7 Under-the-Hood Optimization Techniques That Will Rock Your SEO

Whether you’re an SEO at the top of your game, or a site owner looking to do more with your SEO, this article is for you.

Most SEO advice is pretty straightforward (and worn out): Optimize your title tags! Content is king! Use a sitemap!

I get all that. And that’s fine advice. And you should do it. But sometimes we need a little bit more — those under-the-hood optimizations that can move the needle even further for SEO. I’m about to give you seven of my secret weapons for doing just that.

Just so you don’t get your hopes up too high, I’m not providing any home run hacks that are going to boost you to the top of the SERPs by tomorrow morning. SEO doesn’t work that way. These seven techniques are reputable, slow-but-steady, and hard work.But they do work.

1. Make Your Site Secure

Google has tipped its hand regarding one of their newest ranking factors: Site security.
In the summer of 2014, Google declared that HTTPS is now a ranking signal. Although its immediate impact on the search landscape is marginal, we can expect this signal to grow stronger as time goes on.
Security, with all its massive disruptions of late, is a big deal for users, and therefore for Google. We as SEOs need to understand this. Although we crave data — especially the data that gets snatched away from us (not provided) — we still need to respect the limits of privacy.
If you have the ability and/or resources, add encryption to your site. In addition to being a ranking signal, it is also a user signal. Sites with encryption are recognized in the SERPs with an “https://” preceding the URL, unlike non-secured sites.

This little change in the SERPs alerts conscientious users to the presence or absence of a security layer on a given site, which may in turn affect click-throughs, bounce rates, and dwell time.

2. Add Above-the-Fold Images or Videos With Full Optimization

We all know images and videos can improve a site’s ability to engage users. What we may not realize, however, is that such images can improve a site’s ranking in Image or Universal Search.
The click-through rates for no-image pages are, on average, lower than pages that contain images. Although the first position results gain higher CTRs (20% vs. 10%) for no-image pages, the tables turn in the third through tenth SERP positions. For these results, users show a preference for pages that contain images.
Here is research from Jim Yu in his discussion from Search Engine Land. The chart indicates CTRs for image vs. no-image SERP entries.

To make your images as SERP-supported as possible, you need to optimize them. Here are the most important features for optimization:

• Make the size of the image appropriate to the necessary resolution. Get the file as small as possible to improve page load times.
• Add alt text.
• Title the image appropriately, using keywords if at all possible.
• Use a good quality image. It’s for the users, remember.
• Add supporting Schema for the image.

You can use videos, too, with similar results in the SERPs. The additional effort of adding above-the-fold images and video is that it improves SERP rankings while also adding value for the user. Value for the user means your site visitors will click through more frequently, bounce less, stay longer, and thereby improve your rankings.

3. Create an Image Sitemap

Every search engine professional understands the importance of an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap. I’m suggesting that you create an image sitemap.
So, what’s an image sitemap? And how many sites even have one?
Not many sites have an image sitemap. That’s why we’re under the hood right now. This optimization will boost your rankings particularly in Google’s Image Search.
To create an image sitemap, simply add extra information about images on the page to your existing XML sitemap.

4. Regularly Review and Request Removals From Your Link Profile

Behind every site lurks a powerful and sometimes ominous force. It’s your link profile.
You have limited control over what sites link or don’t link to your site. You could become the victim of a negative SEO attack, or you could be rewarded by links from a high-authority government (.gov) or education (.edu) site.
But you do have some control. You should exercise this control in three ways:

• Monitor your link profile. Every now and then, scan through the list of sites that are linking to you. This data is available in Google Webmaster Tools. You can also purchase services that will scan your link profile for possible risk.
• Request low authority or spam sites remove their links to yours. A polite removal request is the best solution to spam links. Simply email the webmaster, informing them of the links and ask that they be removed.
• Submit a disavow file. Regardless of the SEO brouhaha over the issue, Google has provided a tool that allows you to disavow any links that you deem undesirable.

5. Create Keyword-Specific URLs

Aren’t ranking for a specific keyword? Check your URLs.
Exact match domains (EMD) are an SEO spam technique of yesteryear, but there is no question that Google still considers the URL to be a significant indication of a page’s relevance, and therefore a ranking factor.
Notice how each of these sites, top-ranked domains for a competitive keyword, have URL pages that use the exact query.

6. Use Your Target Keywords Across The Entire Site

One of the lesser-utilized SEO techniques is employing a target keyword throughout the site as a whole. Many SEOs believe (mistakenly) that they can rank for a given keyword by churning out a few blog articles surrounding the keyword. They target a keyword by developing content on one or two pages, but they neglect its presence on the rest of the site.
In reality, Google prefers to see an entire domain that supports the keyword and its semantic variations.
Here’s how you can check this:

• Do a Google search for inurl:domain plus the selected keyword in quotation marks.
• Look at how many results Google provides.
• Compare this to as many domains or competitors as would be helpful.

Let me show you an example. In the screenshot above, I showed you how the website Accreditation is outranking Experian.com for the keyword “what is a good credit score.”
I recently analyzed the SERPs for this keyword, and found that the top organic result has the highest site wide saturation for the given keyword. I tested several other semantic variations and found it to be consistently true. The site with the highest site wide occurrence of a given keyword ranked higher.


CreditKarma.com has 3,500% more occurrences of the keyword than Experience. Even though CreditKarma’s domain authority, page authority, and domain wide link quantity are lower, they still rank higher for that keyword.

My informal survey doesn't prove that top results will always be backed by the highest occurrence of a keyword throughout the site, but it does suggest it is an important factor in Google’s ranking system. Sites that contain semantic variations and/or keywords throughout have a higher chance of ranking in the SERPs for any given keyword in that semantic domain.

7. Optimize Your Brand’s Social Profiles

Google’s Knowledge Graph is a significant aspect of SEO that we can’t ignore. Google recently began displaying the social profiles for brands directly in the Knowledge Graph.
It’s not apparent how this will roll out for small to mid-sized businesses. Most of the results I've seen are for large corporate brands.
My sense is that Google will continue to refine KG settings to bring up a full array of information for most brands that have optimized social profiles. It’s worth giving some optimization effort to your social accounts.

8. Add Schema Everywhere

According to a study by Search metrics, Schema markup shows up in more than a third of all Google’s search results. With this huge SERP preference for Schema, you’d think that sites would be flocking to implement Schema snippets wherever they could.
Well, apparently not. A mere 0.3% of Internet domains are using Schema integration.

This definitely falls into an under-the-hood optimization technique. Learning schema isn't that difficult, and it will certainly look familiar if you have any coding background or awareness of structured data.
Google has even given you some help with their Structured Data Markup Helper.

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Content Strategies To Improve Your SEO

Becoming an expert or a respected source for specific types of content is one of the best ways to improve your search ranking. Search engines view sites that have multiple pages of in-depth coverage on a particular topic as more valuable because they present users with a greater chance of finding the information that they’re looking for.

Search engines look for “content clusters” on websites to determine their relevance to a specific search query. Sites that have lots of quality content focused on a single subject are likely to rank higher. For sites covering multiple topics, it’s important to organize based on themes, main subjects, or terms, otherwise known as “siloing,” to help increase your ranking. Organizing related elements of your website into “silos” of information helps search engines recognize related content, and can be easily done in your main navigation.

Another popular (and often successful) strategy is creating content around a keyword or keyword phrase that has shown high levels of engagement on your site. If you know that a certain keyword draws a lot of traffic to your site, then you should focus your efforts on creating more content around that term. This will help you reinforce your relevance and boost your search ranking for that particular term. This should hopefully lead to more traffic and monetization opportunities for your efforts.

Blogging & Content Marketing

Having a blog is a necessity for content marketing. If you want to be taken seriously in the digital marketing space, you have to maintain a blog and keep your followers coming back to your site for more. This is an obvious truth for online publishers and bloggers, but many big brands neglect their blogs or lack them altogether.

According to a 2013 HubSpot report, 79% of companies with a blog experienced a positive ROI for inbound marketing, compared to just 20% of companies without a blog. Clearly there’s a big discrepancy between those numbers that serves as an obvious indicator of the importance of a blog.

In 2014, a brand’s blog should be the front line of their content marketing strategy. It’s their own customizable domain to share relevant information, tell their story, and provide followers with great branded content. Essentially, a business’s blog is where the content marketing journey starts.

As the critical foundation for your content marketing endeavors, you should take the time to focus on the design and layout of your blog and ensure that all of the existing content is of the highest quality possible. Your blog will serve as the single most important place for your content strategy, and as such, it should provide an unbeatable user experience.

While having a great blog of your own will be a cornerstone of your content marketing strategy, it doesn't mean that you have to limit yourself to creating and sharing information solely on your blog. In fact, it’s equally important to try and contribute to other related sites in order to get your brand and your message in front of your target audience.

Having your brand appear on neutral publications will help build your fan base and legitimize your business while also helping to establish your reputation as an expert in your niche. When your followers and potential customers recognize your brand on other sites, it helps them build trust and reinforces your company’s relationship with them as consumers. On the other hand, guest blogging serves as a great opportunity to evangelize your company to new audience members and gives you a new platform to further share your story.

Blogging For Content Marketing

Running your own blog requires a lot of time, effort, and resources. As such, you should look at your blog as an investment. One of the best ways to ensure that you get a return on your investment is to focus on optimizing your blog and your content for search. Ultimately, your search ranking will help you generate more organic traffic, reach a larger audience, and bring in extra revenue.

So what are some tips for getting your content noticed by search engines?

First, you should spend a lot of time crafting the headlines of your articles. When it comes to content marketing, having a catchy headline is more than half the battle. In fact, most content creators spend more time coming up with headlines than they do on the body of content itself—it’s that important!

Here are a few guidelines to help you write better headlines:

Be Concise—Internet users want to be able to gather as much information with as little effort and in as short amount of time as possible. Thus, your headlines need to be short and to the point. Typically, headlines with 8 words or less perform best.

Use Numbers—Starting your headline with a number tells readers exactly what they can expect to find inside and tends to attract more attention as a result. Titles such as “10 Expert SEO Tips” or “5 Unbelievable Marketing Videos” will garner more clicks and help your content be recognized by search engines.

Offer Benefits—Use words that promise some sort of benefit to your readers. For example, the phrase “How to” typically gets a great response because it quickly indicates to your readers that they can learn something new from your piece.

Optimize for Search—This may seem like a no-brainer, but you should try to include your keyword or keyword phrase in your headline. Search engines will look at the title of your article to determine its relevance to a search query, so it’s important that you include the term or subject of your article in the title. Use tools to learn what people are searching for and find a way to include that specific term in your headline.

Tease Your Readers—Titles that are mysterious or play to the curiosity of your audience will also perform well. The key to this type of headline is to write something short that hints at what makes the article helpful, controversial, interesting, or funny. Don’t give all of the information of your article away in the title; rather, make readers click to find out.

Writing catchy headlines plays a huge part in the success of your content strategy, but so does your subject matter. Real content marketing success is the result of combining a great topic with high quality content, a great headline, and then getting creative with how you share it with your audience.

Try using these guidelines for choosing great subject matter and getting the most out of each and every post:

Choose Timeless Topics—Just like there are timeless songs that we all know and love regardless of their age, there are timeless topics that no matter what year it is, people will still be interested in them. Some great examples are celebrities, technology, food, and entertainment. Finding ways to tie timeless elements into your articles will help extend their shelf life and their relevance to your readers over time.

Expand On Your Previous Posts—A great way to keep your momentum moving forward is to study your previous posts, find out which ones performed best, and then build on those topics. This is an effective strategy for targeting your audience and nurturing a new content cluster, which search engines will view as being authoritative.

Update Older Posts—You don’t always have to create and share brand-new content. Extend the life of your existing posts by updating the most popular posts from your archives. Take a look at your analytics, find some posts that have performed well in the past, and give them a modern makeover. Don’t rewrite your posts, as that could have damaging effects on your SEO. Simply give them a bit of an update so that they are relevant to your new audience members.

Stay On Top Of Trends—Blog posts are inherently short-lived and generally news-y, which is why it’s a great idea to stay atop trends and cover topics in your niche that are popular at the moment. These types of posts can be quickly created and shared, and result in quick and easy spikes in traffic, which will boost your search ranking. As public interest grows in a trending topic, there’s often a short period of time where marketers can create related content and ride the wave of popularity. You can expand the reach of your brand by sharing timely posts or developing entire campaigns around trending topics.

Your blog gives you total control over your brand’s image and should act as the foundation for all of your content marketing efforts. Your brand identity and voice should be strongest on your blog because after all, it’s your home turf. The most important thing to remember is that this is where your content marketing strategy will start, so you need to take the time to optimize it, both in terms of design and content. Understanding who your audience is and what they’re interested is a big part of creating a blog and content that will be successful.
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Understanding & Explaining A Realistic SEO Timeline

How long should it take to see SEO results? Columnist Stephan Spencer says there's no simple answer to this question, but explains some of the factors which may impact an SEO timeline.

Is your site is in deep water in the search engines? Perhaps you got hit with a manual penalty. Perhaps competition is simply outperforming you in results and in sales. Maybe you’re the consultant or in-house SEO who has been assigned to a tough case….

For site owners or marketing managers, it’s often difficult to understand why your rankings or conversion rates are not improving – are perhaps even declining – after implementing huge site changes at the advice of your SEO practitioner. If you’re the SEO in that situation, you might have a tough time explaining exactly why you can’t just “SEO it faster.”

Now, it could be that your strategy isn’t working; however, it’s more likely that there is simply a disconnect between the SEO practitioner and the rest of the team about the nature of a “realistic SEO timeline.” How do we solve the information gap?

Here are some ideas that are great for starting the discussion:

SEO Is Site Fitness

Optimize Worldwide’s Matt Morgan wrote a great article back in May comparing SEO to taking antibiotics. While this is a fine analogy, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

SEO is about fixing current problems as much as it is about preventative measures and continual improvement. Once your “treatment” of short-term SEO tasks is done, your site should never stop practicing SEO.

Perhaps a better analogy would be to say that SEO works similarly to a fitness routine. If you start skipping your routine — or stop doing it all together — you’re not going to achieve or maintain optimal results.

Of course, before starting that fitness routine, it is always important to check in with your doctor, who will make recommendations as to what can be feasibly done without damaging your body. This is the SEO’s first job: looking at your site to diagnose what problems are going on, and providing guidance on how you can build strong, reputable authority and rankings over time.

Going too fast and expecting extreme results will often end up resulting in some sort of “over correction” that could damage your site further, just like an extreme diet can work in the short term, but ultimately put you right back where you started — or worse, do damage to your body.

SEO Is Complex And Requires Long-Term Thinking

A lot of the technical side of SEO is troubleshooting. The fact is, it isn’t always evident why your rankings are fluctuating. For example, is it possible that an SEO tactic used in the past is now being recognized as spam, meaning that its value has been discounted within Google’s ranking algorithm. That could lead to a huge drop in rankings, and an SEO consultant’s efforts that have been making slow, positive progress might be obscured or blamed for this.

It’s important to understand that there are many variables going on with your SEO. The consultant or in-house SEO is working with all the SEO, design, code, etc., decisions made in the long past, the recent past, the present, and the future. That’s why it is incredibly important to start out an SEO relationship with an audit of the site. This is going to uncover those problems that wouldn’t normally show up on your radar screen and expose the damage that they may be doing to your site.

Once you have a solid foundation, develop an action plan to move forward in bolstering your site’s reputation and reach. Sometimes, when fixing a site from some major foul play, you’ll see worse results before you see eventual and steady improvement.

For example, in a recent conversation with forensic SEO consultant Alan Bleiweiss, he described to me a case with one of his clients which illustrates the need to take the long view on SEO projects.

Alan related to me:

I did the audit in January of 2013, and the client began implementing changes immediately. The organic traffic continued to slide through July 2013, and then only began to slowly come back at that point. As you can see, from that point forward, it was a bump up, decline, bump up, decline process repeatedly until finally, a year later, it’s breaking through.

This site was a combination of issues across various algorithms, mostly Panda. That’s the most difficult reality – Panda has continued over the past couple years to mostly get stricter, with some “easing” thrown in along the way. That makes it very difficult for a site to reach sustainability.

Another critical consideration is that work can’t be done once and left. These sites need ongoing applied pressure of stronger quality signals on-site as well as brand authority and trust reinforcement.

You can see from the graph of the web traffic that this site actually required major changes which, with the additional complication of algorithm changes by Google, actually caused organic traffic to drop for a significant period of time.

However, by taking the long view, being patient, and doing all the right things to create sustainable SEO success, the traffic has rebounded and indeed surpassed previous levels. Had Alan not prepared the client for the fact that this may likely be the case, he and the internal team members responsible for SEO could well have faced some very difficult conversations with the management team.

SEO Requires A Team Effort

There are a myriad of factors that impact SEO success — and many are dependent upon cooperation from other teams or departments.

With larger clients, we’re often looking at tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, or millions) of website pages and large, sometimes geographically distributed, teams to work with. There’s also the bureaucracy of getting changes approved and enacted. A lot of the time can be spent waiting in the wings on obtaining approval, deciding on preferred courses of action, or simply getting SEO work into the site development queue.

That’s why the cooperation of other teams — especially the IT department and the social media team – is crucial to SEO success. The SEO is managing not just a bunch of keywords, but an entire movement for the direction of your site. Don’t underestimate the amount of work this takes, especially when factoring in the time needed to get buy-in from these other departments or executives.

Timing Is Often A Game Of Chance

An effective SEO tactic used to be putting up 50 new blog content pieces and promoting the heck out of them in hopes that a small number would be seen by a lot of people, and perhaps earn social shares and link authority for the site.

The thing is, virality is incredibly hard to predict, even by the experts. It is often about placing content in the right place at the right time; however, that right moment can happen at any moment.

You can make an effort to predict what content your audience will want by using seasonality (basketball-related content during March Madness, etc.), leveraging a current event (this gets tricky, since if it is done too late, it is passé), or simply trying to put out awesome content and ideas that people want to share, and hoping it strikes a chord.

ROI Gets Complicated

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm and the loss of keyword referral data (“not provided”) have made things a heck of a lot harder for SEOs aiming to measure precise ROI of their actions.

No longer is it an option to measure the exact amount of traffic a singular keyword is getting you. Furthermore, Hummingbird makes it so you can’t always directly control which variations of a word your site will rank for. Sometimes, this can even direct irrelevant traffic to your site.

Instead, look for KPIs that add more value to your overall goals. Is the ultimate goal of your SEO overhaul to receive more positive online press? Is it to facilitate brand loyalty? Is it to improve conversion rates? What metrics have value is ultimately determined by your business’ specific goals; useful info for one site could be utterly unhelpful for another.

One metric that I always recommend is “task completion” – this cuts to the core of understanding why people use your site, which helps inform strategies for increasing conversions. This methodology recognizes that not everyone is going to come to your site to buy — that’s just not the way it works. Instead, it asks, “Did the visitor complete what (s)he set out to do on the site?”

For example, some users will use the site to research a type of product for interest in a purchase later down the road. To help them receive the best possible experience, have a great and clean review system with clear ratings that you keep free of spam, and use in-depth, original content for your product descriptions. You could even create a forum where users ask questions, then keep a log of these questions and flesh out pages on the site by answering them. Track the time a user spends on the product page or on pages providing more in-depth info on the product.

It may be useful to collect some data on task completion rates in the audit portion of your SEO plan. To do so, set up a short survey that asks just a yes or no question, such as “did you complete what you wanted to get done?”, “are you satisfied with your visit?” or even a short multiple choice question that asks users if they are visiting for research, for entertainment, or to buy. You can use this metric later to review the efficacy of the SEO plan in creating a better customer experience.

What This Means When You’re Hiring/Working With An SEO

• Never trust an SEO professional who claims to guarantee a number #1 spot in 6 months or less. Often times, the benefits of a well-executed SEO strategy won’t manifest themselves for at least a year, especially when the website being optimized has a lot of issues. Tactics which might get your rankings to spike in the short term can come back to haunt you in the long term.
• Ask for a timeline of expectations at the beginning, and then another timeline after the audit is done.
• Look for someone who, instead of focusing on rankings, focuses on your business goals. Rather than rankings, look for growth in KPIs such as organic traffic, sales, tasks completed, etc.
• As with your own personal fitness, often it is best to focus on small, achievable goals that are right in front of you. Doing so allows progress to happen, less inhibited by the constant worry of where you are in comparison to the mountain of work ahead of you. Instead of trying to succeed at SEO with a single herculean effort, you can create something great, measure its performance, and then create another starting point from which to continue improving.
• Ask them not what is going to give the fastest results, but what will lead to the results that can be sustained over time.
• Try a timeline that is segmented into actions: 2-4 weeks for a comprehensive site audit, 1-2 months for technical changes, 2 months for content revamp, 3-4 months for link acquisition efforts, etc.
• Ask for reports that explain clearly what is being done and how this will improve your overall growth; de-emphasize pure ranking metrics.

This article should not be seen as validating poorly-done SEO that does not show you the fastest possible results. There are some situations in which great SEO can indeed show very fast results – such as eliminating hidden spammy links from hackers, fixing critical crawling or site architecture issues, or manual penalty recovery.

What you should take from this article is that before beginning any SEO efforts, you should take time to assess the situation, plan both short- and long term-strategies, approach SEO as an ongoing process, and communicate realistic goals and timelines for improvement to the larger team and executives.

Many SEO efforts fail due to unrealistic expectations about the time and investment required. Don’t let yours be one of them

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Emphasis on Content Marketing Revives Agency SEO Efforts and Revenues

What good is digital content if no one can find it? That's a question driving growth at agencies as marketers rediscover search-engine-optimization's role in making or breaking a campaign -- and selling product."A lot of our clients are starting to put a heavy focus on organic search," said Huge's director of marketing and SEO, David Sosnowski, referring to services meant to boost a marketer's search results often without the use of paid media. "Traditionally in the past it's been almost left out of the process." He attributes much of the growth in SEO to brands' emphasis on content marketing.

Lavall Chichester, director-search and content marketing for Lowe Profero.

While search-engine-marketing services are as old as Google itself, they're seeing a resurgence as an agency moneymaker. Some large shops are getting around 20% revenue growth from search while others are beefing up their teams.

For example, Inter public's Huge in 2014 doubled its team to more than 10 staffers. One of the shop's largest clients increased its marketing spending on an SEO initiative from 10% of its budget to 30%, said Mr. Sosnowski. Other clients are seeing almost 50% of their e-commerce revenue driven by optimized search.In 2015, the agency plans to double or even triple its search team as voice prompts and new mobile platforms complicate the landscape.

Profero, which was acquired by IPG last year, also doubled its search team in 2014. While part of that growth came from new-client opportunities within the network, "content is the biggest opportunity for us," said Lavall Chichester, director-search and content marketing for Lowe Profero.

"The SEO department is growing faster than even the paid-search department," he added. "[Brands] are switching to publishing models and the ones working are powered by search."

Search engines surpassed general media as the most-trusted source for general news and information in 2014, according to PR giant Edelman's latest Trust Barometer. Search engines were up 8% on the Trust Barometer compared with the year before.It also helps that more clients who control budgets understand the importance of search. Trip Advisor, although not a Profero client, is one of those companies that gets search, he said. He cited a campaign that encouraged consumers to search for "Trip Advisor and San Francisco," rather than just "San Francisco." "Doing this creates keyword searches that increase in volume over time." said Mr. Chichester.Much of that online discovery is also now happening on mobile devices, which is leading to demand for responsive website design. Brands also want to optimize for local Yelp and Google business pages, and local search efforts power mobile search, Mr. Chichester said.

Benefiting are search specialists like iProspect. Paid search, which makes up 60% of its revenue, grew 20% in 2014 while total revenue was up 16%, thanks in large part to new content opportunities. For client GMC, iProspect identified three un-branded search topics: towing and trailering, fuel efficiency and vehicle performance. It then worked with a partner shop to create lifestyle articles and targeted consumers as they searched these topics. GMC secured the top ranking for numerous unbranded terms and drove around 14,000 incremental organic site visits per month, the shop said.

Much of that online discovery is also now happening on mobile devices, which is leading to demand for responsive website design. Brands want to optimize for local Yelp and Google business pages, and local search efforts power mobile search, Mr. Chichester said.

"Depending on the client, we are seeing at least a 50% growth in client revenue from mobile," said Jeremy Cornfeldt, U.S. president of iProspect. He referenced Google's 92% growth in mobile ad search revenue from 2013 to 2014. "It's safe to say that clients are seeing massive growth in mobile traffic and sales."

At the same time, more shops are automating much of the process using new proprietary technology, third-party vendors and APIs. Using new tools, they're also capturing more data.

"The learnings we get from search help us identify new targets," said 360i CEO Sarah Hofstetter. "It's not just search as a mechanism; it's search as a research vehicle."

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Basic SEO for the Beginner

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is one of the most rapidly growing forms of Internet marketing. SEO companies spring up almost overnight, and in the volatile world of the Internet, most of them die away just as fast.Why is SEO doing such booming business? Is SEO important for your website? How can you choose a good company to handle your SEO needs? Is SEO something you can do yourself? This article looks to answer some of those questions.Why is SEO doing such booming business? As more and more commerce moves online, from shopping to wholesale to banking and investing, it's only natural that marketing should move with it. SEO is, at the moment, the most effective form of online marketing. And, arguably, since billions of people use search engines every day, being found by search engines is certainly one of the more important aspects of online marketing, if not the most important aspect.So is SEO important for your website? The answer is a resounding Yes for commercial and informational websites, a hesitant Probably for personal sites. If you want people to find your site, SEO is important. If you plan to make money from lots of people visiting your site, whether directly, through selling them something, or indirectly, from click-through advertisement profits, then SEO becomes not only important, but essential. The only website that doesn't need SEO in some way or another is the one that doesn't really care if it gets hits or not. In other words...every site should have some basic SEO.With so many companies out there, and so much misinformation about SEO floating around the web, how can you choose a good SEO company? Well, the best way to start is simply to input "SEO" or "search engine optimisation" into a search engine. The first 20 companies are clearly doing something right. If you want a company to be able to place you in the top 20, you must find a company that can get itself there, first.But don't stop there. Go to each company's website and look around. What do you see? Confusing articles riddled with so many keywords that there's almost no content? Confusing navigation and misdirection? Or do you see informative, easy to read blurbs about the company, their mission, and, most importantly, a concise layout of the services they offer and the prices they charge? Choose a clean, easy to read site with good information about the company and its services and charges, even if it doesn't show up first in the search engine results. You don't just want customers or viewers to find you; you want them, presumably, to come back.Finally, is SEO something you can do yourself? That depends. SEO requires basic knowledge of a websites META tags (something you're already familiar with if you built your own website; if not, work closely with your webmaster on those), an ability to learn which keywords and key phrases to focus on for your website (for example, which one are people most likely to input into a search engine: "SEO" or "search engine optimisation"?) and, of course, the ability to incorporate those keywords into rich, informative articles and blurbs. It involves the ability to get back links from reputable companies — an important part of SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).There are hundreds of free resources on the web to help you walk through the steps; what you need to do, how you need to do it, etc. In the end, though, your ability to perform the work and your willingness to spend the time required to get good rankings determine whether you should do it yourself or hire an SEO service to help you. If you have the time and the willingness to learn, an ability to put together a good article, and the ability to research to find out which keywords to fill it with, then you can do your own SEO. If those things are lacking, you may be better off hiring us at TechKnowSys, where we know the techniques and can get the job done for you.Basic SEO for BeginnerWhichever one you choose, in the end, SEO is an important part of your website, and it's not something you can afford to overlook if you want to drive traffic and generate revenue.
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Why Content is King in SEO

Once upon a time, if you wanted to use SEO to increase your rankings, you simply crammed your website as full of keywords as possible. Some less scrupulous web designers crammed their sites full of popular, but irrelevant, keywords. Of course, that only worked for websites who only wanted to display ads and were not concerned with getting visitors to come back.

Today, SEO isn't just for con men anymore. Respectable businesses are learning how to optimize their websites so they can be found by people who are searching for the products and services they want to sell. This means, of course, that they don't just want visitors to drop by once. They hope to keep them coming back. This is why content is so important.

Webmasters and SEO experts have a saying: “Content is King.” It's very true. A website's content, even more so than its products, is what attracts visitors. If you can't write good content yourself, TechKnowSys can help you by providing an author who can write SEO-optimized for your industry.

There are two important aspects of web content. For simplicity's sake, we'll call them Quantity and Quality.

Quality means that the content should be well written and be free from those embarrassing typos that make visitors wonder if your website really knows what it's talking about. For our purposes, however, it also means that content should be rich in keywords, informative and interesting, so that the visitor feels they've learned something. Such is the power of Quality content.

Quantity, on the other hand, means that your website should be updated regularly with new content added. A visitor may return to an informational article once, or even two or three times, but if your website's content never changes, eventually, there will be no reason for him to return.

How often should you add new content to your site? This is where experts differ. Some say once a week is often enough. Others say twice a day, at least. It depends on the nature of the site, of course; a website's commercial blog should be updated once - or even twice - per day. Static content, however, can be added once or twice a week. Try to space it out. Going for weeks without adding anything then suddenly adding ten different articles isn't going to get you anywhere.

Content truly is king on the Internet. Use it properly, and first-time visitors will become repeat visitors.

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On-Page Optimization

1. Page Titles

Your page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. Each of your pages & posts should have its own unique title, which includes the main keywords for that page.

For example, you could write a blog post about a new chocolate cake recipe that you have tried. It is therefore vitally important that you include ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ within your post title, perhaps “Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe” or “ Chocolate Cake Recipe for kids”, etc.

This way, whenever someone searches for Chocolate Cake Recipes in a search engine, your post has a better chance of showing up because you have included those keywords.

2. Meta Descriptions

Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. These descriptions are an important place to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.

For instance, if we continue to use the ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ example, then a good meta description for that page would include those keywords and related ones. So, “This easy chocolate cake recipe is possibly the most delicious, mouth watering, chocolaty cake ever made.” would be a great meta description to use, as it is relatively short, whilst containing a number of specific keywords.

3. Meta Tags

For each of your pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously.

I use a WordPress plug-in on my sites called ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This allows me to enter all of my meta tag keywords, meta description and page title at the bottom of each of my posts before publishing. This simply inserts all of the information into your page HTML format for you, making your life a little easier.

4. URL Structure

Including search engine friendly URLs for each of your pages is highly recommended, as these bring better crawling. Shorter URLs seem to perform better in search engine results, however that is not the only factor.

URLs that include targeted keywords, also perform better. The location of these keywords can also be a major influence. For example site.com/keyword would perform better than site.com/365/738/subfolder/keyword etc.

As you can see for this page, the URL is http://onlineincometeacher.com/traffic/on-page-seo-techniques/ I have included the keywords that are relevant for this post.

5. Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)

When writing your articles, you should break up your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to make it easier for people to read. These sections can be given heading, which is where H1, H2,H3, H4, etc. tags are used.

Generally H1 tags are reserved for your main page title, with subsequent headings (just like the ones I have used throughout this post) being issued H2, H3, etc. Search engines use these to determine what is important within your content. This is why keyword rich headines are more useful than generic ones. Make sure you write keyword rich headings in the order of priority in H1, H2 and H3 title tags. They are used by many crawlers to differentiate important content.

6. Keyword Density

Including relevant keywords throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines work out what your content is about. However, try not to excessively repeat and overuse keywords just for search engine robots. This can lead to your site being banned from search engines.

To avoid this, try to keep your keyword density to roughly 2-5%. If you find this hard, get out a thesaurus and broaden your writing vocabulary. This way, you are still writing about the same thing, without risk of being banned.

7. Image SEO

Using images within your content is a great way to make your site more visually appealing and break up boring chunks of text. You can utilize these images to help improve your site SEO.

All your uploaded images have titles, so treat them just the same as your page titles. Including relevant keywords can help people find your site when searching on Google Images.

You can also include Alt Text and Descriptions for your images, making them even more useful with SEO.

8. Internal Linking

People often think that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links are important, these are not the only important links!

Placing links to your other website pages, is a great way of improving your site and used properly,internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it much easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your content, but it also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst also helping to increase the Google Page Rank of your pages.

There are a number of different methods that you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The main being; content links and permanent navigation links.

For bloggers, content links are very useful when used properly. These are links that are placed within your article posts, which redirect people to other relevant pages on your site. For example, this post is focused on increasing traffic to your site, so readers may also find a post on ‘How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog‘ useful. Perhaps other people are just starting out blogging and want to learn more.

9. Geo Targeting

Use geo-tagging to let your users and search engines see your actual business location.

10. Authorship Markups

Use authorship to take the ownership of the content you publish on your website.

11. Socialbility

Add social media buttons to encourage your readers to share your website’s content on their profiles. Websites with social signals can get better rankings in search engines.

12. XML Sitemap

Create xml sitemap and add each of your website in it. You can submit to sitemap in Google and Bing webmaster tools to make your website index soon.

13. Robotics.Txt

Updated: The robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl and index pages on their website.

14. Analytics

Make sure you have added and setup the analytics code so you can properly analyze your website.

15. Webmaster Tools

Add and verify the ownership of your websites via Google Webmaster Tools. These webmaster tools will also help to analyze the on-page validations.

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Pixotri Technologies

About Us

Our Core competency is in developing Responsive web sites,E-commerce websites, Mobile Application Development, Digital Marketing and SEO services. We have developed numerous, large scale websites and web applications. We do the best in this industry and our work speaks for itself. Our unique approach, philosophy, and work ethic have proven their efficiency throughout numerous projects, resulting in long lasting success.

Pixotri's solutions has been the source for some of the outstanding websites and web applications. We build solutions that lead their industry and remain at the top for a long time. For the past years, we have been leading the web development industry with innovative concepts, cutting edge design, and state of the art web technologies. We specialize in creating advanced web applications combining robust functionality with object oriented programming practices. All our work is 100% created by our team in our infopark development center nothing is outsourced.                                  

What we are

We are a Web Development company  with  dedicated team of professionals who creates web solutions that helps to promote your brand and Capture the attention of visitors and achieve higher conversion rates.Our experienced designers in Pixotri is specialized in digitally transferring your brand, your values, and your vision to user friendly and attractive creative designs. Every website we design includes a Content Management System on the back-end which allows for complete control of the website's content, pages, images and navigation from an easy-to-use secure web-based administrative interface.

Our user-centered design approach is based on usability research involving rounds of brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and thorough user testing.When your final design is finalized, we ensure that it is optimized for usability and conversions.We work on projects of all types and sizes. Our web design strategy will ensure, we are creating your site in a way that the search engines will know what your site is about.Our designs are fully tested by our quality team for compatibility with multiple operating systems, screen resolutions, download speeds, and more importantly, usability.Our development team is adept at implementing the latest web standards and programming techniques.

Services

Web Development

We Create web designs that helps to promote your brand and Capture the attention of visitors and achieve higher conversion rates.Our experienced designers in Pixotri is specialized in digitally transferring your brand, your values, and your vision to user friendly and attractive creative designs. 

Every website we design includes a Content Management System on the back-end which allows for complete control of the website's content, pages, images and navigation from an easy-to-use secure web-based administrative interface.

E-Commerce Solution

E-Commerce Website Solutions is Designed to promote your Brand and Sell Your Product and services.Our Successful e-commerce software solutions deliver an optimal shopping experience for targeted prospects. Shoppers using desktop or mobile devices expect a seamless, online shopping excursion. 

Our solutions create fast, easy browsing and simple ordering and checkout process.In today's world every organisation should have an Internet marketing strategy to gain competitive edge over their competitors.

SEO Solution

Our professional SEO services build your business to the top of search engines and increase your websites traffic, promote leads in order to reach your goal.Our work and results are measured only in your ranking and organic search traffic improvements.

We can design your website, analyze your market, select keywords for optimization, rank your website in the top 10 organic results, launchPay Per Click and social media marketing campaigns, analyze results and improve conversions.

Responsive Web Designs

Responsive web design (RWD) is the strategy being used to take it across multiple platforms. This essentially involves developing a flexible website that will respond and adjust itself to the various screen dimensions of devices. 

With this design you are able to maintain one website that will serve all of your customers, no matter where or what they are viewing it on.Responsive web design helps managing your SEO strategy easier. For these reasons, responsive web design is the best option for your mobile SEO strategy. 

Graphic & Logo Designs

Pixotri Technologies provides world class logo graphic design service for corporate around the world. Our highly trained Logo designers work towards developing a unique identity that will truly set your business logo apart from the rest by utilizing the breakthrough methods and tools. The logo we design for you sends a convincing message to your consumers, build a visual imprint of your brand and form a lasting impression.

Mobile Apps Development

Pixotri Technologies build custom mobile app solutions using Android, windows and IOS that perfectly fit our clients needs through understanding their mobile objectives and aligning it with their overall business strategy .We have always provided best in class service in Mobile App development outsourcing services till date. When you choose Pixotri, you are partnering with most cost-effective team that has been designing and developing feature-rich mobile apps for years.

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