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

Linking is an essential part of SEOs and increasing page rankings, but at times it sounds forced or too repetitive. Here are some tips to make linking seamless and sound natural.

It is best to get links from various sources. Do not just rely on blogs, forums or directories. You can use all of them and add article sites, social bookmarking sites, new sites, editorial sites and many more other sources.

Keep in mind that the number of domains linking to you are much more important than the amount of links you have. Having many links from the same domain does not help much. It is better to have different links coming from different domains.

“Use the exact anchor text for 40% of your links”, but alter them in a way that they are combined with other words. For example, use “famous Italian restaurants” instead of just “Italian restaurants”, this type of anchor text must comprise 20% of the links. The remaining 40% of links should use anchor texts such as “check it out”, “click here”, “learn more” or showing the website itself.

If you create a page and optimize it for “Italian Restaurants”, direct 40% of the links to this page and 60% to your homepage. Do not lead all the links to the page you want to rank.

Lastly, use no-follow links. They help make linking more natural and less scripted.

Image from ivanpw

This technique is perfect to bait links although I see one flaw – while humor is something that may be natural to some people, not everyone has the gift of expressing humor. I have seen so many bloggers try their hand at humor and fail miserably. There is nothing worse than trying to be humorous and having your jokes fall flat, don’t you think?

If you are not a natural stand up comedian, do not despair, though. I have seen many other blogs which make use of pictures and videos – which they collect from all over the place. This technique works just as well. A word of caution, however: make sure that you acknowledge your sources. Mention the person, the site, or the group which created that video or cartoon strip. Otherwise, you are merely plagiarizing other people’s content and you know that that is a big no no.

Another important note – you can use humorous anecdotes, photos, cartoons, and videos and still convey the core message of your blogs. This is particularly applicable to niche blogs. For example, if your blog is all about religion, you are sure to find a lot of funny content on religion. Use these to supplement your posts and get the attention of other bloggers who would eventually link to your blog.

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.

The Good

Cross linking benefits you in two ways: it helps you SEO-wise and helps your readers find related more easily. For the SEO part, cross linking is good because it helps establish relevancy between posts and pages. Pages containing related topics will, of course, be the ones linked to each other. Just make sure the anchor text for the links contain the keywords you need to help search engines know what the pages’ topics are.

When it comes to helping your readers, cross linking to older related posts will not only make access to these posts a whole lot easier for readers but will actually encourage them to stay on your blog longer.

The Bad

There are two things to avoid when cross linking: doing it excessively and misleading readers.

Linking excessively to your own posts can make you look either desperate or irritating. The main reason for linking to older posts should be to help readers find something of value to them and not just be means for self-promotion. That said, link only when it will provide value to your readers.

Misleading readers is even worse in my book. This happens when the anchor text you use is such that it makes readers think that they’ll be routed to an external page that’s the source of your post but instead gets routed to another post on the same topic. I hate it when that happens. It looks greedy because you’re caging readers in even when pointing them to an external page will help them find further information they need.

Both kinds of links are very important but when it comes to SEO external links carry more weight. The reason for this is that, as we know, one of the factors that search engines look at to determine a page’s rank is popularity. The number of external links is indicative of the popularity of a page, which is why search engines give this type of links more weight. However, always remember that when it comes to external links it is not just the number that matters but the relevance of the link to your page’s content as well as the authority of the page that point to you.

Just because external links carry more weight it doesn’t mean that you should neglect internal links. You need to pay attention to internal links for SEO purposes since they still do carry some weight and search engines also use your internal links to determine relevance of contents from page to page. Aside from this a good link structure is helpful to search bots. You to make things as easy as possible for bots if you want all pages crawled every time the bot visits. Furthermore the effects of good internal link structure carry over to user issues. If you don’t have internal links aside from the navigation bar (whether on the side bar on at the top of the page) you will be missing opportunities to usher users to another part of the site they may be interested in.

According to randfish you should NOT split your efforts across many domains. What this means is that instead of registering tons of domains with the purpose of having them link back to your main site you should instead focus on several domains that are seen as by search engines as quality sites. Put your effort in getting links from those domains and if other links aside from those do come in then welcome them. However, straining really hard to get lots and lots of links from low quality domains is a waste of time.

The same goes for reciprocal linking. If you engage in such schemes, which by the way is seriously frowned upon by both Google and Yahoo, you will more likely be getting poor links since the great sites do not have to resort to reciprocal linking. Note though that linking to other sites and getting a link back is good but only if it is not done out of a reciprocal link scheme that aims to just get as much links as possible.

Comment on their blogs – Of course some blogs make use of the “no follow” attribute which will render any links useless. So choose which blogs to participate in and comment on those that not only doesn’t use “no follow” but also allows automatically posts a link to your site. You don’t have to link drop this way and get censored for this irritatingly obvious tactic.

Write a good review on a government or university program – After you write one and post it in your blog make sure to let the department/institute involved know about your positive feedback. Most institutions like getting good press so hopefully (you can also hint on it) they will link to your blog post on their news pages.

Donate – If you see that they list donors and the contacts of the donors then do donate to the institution or charity that the institution supports. An added benefit will be the tax deduction you may get.

An invalid mark-up code – To make sure that your mark-up code is valid use a validator such as the W3C Markup Validation Service. Of course when validating you should know which errors to look out for by asking the following questions:

* Does your file contain a document type declaration (DTD) statement?
* Are all of your tags closed properly?
* Are your tags written in lower case letters?
* Are all of the tag attribute values, even numerals, as in
, enclosed in quotes?
* Are the tag attributes used in your code valid?
* Are you using deprecated tags?
* Are your tags positioned in the right place in your code?
* Are your tags nested correctly?
* Are you using the escape special character & for the ampersand character in your href attribute URL values?

After validation you should still test your pages on different browsers to see how well they fare and make adjustments accordingly.

Bad links – Bad links include mistyped and expired URLs as well as structural and site design problems that compromises your site’s SEO. Link checkers are available online to help you check your links. Some of the more common link problems also include:
* File Not Found 404 errors
* Missing page elements
* Mixed canonicalized links
* Navigation blockages

Other coding errors that can kill your site include:

* Missing, empty, or duplicate title tag
* Missing, empty, or duplicate meta description tag
* Missing, empty, or duplicate h1 tag

For a detailed discussion on each common mistake you can read Rick DeJarnette post here.

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