We all know that SEO or search engine optimization helps improve site rankings. Since Google is the most commonly used, its standards are used as a peg for configuring SEOs.

SEO basics require delivering value, creating great content and promotions, but there are times when Google changes their algorithms. So here are tips that you can follow to improve SEOs.

High-Quality Sites

Have you noticed that Google is now giving more importance to sites with great designs, good branding and unique content? The challenge now is to improve and make sure that your website can compete with others.

Social Signals

Comments on blog posts, tweets and Facebook likes or shares are good indications that people like your web content. This entices Google to increase your rank because they like “showing content that users like”.

Links

Linking isn’t as important as they used to be. They still remain an important factor, but Google is paying less attention to these due to link spams and focusing more on social signals. “According to a survey by SEOmoz, links used to account for 65% of the ranking factors in 2009 and now they account for about 40%.”

Keyword Usage

The old style required creating a page and optimizing it for the keyword you want to rank at. Google opts to send traffic to sites with a lot of content on the topic as compared to sites with just one article about it. It goes without saying that you still need a primary page with your desired keyword, but make sure to have other pages related to the topic and interlink them when you can.

Longer Documents

As mentioned earlier, more content (i.e. more words) gives your site better ranking.

Image from  Maria Reyes-McDavis

You know the saying that nice people always finish last? It is something like that, except that you do not have to be “un-nice” to stir up some controversy. The idea is to pick one of the hottest topics that people are talking about and then to go against the flow. That is, if your opinion is not the same as the popular opinion, go right ahead and declare it to the world. You’d be surprised at just how many people will take notice of you.

Matt Cutts gives an example. You know many people love Google? Gazillions of them. And what does one get by being anti-Google (and making sense of course)? This:

Saying something controversial. You can be cheeky, like Threadwatch, or you can be incredibly earnest. I give the creator of Google Watch credit for staking out the “anti-Google” territory way before anyone else. Later, Andrew Orlowski probably realized that taking potshots at Google or blogs was a way to generate lots of discussion.

Yep, picking a controversial issue and going against the grain will certainly bait you a considerable amount of links. Try it and let us know how it goes.

Uniquely interesting titles are good. When they are outrageous and cryptic, they do tend to get more clicks as human readers would wonder what the post might be about. However, if you focus solely on this consideration, your post might not even make it to the first 5 pages of the SERPs. And what good will your cryptic title do you when people cannot find it in the first place?

My suggestion is this – try to work on your post title getting to the top of the SERPs. At the same time, don’t hold back on your creativity. So how can you work on getting to the top?

One way would be to incorporate keywords into your post title. The idea is to make use of words or phrases that are commonly used in searches. Now how do you find this out? Make use of keyword tools – there are so many out there! You can even use Google’s free tool, Google AdWords Keyword Tool. If you wish to do so, you can search for other keyword tools that can help you figure out which keywords are most used for certain topics. Once you have determined these words, then you can craft a post title that is engaging and SEO-friendly at the same time.

There are times when plagiarism is more serious in that it copies a rather large portion of your website’s content or the entire website itself. This cases of plagiarism obviously becomes a big problem since it can and will probably affect your ranking. Crawlers tend to not crawl a site which they have determined to be a mirror site of another to avoid duplicate results in their SERPs. If this happens and the crawler mistakes your site for the mirror site then not only will your page rank be affected but you won’t even be listed in the SERP.

In cases like this it is still recommended that you take the diplomatic route first. You can contact the website or blog owner and ask them to remove the offending website or webpages. If they do not comply then you can contact their hosting service and ask them to pressure the owner to remove the offending content. If this does not work then that is the time to turn into a tattle-tale by submitting a complaint to search engines. Search engines such as Google take such things seriously and really do act upon reports of plagiarism.

Photo credit: tnarik

It is far more desirable to approach a specialist with some knowledge of their subject, and in SEO, that is not too difficult to do. Even so, there is a distinct possibility that when your SEO company’s assessment of your site comes in, a lot of the information on that assessment won’t be expected. A good search engine optimization company will be able to answer your questions, and you can discuss any optimization concerns with our experts at www.seoconsult.co.uk. It can also be a good idea to know what to look for on your site to estimate the SEO work to be done.

1. Assess your pages. The things you should be looking for on your pages include the amount of content you already have, your existing link profile, any disputes with the search engines you’ve had in the past, and your current site structure. It can help to draw up your site structure on a page to check for clear paths. Use some of the free online search engine optimization tools available to give you a head start on where your current site is in terms of SEO.

2. Sort out your desired outcomes. It’s a good idea to look at your current desired outcomes for SEO, and any outcomes you’ve aimed for in the past. Having made some attempt at optimisation in the past is something that should be taken into account in your current optimization attempt. Your previous work could either help your current campaign, as there will be an established good history with the search engines, or it could hinder it if the work wasn’t done well.

3. Sort out areas of concern. If everything was going swimmingly with your site, it’s unlikely that you would be approaching an SEO consultant. Make a list of the problems you think need to be addressed.

These three steps won’t enable you to prepare an SEO plan yourself, but should help you to get an idea of what needs to be done.

Before you start your assessment, it’s important to consider the time factors involved in SEO. Although it might take you only a few hours to review your site, SEO professionals can take between 30 and 70 hours to properly assess a site and build up an optimization plan. The time required will depend on the size of the site, and the kind of work involved. A small site is generally considered to be anything under 1000 pages.

Most SEO companies work on several sites at once, so it’s important to allow a suitable period for your optimization. Although a company may estimate that they’ll take 30 hours to assess your site, they are likely to require a period of weeks to get the results back to you. This needs to be allowed for in your schedule.

We’ve been talking about RSS feeds and what it can do for your website. We know that incorporating RSS feeds into your site results in more frequent visits from search engine spiders and thus leads to faster indexing.

Have you realized however that by syndicating your RSS feeds successfully you can achieve the same results? How so?

If you have subscribers when a search engine spider crawls your subscriber’s site (assuming that your subscriber incorporated YOUR feed into his own website) the feeds will of course contain a link back to your website. Once the spider follows the link it will notice your website and so index your site as well. Now if you have a lot of subscribers the chances of being crawled through back links are much greater. In addition to this the spider will of course notice the plentiful back links, which will result not only in faster indexing but in a higher page rank.

To get noticed fast one thing you can do is to subscribe to your own feed using Google Reader, MyYahoo, and MyMsn accounts. Surely the three search engines will at least pay attention to their own services.

Nowadays, with much attention going to social media marketing it is important for SEO companies to offer related services. Google Social Search is one of the ways you can help in your client’s audience analysis and targeting. With social search you can get information on the existing network (customers) of your client. You will be able to find out what really interests these people with their public content (from tweets to blog posts) as well as get leads from the name of the friends in their social circle.

If you haven’t been using social search make sure you update your Google profile (and your clients’ as well) and activate the social search feature. Things you will see as part of search results due to social search would be publicly available web content from your social circle such as blog posts, status updates, tweets, and pictures.

To active Google social search:

1. Make a Google Profile
2. Add links to Twitter, FriendFeed, your blog, etc…
3. Opt-in to the Social Search experiment at google.com/experimental/
4. Search while signed in

Remember you need to be signed in while searching to actually see results from your social circle!

So what exactly is Google caffeine?

Google caffeine is Google’s biggest and baddest change in search algorithm. The key to this change is that it is an actual change in the formula and not just minor tweaks. Parts of the entire search infrastructure was, according to Google, completely rewritten. The results? A search engine that will “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and other dimensions.”

Of course with the Bing hype people immediately asked whether Caffeine was Google’s answer to which Matt Cutts promptly said no. As Matt Cutt’s said, “I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for month.”

For SEOs the even bigger question is how this will affect our SEO strategies. The best way to figure things out is through the same old fashioned method of experimenting and keeping track of how well the websites we maintain are doing in Google Caffeine’s SERPs. Of course it is also essential to keep tabs on how other’s SEO efforts are paying off so make sure you keep track of discussions going on in different forums and groups about Google Caffeine.

To try out Caffeine just go to this link: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Sitelinks are desirable because it allows users to see with just a glance at the search results the other relevant pages in your website. This leads to a higher chance of users clicking on your link, although not necessarily the link to the main page, because they can now go directly to the more specific page where their chances of finding the info they need is also increased. What this also means is a higher chance at retention and conversion since again everything is filtered further.

Now for those that have particular pages that you absolutely do not want to appear as a sitelink, you can always block that page from being viewed using Webmasters Tools. Note though that you have no direct control over which pages will appear as sitelinks for each search result. No need to worry though because Google’s algorithm makes sure that the most relevant sitelinks will appear.

For more details on sitelinks read Doantam Phan’s post on One-lin Sitelinks in Google Webmaster Central Blog.

In the user-perspective having 100 links is simply not a good idea because it will results in your page/site:

To end, remember that 100 links in a page is no longer a problem SEO-wise but should still be avoided for your users sake.