SEO - Search Engine Optimization - The Basics

This page covers some of the basics below but, there are 100's of little things that have to be done perfectly to get rewarded the top position of the search engines. Some variables are only worth maybe 1% but, others are worth 5% or more. If all are done to their full potential then your website will be highly ranked. WebFox is an expert at Search Engine Optimization. It first starts with Keyword Research. Each web page, not website, needs to have a keyword associated with each page. This is so the search engines can index (list) your page in search results. Thus, if you main keyword is "green sneakers" then when you type in "green sneakers" in one of the search engines then you want your web page to rank on the 1st page.

Top 3 Search Results of a search engine query is 80% of traffic for a keyword. Less than 1% of traffic is from pages 2 and up. An SEO campaign generally takes at least 6 months to be effective and we engage our customers for 6-12 months up front and then on a maintenance program beyond the initial ramp up period.

Periodic Table of SEO

Study this chart carefully. It is a powerful diagram of what is important for high search engine rankings.

Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis

This is sometimes a difficult and time consuming project. There are many variables that go into this step of the process. The main and foremost is how competitive the keywords are in the market niche one is trying to dominate. If the market is competitive then many times its better to go after a less competitive keyword and dominate those keywords and over time add on to your keyword domination. We normally start with 1 to 5 keywords. We can do as many as a client wants but, generally speaking it's best to work on keywords in groups of 5 or less.

Many businesses want to promote themselves locally. This can be done more successfully then trying to promote yourself on a country or a global basis. There are about 260 million websites so, invariably you will have competition.

Keyword Selection Process

This step cannot be taken lightly. It's very easy to go thru a list of 100's of keywords and look for the relevant keywords and choose those - BIG mistake! We have some unique ratios we look comparing phrase to broad ratio to determine which keywords are sharing keywords from other keyword phrases and artificially increasing searches. What this means is you could spend months on a basket of keywords and get the keywords ranked high and your analytics don't show any increase in website traffic. Thus, you just wasted time and money.

Search Engine Submission

The first objective of SEO is to get all of your pages indexed by the major search engines. This can be a time consuming and difficult process if one doesn't know the industry. There are simple tricks to get all of your pages listed either immediately or in a matter of days in the search engines.

On-Site Optimization

Some SEO professionals say this has zero value to some say it is up to 40% of the SEO success equation. WebFox believes that every little SEO technique has value and if all done well then you can dominate your keywords in the search engine results.

Domain Name

Having your main keyword in your domain name is always a little extra boost and helps visitors quickly identify with your product or service offering. It's also best to stay with .com. For SEO purposes the best valuation is with a .org and .com and .net as a close 2nd. Sometimes in a highly competitive environment we must look at using a dash in your domain name. This is great for SEO but, sometimes not so great for branding. Depending on the circumstances we will advise one way or the other.

Dedicated IP Address

This is also very important. Most hosting providers only provide a shared IP address. When this is done you are sharing your website with 100's of other websites and all are pulling for different keywords and makes the job of SEO much more difficult.

Content, Content and more Content - Fresh Content

With the latest updates of Panda (Google's code name for their algorithms), content is becoming even more important. We always strongly recommend adding a blog to your website. Post to your blog at least once per week if not more. Post's can be 250 to 500 words. Posts need to be relevant to your industry.

Social Proof and Validation

How well other people like your facebook page, follow you on twitter, share with their friends, tweet your company name, and so on all adds value to your website and how well it ranks on the search engines.

Title and Meta Tags

Title of every page is very cricital. The first word is more valuable than the 2nd and the 2nd is more valuable than the 3rd. More than 3 keywords in your title page and you are hurting your 1st keyword. Many times we will stuff the title with some cities or areas of geographical interest as well.

One Keyword Per Page

We always focus 1 keyword per page. If you do more than 1 main keyword per page then you are hurting the value of the main keyword. So, if you have 5 main keywords then we focus on optimizing at least 5 pages, 1 page for each keyword in addition to your additional website pages.

H1, H2 and H3 Headers

This is also very important to use your keywords as much as you can in your H headers. Many programmers will use CSS classes for tables instead of traditional H headers, which has negative consequences for your rankings.

Folder Structure

Folder structure is very critical for success of a web page. This is why so many CMS (content management systems) don't work well since they use a database tag or number to identify a page. We strive to keep the keyword pages as close to the root folder as possible and use dashes instead of underscores for naming of the files. Underscores can't be read by bots.

Page Interlinking

Interlinking all of your pages is also a necessary step to optimize your SEO campaign. Although this can be disastrous if you have more than 1 website sharing the same IP address.

Plug The Leaks

Many web pages have links referencing external pages and this robs your website of link juice. We make sure all links have a nofollow command so, the robots (crawlers) don't count the outbound link against your rankings.

1st Link Priority

Many times web designers have multiple links between pages with anchor text links and the bots ignore the 2nd identical link but, that was the link with the anchor text. Another little technique that adds value to your SEO campaign.

Site Map - Bots Can't Read Scripts

The site map is very critical and in most cases should be in the top of the page or top left. Bots always start crawling a page from top and from left to right. Bots algorithms determine that the closer items are to the bottom of a page then have less significance. Items closer to the page have higher significance.

Off-Site Optimization - Link Building

Off-site optimization is where the heavy lifting is of any SEO project. To build thousands of links and high quality links to your website pages takes months and many times years. If done too quickly then it has disastrous effects.

PR Rank - Googles Page Rank

Each web page of your website has a PR (page rank) rank. 0 being the worst to 10 being the best. It's important to get links from high PR ranking websites. Getting a 1000 backlinks from PR sites of 0 is probably equivalent of getting 5 backlinks from pages with a PR of 3. We focus on getting your website and web pages linked on many PR 3 to PR 8 properties for maximum link juice.

Directories

Link building using directories is another important aspect of SEO. Many directories are generic and some have more value then others. Nonetheless it's still an aspect of building a great SEO campaign.

Forums

Participating in forums with comments and questions is another great way to get backlinks to your web pages. WebFox does this for you as well.

Press Releases

Besides communicating with your prospects and customers via press releases it also has great SEO merits and should always be used in any SEO project.

Web 2.0 Properties - Blogs

Blogs are excellent tools as well for fresh content. Then you bookmark your article in other social media venues. Commenting on other blogs is also a great way to build links to your web pages by providing a comment and a link back to the page you are optimizing. Just don't forget to use your keyword in your hyperlink.

Article Writing and Directories

This is a key cornerstone of an SEO campaign. There are many tricks of the trade here to maximize your one way backlinks.

Social Networks

Most people think social networks are limited to facebook and twitter. Those are important but, don't forget youtube, prosperous, tumblr and 100's more. We have a list of 45 social networks all with high PR ranks for high powered backlinks.

Social Bookmarking

Another aspect of social marketing is using the many social bookmarking sites. We have high PR ranked social bookmarking sites we post your URL's on for more high power link juice back to your website.

Reciprical Link Building - No

Many webmasters still do this game but, it only works if your PR rank is lower then the website linking to you. If you have a webpage linking to your webpage and vice versa and both have a PR of 3, for the most part the "vote rank" are cancelled out. Thus, no value in reciprical links. It works if you get higher PR ranks coming in that are higher than yours.

Links Diluted

Along the same lines of reciprical links is if you have a link coming from an external webpage and it has 100 other outbound links then you are only getting 1/100th of the value of that link juice. And if you link back to that page or other page and you only have 1 link outbound on your page then you traded 1 healthy vote for 1/100th of a vote....bad deal.

Keyword Anchor Text Links

This is critical. You don't want to just list your website of www.xyzcompany.com on all your external web pages or worse "click here". The search engines are looking for your keyword that his hyperlinked to one of your keyword enriched pages and not just your home page.

We Avoid Nofollow Link Websites

This is critical. When posting your articles and blog posts and such on external pages if the sites we use have "nofollow" commands on your links then the PR value of the website is not passed on to your website. There is still some value to posting on nofollow websites but, we try to avoid most of them.

Authoritative Sites

Your backlinks coming from external websites will have more voting power if they come from an authoritative site in your market niche versus an authoritative site in another market niche.

Summary

These are just a few of the details that we as SEO Specialists concentrate on for our customers. It's not rocket science but, the "devil is in the details". We at webfox are proud of what we do and hope we can work with you on your SEO project.

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