Organize your web page titles in 6 easy steps

With all the hype about Google's latest algorithm updates, it is easy to forget about the basics that are needed to get high rankings. Before you work on the links to your site, your web page basics must be right.

For example, the title tag has a very big influence on the search engine positions of a web page. In addition, the title tag is very important because it is the first thing that people see in the search results. There are several things that you can do to optimize your web page titles.

Step 1: check the HTML code of your web pages

It's astonishing how many pages have more than one title tag in the code. If your pages have more than one title tag, they will confuse search engine robots. The tags might not be read at all or, even worse, search engines might interpret this as a spamming attempt.

Step 2: use your keywords in your web page titles

Use the most relevant keywords at the beginning of your web page titles. Many people only scan the beginning of the titles so make sure that the beginning of the title tag contains the right words.

Step 3: make the titles clear, predictable and irresistible

The readers of your web page titles should know what your web page is about and the title should lead to a page that meets the expectations of the searcher.

The web page title is the first thing that people see in the search results. Make sure that the wording of your web page titles is appealing, emotional and irresistible.

Step 4: keep the titles short

Although there is no official limit, you should keep the length of your web page titles below 70 characters. The reason for that is that most search engines truncate the titles after 65-70 characters on the search result pages.

Step 5: remove unnecessary words

Words such as "homepage", "Index" and your company name usually don't help your search engine rankings. Remove these words from the title tags of your web pages. Your title tags will become more relevant to the actual keywords then.

Step 6: use unique title tags

Don't use the same title tags on more than one page. Each page should have a unique title tag that reflects the content of the web page. In general, optimize different pages of your website for different keywords. The more pages of your website you optimize the better.

The title tags of your web pages are only one factor that influences the position of your web pages in Google's search results.

Top 5 Sure Shot ways To Increase Web Traffic

Every online entrepreneur, has an earnest desire to make his/her  content go viral all over the net. Unfortunately, most of their web pages end up biting the dust in the next few pages of Google SERP. Even the best designed websites constantly struggle to achieve high rankings. Many wonder, what are the causes for such a narrow defeat? Obviously it is a complex mix of poor internet marketing strategy along with weak execution. Let us now explore the top 5 ways to increase web traffic so that you can pull your site out of the oblivion and bring it to the first page of Google.

1. Don't work on the desired keyword, work on the correct keyword : If you want to rank high, don't go by instincts, go by reports, go by research. Use Google's adwords keyword tool to find rankable keywords. The ones, which have decent monthly search volume and are less competitive. The way to achieve this objective is to first perform a keyword research in an extensive manner. Also determine your current ranking for the same. Then develop a strategy (on page and off page) to bring it up the order. Always stick to your theme and niche while making any further moves.


2. Guest Posts : I remember reading a controversial post on youmoz where in the author said the only strategy you ever need to bring your site up or to increase traffic is to write 2 high quality, lengthy articles on each of your selected keyword . One for your own site and other for posting as guest post. The one on your site will make you strong from the on page factors point of view and the guest post will give you high quality backlinks for the same. I would agree to a greater extent with this strategy provided one does it on a consistent and aggressive manner. This is a sure shot way of increasing your web traffic.
   
   
3. Social Networking Sites have taken the online world by storm in the last couple of years. They are one of the strong source to help you increase web traffic in a significant manner. All you need to is to interact with the users of such site in a constructive and helpful manner. Popular social networking sites like facebook, twitter, linkedin etc. gives you easy access to several thousands of people and you need to do your best to establish a rapport with them. Creating trust this way will help you in the long run to boost your sales. In other words, social networking sites act as catalyst to increase web traffic to your website.
   
   
4. Video Marketing is another sure shot way to increase web traffic to your site. Reason being, videos consumes 50% of the time of online viewers. Videos are addictive, improves overall brand recall, are more viral in nature as compared to text, image or audio. YouTube which is owned by Google has an impressive track record of capturing 80% of the views of the online video audience. The point to be noted here is, the name and the description that you give to your video has to be eye catching. Many a times, such a small thing alone is responsible as a deciding factor for your viewer to click on your link or not. Since there is a huge avalanche of available videos, you need to get your title and description correct. Make it catchy but not misleading and watch the traffic grow impressively.
   
   
5. Last but not the least, one of the tried and tested way of increasing traffic is to go for PPC or Pay per click. Here also you are supposed to do extensive keyword research to figure out which keywords can bring high traffic. However, it is strongly recommended that you better approach a PPC expert to get proper training before venturing out yourself or better outsource it to a ppc specialist , else you may end up wasting a lot of hard earned money.

So these are the top 5 most effective ways to drive traffic to your website. In addition to it, you need to design your page in such a manner that is able to capture the email addresses of your targeted customers easily. This is must for building up your list so that you can have repeat sales. An auto-responder will make your task much easier by enabling you to keep in touch with your customers by sending them exciting offers/mailers on a regular basis. You just need to imbibe these tips to increase web traffic and you will succeed without fail.

Different keywords require different SEO tactics

Keywords with little competition require different tactics than keywords with high competition. If you want to get the best possible results for your website, you must use the right tactics with the right keyword.

1. On-page optimization has a higher impact for long keywords

The relative value of on-page web page optimization is very high if you target very long keywords with little competition:

Here's an example: say you want to be listed for the search term "buy blue nike 'the overplay' basketball shoe in Atlanta" then it is enough to optimize one of your web pages for that search term because the competition for that search term is not high. You don't need many inbound links to get high rankings for that keyphrase.
If you target more competitive keywords, you need more backlinks to get high rankings in the search results.

2. Even if you target competitive keywords, it is important to optimize your web page content

The chart above might create the impression that web page optimization is not important to get high rankings for very competitive keywords. That is not the case. Optimizing the contents of a web page is the essential basis for high search engine rankings.

By optimizing a web page for a keyphrase, you tell search engines that the web page is relevant to that keyphrase. If more than one web page has been optimized for that keyphrase (which is usually the case) then the web page with the best inbound links will get the highest position in the search results.

For example, the website www.cnn.com has 46,600 inbound links according to Google. Although CNN.com has so many inbound links, they do not rank for the keyword "buy blue nike 'the overplay' basketball shoe in Atlanta" because the website has not been optimized for that keyphrase.

3. Optimize your web page content, then work on the backlinks

If you want to get high rankings for a keyword, the first step is to optimize one of your web pages for that keyword. Then work on the links that point to the optimized web page to outrank other websites that have been optimized for the same keyword:

4. The more pages you optimize the better

When you optimize your website, optimize different pages of your website for different keyphrases. Start with longer keyword phrases that don't have much competition and then proceed with more competitive keywords.

For example, start with the keywords "buy sneakers in atlanta", "buy cowboy boots in atlanta", "buy pumps in atlanta", "shoe shop atlanta", etc. When you have managed to get high rankings for many of these keyphrases, Google will know that your website is relevant to the topic "shoes".

As soon as Google knows that your website is relevant to the topic, it will be much easier to get high rankings for more competitive keywords such as "buy shoes" or even "shoes".

The more pages of your website you optimize for different but related keywords, the better.

5. It's not necessary to have more links than your competitors

It's not always necessary that you have more links than your competitors. You need better links.

Try to get links to your website that use the targeted keyphrase as the link text (also called anchor text) and that point to the web page on your website that has been optimized for that keyphrase.

Don't focus on quantity, focus on quality. Getting hundreds of links from a link farm won't help your website as much as a few dozen links from relevant web pages with authority.

If your website has both optimized web pages and good inbound links then it will be easy to outrank web pages that only have one factor.

How to find good keywords without keyword research tools

The keywords that you use for search engine optimization are very important. Choose the right keywords and your website will get many new customers. Choose the wrong keywords and you will lose a lot of time and money.

Most people focus on keyword suggestion tools when looking for new keywords. However, there are several things that you should do before using a keyword suggestion tool:

Describe what you do in easy words

Try to describe what your company does without using any business specific words. How would you describe your company to your parents or even your grand parents? These descriptions help you to find new keywords that are related to your business.

Find the unique selling proposition of your company

What makes your company special? How are you different from your competitors? Do you offer great service? Do you offer the lowest prices? If you offer great service, add service related keyword modifiers to your list. If you don't want to sell by price, avoid words like "cheap" or "low cost" in your keyword lists.

Find words with multiple meanings


Some words have multiple meanings. If you sell products that have names that can be confused, make sure that your website visitors immediately know what they will get. If you sell tablets, do your customers know whether they are tablet computers, bath tablets, clay tablets, chewable tablets, writing tablets or graphical tablets?

Focus on your most profitable products

You don't have to be listed for every single keyword on search engines. If some of your products have a small margin, it doesn't make sense to optimize your web pages for them. Better focus on the keywords that are related to the products that are profitable for your business.

Write down the 10 most important keywords

Make a list of the 10 most important keywords and then take a close look at the list. Are the keywords all about the same product? Do you cover all aspects of your services and products with these keywords? Do not follow your first instincts. Carefully go through the list and check why you find a keyword important.

When you optimize your web pages for search engines, start with very targeted keywords that attract targeted website visitors. Do not use one-word keywords or keywords with multiple meanings. The more targeted your keywords are, the more likely it is that you will get new customers with these keywords.

How to check if spammers abuse your website

A new type of spam cloaking is getting more popular: spammers hack into popular websites that have high rankings on Google and then insert keyword rich links and redirects to other websites. What can you do to make sure that your website is not abused by spammers?

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a spamming technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from the content presented to regular users.
This is done by delivering content based on the user-agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page, the IP address of a user or the referring page:

1. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page.
   
   The search engine spider can be identified based on the IP address and on the user-agent HTTP header.
   
   
2. When a user comes from a particular page (for example a Google search result page), the web server delivers a different version of the page than users get when they enter the URL of the page directly in the browser.

These methods can be combined. A web page can be cloaked based on the IP address, the user-agent, referring web page or any combination of these three factors.

How do spammers abuse your website?

Many websites have security holes. Spammers use them to hack into your server and to change the content of your web pages. They can do the following with your pages:

1. They insert keyword rich links to spammer sites on your web pages. These links are only visible to Google's indexing spider. For Google, it looks as if your website is endorsing the spammer website with a link.
   
   
2. They redirect your website visitors to their own pages. Google gets your regular page. People who visit your web pages after clicking on your website listing on Google's search results will be redirected to the spammer website.

How can you find out if spammers abuse your site?

There are several ways to find out if spammers change your web pages:

1. Search Google for "site:yourdomain.com" (replace yourdomain.com with your own domain). Browse through the search result pages and check the titles and descriptions that Google uses for your web pages.Click on a listing to make sure that visitors are directed to the correct page.
2. Click on the "Cached" link on Google's search result pages for your domain to see the content that Google has indexed on your pages.Look for links, Javascript and other elements that don't belong on your page.

Use the tips above to find out if hackers have changed the content of your web pages. To make sure that hackers cannot abuse your website, use the latest version of your content management system and install the latest security updates.

Getting on Google's first result page

Getting on Google's first result page is important if you want to get more website visitors. How long does it take to get listed on Google's first result page? There are four factors that influence the process.

1. Trust: old websites have an advantage

It takes some time until Google shows new websites in the search results. Although you can submit your website to Google, Google will only index your website if other websites link to your site. You have to earn Google's trust before your website will get lasting high rankings. A new website can get good rankings for less competitive keywords but it usually takes about 6 months to gain the minimum level of trust that is necessary to get high rankings.

2. Optimization: make it easy to parse your pages

It can be relatively easy to get top rankings on search engines if you have an established website that blocked Google by mistake (a broken robots.txt file or problems with the website navigation). Make sure that it is as easy as possible for search engines to index your web pages. The better search engines can parse your pages, the more likely it is that your web pages will be added to the index. Optimize the content of your web pages to make sure that your pages will be found for the right keywords.

3. Keywords and competitors: it's not good to compete with Amazon

The keywords that you target are a very important factor. The more competitive your keywords are, the longer you have to wait and the more backlinks you need.If the websites that are ranked in the top 10 results for your keyword all have thousands of backlinks and thousands of pages then it's not likely that your website will be able to get in the top 10 results if it has 10 backlinks and 20 pages. Start with very targeted multiple word keyphrases and then proceed to the more competitive keywords when your website has good content and inbound links.

4. Backlinks: the better the links, the faster your site will be listed

The more backlinks a website has, the quicker Google will pick up the changes on your website. If your website has great content but only a few backlinks, then it won't get high rankings.

High rankings on Google take some time. You have to optimize your web pages and you have to get good inbound links. Without these two factors, it is not possible to get high rankings on Google.
The number of inbound links is a very important factor. If you have optimized web pages but no links, then you have to build these links and you have to wait longer. If your website has a lot of inbound links then you will get high rankings quickly if you optimize your pages.

7 Tips on how to write optimized webpage titles

The HTML Title is the text within <title> tag that can be found on the head of the HTML code. As it is the key element that appears in search results, your web pages’ titles are very important for your SEO strategy for two main reasons:

1. Title relevancy is taken into account by the algorithms of Search Engines.
2. Good descriptive titles increase the click through rate.

Here are some tips in order to enhance your website’s visibility through title optimization:

1. Write short Titles

Google has a maximum title length of 64-70 characters. Do not make the title longer, because Google cuts down its display in the search results. 

2. Identify your Keywords

Indentify the keyphrases of your web page’s content. List down all possible words describing the content of your page. Step in the shoes of the user and list all the relevant search terms that he/she may formulate. The words used in your title will be displayed in search engine results as a clickable link. Therefore it should contain your page’s main keywords.

3. The important goes first

Start your title by adding the important keywords that you found during research. The words appearing first are considered to be more important.

4. Use targeted keywords

Choose specific keywords for your title in order to have more targeted traffic.

5. Be descriptive

Make sure that your title summarizes the content of your web page. In this way users will know what the topic of your page is, when it appears in the search results. This will help you decrease the bounce rate and increase the click through rate.

6. Create unique titles

Make sure you use unique titles for each web page. Duplicate titles might lead to duplicate content issues.

7. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing or any other spam technique should be avoided. Even if you manage to rank first, an “over optimized” title will reduce your click through rate.

Don’t forget that you should always write webpage titles and content that is attractive to users! By trying to achieve high rankings, SEOs often forget that the most important factor of our success is the users’ “click” on our website link.

Why Keywords Are Important To Building Your Blog

Keywords are essential for any blogger wanting to get more readers, fans, subscribers, and ad revenue for their blogs. Why is this? This is because keywords are search terms that people search on search engines like Google or Bing to find your blog. If you can get ranked highly for a keyword that is searched a lot on Google or Bing, you will get organic traffic to your site. Organic traffic is great because it is traffic through the search engines and it doesn’t cost you anything. The goal to build your blog is to find many keywords relating to your blog that people search a lot, and then rank in the top ten in the search engines for those keywords.

Now that we know why keywords are important we need to figure out how to find good keywords to try to rank for. The keywords you should be targeting depend on what theme your blog or website has. The more specific your blog is the easier it will be to rank for keywords. For example it will be harder to rank for the keyword blog then something more specific like cooking mom blog or parenting blog.

Since the term blog is very general there is going to be much more competition. Another thing that will help in ranking high for keywords is if your website is a .com instead of a .blogspot.com or wordpress.com. When you own your own domain anytime you have someone link to your website your site will get a boost in the search engine rankings, instead of blogspot or wordpress getting that boost. If you are blogging for money or wish to brand yourself, invest in the .com domain.

Let’s start finding some good keywords. I’ll use the example parenting blog. To find what keywords we should target if our blog is a parenting blog we should click on the google keyword tool We type the keyword parenting blog into the box where it says word or phrase, and fill out the annoying captcha. Then we hit the search button. 100 keyword ideas will come up. If you click on the local monthly searches you can have all the keywords organized in order of which search term gets the highest monthly searches for parenting blog all the way down to the lowest.

Notice on the left side of the screen you see match types and underneath the box, broad is checked. If you remove the check from broad and check the box exact instead you will see which exact phrases get the most local searches on Google, and the competition for each.

For example the keyword parenting styles gets 8,100 local monthly searches and appears to have low competition. To be in the top ten for keywords it is easier to find keywords that still get a decent amount of searches and have low competition, then go after a keyword that has a lot of searches and very high competition. If you eventually target many smaller keywords with low competition this can add up to some big organic search engine traffic from Google and Bing!

How to secure your rankings after Google's latest update

Google's Panda update caused a ranking drop for many websites. Google has a very long official discussion thread about this topic. The discussion reveals things that you can do to make sure that your website gets its rankings back.

The update is not just about content farms

Google's new algorithm targets low quality websites. It seems that Google defines a low quality website like this:

·         The website does not have enough content to be useful (shallow content).

·         The website has poorly written content.

·         The content of the website has been copied from other sites.

·         The content of the website is not useful.

With Google's latest update, it is not enough to have unique content on a website. It also doesn't help if there are many unique words on your web pages. The content has to be useful to your website visitors.

Even high quality pages can be affected

The low quality content on part of a website can impact the rankings of the entire website:

"It's important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site's ranking as a whole.

For this reason, if you believe you've been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain.

Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content."

Things that you can do to make sure that Google does not penalize your site

There are several things that you can do to make sure that Google does not penalize your site:

·         Improve the poor quality pages on your website. Ask yourself: is the page useful to my website visitors? If not, improve the content of the page to make it more useful.

·         It is very likely that the overall user experience is important. Check the usability and the design of your web pages. Your web pages should be easy to navigate and they should have a professional design.

·         Check the ads/content ratio on your web pages. If a web page mainly consists of ads then it is likely that Google considers it low quality.

·         Don't try to cheat Google with shady search engine optimization methods. Focus on optimization methods that are beneficial to webmasters, website visitors and Google.

 Search engine optimization is not about getting high rankings for every possible keyword. It is about getting high rankings for the right keywords and about meeting the expectations of the website visitors.

If you have high rankings for the right keywords, your website will deliver many new customers to your business. If you give Google what they want, your website will get high rankings and more sales.