brief there are few most critical techniques a SEO person should master:

A. On your website, in a priority order:

1. Title Tag
A page title is the first thing a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing.

2. Meta Tags
Although it is not used by the search engine for your website ranking result, meta tags is what your visitors see on SRP (search result page) before they click on your link.

3. Heading Tags
This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. In a priority basis, heading tags help users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your website contents are. Using as your page title, , as the next important key points.

4. Alt attributes for images
This would help the search engines understand what is your content about hence improve the site content quality. Search engine will understand what is the picture about and same as your reader. In some channel people can't see your picture by default (on Feed reader for example), having a clear alt tag to describe your picture is a good thing to do.

5. Title attributes for hyperlinks
The attribute text will be displayed when the visitor's cursor hovered on the link. This will tell visitor what is your link about and why they should follow the link (is the link's content relevant to what they are searching). The search engines also consider the link relevance by checking it's alt text. Using a text link 'click here' has no use for both visitors and search engines.

6. XML Sitemap and read-able site map
Search engine relies on XML Sitemap to index your whole website while the readable sitemap is what your visitors use to navigate through your website. Both kinds of sitemap help search engines and visitors to understand your site structure and improve your site index result.

7. Relevant content
The search engines were programmed to check whether the page's content is useful and relevant to the readers. The key here is making sense. You may use many keywords as you want, but the content must be relevant to the keyword unless you are failed to keep the visitors and the ranking of the page.

Cont.

(Cont.)
B. Off your website:

1. Link building
Many people believe that having as many as links pointing to your site will help improve your page rank. It is just not enough. It should be: having as many as IMPORTANT links pointing to your website or page will remarkably affect your website ranking. Having thousand links with ZERO PageRank point to your website is not effective as having a few high PR links (from PR 5 to 7) pointing to your site. It's making sense, isn't it?

2. Social Media
Social Media is not part of SEO work, it's result does help your SEO effectiveness. Social Media is not SEO nor Marketing, it's building relationship with your target audience and engaging with them.
If your write a great content and having a good relationship with your friends on Social Networks, they will spread your words. This will make a big impact on the Link building practice above and on your brand online presence.

Social Media is 2 ways relationship, it is no use if you just join Twitter or Facebook but only use them to serve your own sake, I'm pretty sure that you will fail. Social Media is to give and take, helping others by spreading their words, commenting on their post if you find it's helpful, and giving advice if you are asked to. Chances that you will get the same in return. Remember the key is to engage, just like making TRUE friends with online folks.

Just saw that my HTML tags were dismissed after submission. This is to correct my point #3 above.

3. Heading Tags
This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. In a priority basis, heading tags help users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your website contents are. Using H1 as your page title, H2, H3 as the next important key points.

Hi, Rachel wanted me to post my Linked In answer over here.

Yes, SEOmoz is the first place with their beginners PDF. Everything a beginner needs is right there.

1) On-Page: Good usage of structure, keywords, anchor text, Title tag, keywords in URL, etc.

2) Off-page link building with good anchor text, start with directories. http://www.seomoz.org/directories

3) All together now! GREAT CONTENT!!!

4) go back to step 2 and work on local sites to obtain links if he is local, or links within his marketplace.

5) Getting all your citations in order. Google places, Yelp, Facebook Places, Yellow Book, SuperPages, etc.

6) Register your Facebook page, Twitter, YouTube, etc. YouTube has a folllowed link in your profile and is great for videos showing up in SERPs

7) step 2 again. Work on getting more links relative to your marketplace.

8) Start blogging on your site to start about your industry. Helps with using longtail keywords and good for linkbait.

9) Follow up those blog post with Facebook and Twitter post. Link back to your blog.

10) Step 2 again: Pimp yourself out for good links!!

http://www.SearchEngineLand.com

http://www.SEOchat.com

http://www.davidmihm.com

And if he needs some paid help :) http://www.SEOsudo.com

Hope this helps,

Richard

edit

Hi David,

Thanks for your comment. Just want to clarify my point above. It's just an introduction and I just wanted to open my thought. The key points are the 9 following practices.

I didn't mean doing SEO has anything to do with being narcissism.Many friends of mine who don't believe in SEO said that doing SEO is just to please the search engines and resisted to do SEO. My opinion above was just to appose that thinking.

What I really meant is "good SEO good results, bad SEO bad results". If we did a good work in SEO we have many chances to increase our Acquisition and Conversion rate in the ACR (Acquisition, Conversion and Retention) process which also is our ultimate goals (not just making a website useful to the searchers but didn't bring any result). It make a lot of sense I think.

Hi David,
My examples of the domain names were in reference to the words used, not the hyphens. seattle-chocolate-biscuits.com, vs. chocolate-biscuits.com "

If it is advantageous to put hyphens in "seo-basics/on-page/link-text-keyword-use.html" then why not in "http://focus-on-seo.com/"?

If it makes it easier to read and understand with hyphens in the file names why should this stop at the domain name?
At one point Google considered domain names spammy. They changed their minds.

quote:
"hyphenated domain names suggested by persons are not appropriate in a business context - just as .net and other extensions are not appropriate. Hyphens are judged by users and searchers alike as cheap alternative brands, which is not a very good first impression."

I disagree. Hyphens aid in understanding. Both for the search engines which must run a word recognition algo for non-hyphenated strings of words. If you want to bring it to the extreme, a domain using hyphens is "greener" than one without, as less processor cycles are used in determining the relevance of the hyphenated URL.

You are misunderstanding my use of the word "body"
A page's code is seen and read starting in the header, then the left column, then the body. The header should have the h1, it being the first thing seen by humans and read by the search engines.

best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com

H tags are the focal points for SEO.
Use them to present your relevance.
Larger text = higher relevance.

I can't agree with the "Having thousand links with ZERO PageRank point to your website is not effective as having a few high PR links (from PR 5 to 7) pointing to your site." Duy.

Let me tell you why.
At about the time the Mayday update came in I started a new site, my nbs-seo.com.
As I am a firm believer in the power of signature links I made it a point to include one on most of my posts, here and in various other venues.

Over a month ago my site went from a PR0 to a PR4 in one step.
At the time of the increase I had 115 links.
113 on PR0 pages and 1 on a PR5 and one on a PR3.
ALL the PR0 pages were relevant discussions on SEO.

Mayday has changed the linking landscape.
It is not a straight assignment between linked and linking pages as it was before but one based on content relevance.

best
Reg
nbs-seo.com

Reg,

Interesting fact. I can see you did a good job in improving and promoting your site with back-linking. And I totally agree with you on the point that the content relevancy contributes to a site's ranking.

Regarding to my point of view, link's popularity and trustworthiness are still the most important factors that many people who do SEO still believe in. I'm talking about the link's quality not quantity(both are considered the ranking makeup elements).

It's not wrong to say: "it is more effective if a site has many important links pointing to it than having more non or less important links" (assuming the link's relevancy is already there as it's the basic we must know). At least there are no evidence found against this logic.

Besides Back-links, there are still many factors that contributing to the site ranking. There is a trustful list which was made by SEO experts could be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

A full list of page ranking factors http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

Hi Duy,
Those seamoz articles were published long before Mayday and Caffeine updates rearranged the SEO landscape and from what I see are quite badly out of date.

You are making an error that a lot of people make.
"Ranking" is PageRank and does not affect SERPs or search engine results positions.
These have been separated by Google and stand alone.

SERPs are not built by the amount or quality of links. If there is an effect, it is not a measurable one.
Links contribute to PR,
PR determines how often the site will be crawled.
The more often your site is crawled the fresher your SERPs.

best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com

While the seomoz guide is great, I'd also recommend getting the newly published Google Guide to SEO too...it's on my own blog front page...and we've had more than 800+ downloads of same in the past 45 days....

www.canuckseo.com

:-)

Jim

Hey Jim,
Nice work on the site.

The Google guide is not bad..
I find they tend to not use the best examples, like in the title.

Text strings like the Title, Description, URL, and other on page content fall into the "Relevance Theory" (by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory and should be kept as short as possible.

To fit this theory, Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices, should be
Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy - News - Prices
Or if one truly contemplated the SEO possibilities
Buy Baseball Cards - News - Prices | Brandon's

I noticed very little was mentioned about the effects of linking.
Under the heading "About increasing backlinks with an
intention to increase the value of the site" they do not say anything about search positions and they only warn,
"Avoid spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area"
and "purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank instead of traffic".

Good advice Richard.
IF one considers that all this linking is for traffic and PR, not SERPS.
"You can never be too healthy, too rich, or have too many organic links."

best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com

Make the content the most valuable content available for the searcher.

I know this is an old question but this topic seems to be popping up all the time, so I thought I'd share. For me, creating great content and optimizing it to the maximum is by far the best SEO technique. On top of that there are some link building techniques but in general, if you have no content, you won't get far in SERPs.

Get them to set up a spreadsheet of SEO activities and a timeline of achievable results, you can find them on the web. Starting with questions like "What is the aim of the business" through to "Perceived Rivals", "Key Phrases", "Title Tags".
Do a baseline check before starting to show your improvement. There are tools on SEOMOZ to do this.

Check out Compendium Blogware at http://compendiumblogware.com/. They market a package for increasing SEO thorough blogging. It really works. It takes a certain amount of dedication and discipline but its an exercise that can involve the entire company and actually increase staff engagement and morale at the same time as it promotes your company. We have been very pleased. Check out http://blog.kmionline.com to see our efforts.

Download and follow the basics that Google has published at:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2...

David is spot on.

Since the Google Caffeine update most of the ranking factors have been shifted to on-page and related "siloed*" content.

Links now count for PageRank and Google uses PR to determine the order of the pages to be scanned.

The more links you have, the higher your PageRank,

The higher your PageRank, the more often your pages are crawled.

The more often your pages are crawled, the sooner your new information hits the index.

The more information you have indexed, the more chances at getting top positions, each page is a new ranking opportunity.

The more on topic pages you have linked in the "silo"*, the higher your relevance.

The higher your relevance, the better chance that your indexing efforts get at a top ranking page.

Links are for building traffic and PageRank "Authority".
PR alone does not determine ranking positions.
I imagine it is only one of the hundreds of factors that influence your position, but as you can see if you do some PR/link checking in the search results, the number of links does not have much of an influence on ranking. I often find a PR2 site will out do a PR4 site if the relevance is better presented.

David, you said:
"this would look like this:
http://focusonseo.com/seo-basics/on-page/link-text-keyword-use.html"

Why not like "http://focus-on-seo.com/seo-basics/on-page/link-text-keyword-use.html"?

SEO is all about relevance and it's presentation.

Relevance starts with the domain name. If you are selling chopcolate biscuits in Seattle www.seattle-chocolate-biscuits.com, if you were selling world wide, chocolate-biscuits.com
The next place to display relevance is in your title tag. (Add the description and kw tags here for the robots to see).

Google and the visitor needs to know what keywoprds are relevant so build that in.
for Google and the largest text on the page, at the beginning of the page, for the visitor..

Develop the visual hierarchy with text size and tags and emphasis. (Bold - Italics - Links)

Present your navigation in headings going from the most relevant to the keyword phrase to the least important. This would usually be
Product Categories -
Articles -
About Us -
Terms Of Service/Policy -
Contact Us -

Open the body of the page with a h2 heading

Don't keyword stuff.

Don't submit to Google. Use a link on a relevant page to direct their robot.

*siloed. - Siloed information is information placed in vertical "stacks" made of separate but related content.

If your index page contained a heading and sub heading and a small amount of text, your call to action would direct users to another page in the site that had more information on the subject, or allowed you to buy it, or both.
The pages in the silo should contain information relevant to the primary keyword phrase. A full description, specifications, optional extras, articles and links to outside information.

Another SEO option is to use CSS image replacement for the logo to stream info to users not allowing graphics (text only accessibility).

best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com

@Reg Charie
Thank you for the positive nod. Two confusing points that need clarification though...

[quote]
"Why not like "http://focus-on-seo.com/seo-basics/on-page/link-text-keyword-use.html"?
SEO is all about relevance and it's presentation.
Relevance starts with the domain name. If you are selling chocolate biscuits in Seattle www.seattle-chocolate-biscuits.com, if you were selling world wide, chocolate-biscuits.com "
[end quote]

I fail to grasp how using hyphens in a domain name adds or manufactures relevance.

This is not user-friendly. It's that simple. If the site is not created with the user in mind, then the site is all about your corporate ego, not the user's needs. Any effective web site must be marketed, and when your domain name contains hyphens, you invite user/searcher confusion and mistakes, which results in failed attempts to connect with their desired goal - the site.

Using hyphens may appear like an easy solution to obtaining a domain - however, if the domain you want is taken, and you create a site around a domain that contains the exact same words using hyphens, guess what searchers are going to remember? They're only going to remember the domain WITHOUT hyphens.

To Kami and other readers, hyphenated domain names suggested by persons are not appropriate in a business context - just as .net and other extensions are not appropriate. Hyphens are judged by users and searchers alike as cheap alternative brands, which is not a very good first impression.

If a domain name is available without hyphens, purchase it and use it.

[quote]
"Open the body of the page with a h2 heading."
[end quote]

I'm hoping this is a typo Reg. As you're aware, every page requires a headline and the first, primary headline that describes the content of the page is the h1. The h1 should contain the keywords of the page content, and the keywords should appear at the beginning of the headline.

"Seattle's Chocolate Biscuit Is To Die For"
will perform better than:
"Finding The To Die For Chocolate Biscuit In Seattle"
_____

@Duy Nguyen

[quote]
"I believe doing SEO is to please yourself."
[end quote]

In the context of your solid information - this belief is nonsensical. If the goal of a site is to feed narcissism then perhaps you are correct.

The goal of the majority of web sites is to present a business or organization in such a way that the site becomes useful to the searcher/user.

If the primary objective of a site is to be useful and informative whilst accomplishing specific corporate and financial objectives - then the purpose of SEO is to attract users and searchers to the site. Pleasing oneself has nothing to do with it.
________

Hoping this continues to help your associates Kami, dm

use wordpress as cms. done.