There are many ways to do SEO. You are probably an expert in all those SEO techniques like link building, excellent content and all the other on page and off page optimisation factors. But how do you know whether they are effective and will bring the results that you want?

For that what you require is proper planning. A good strategy brings good results. A suggestion from us: if you are planning to do your own SEO and you are doing it for the first time, it is better to get the suggestions from an SEO expert regarding this. They can suggest you a clear-cut path that your SEO should take. Here you can find a few strategies that you might find helpful.

• Setting up goals

Things work out when they move in the intended direction. But where do they move to? There should be a goal. In SEO, your goal is to increase the traffic to your website and thereby increase your sales. For that first you need to find answers for a few questions:

• • Who are your prospective customers?
  • What do they expect from you?
  • Can you provide what they expect?
  • What is your priority in SEO? More attention from search engines or more repeated visits from users? Increase in hits or increase in conversion?

• Website Analysis

Nothing can be improvised without knowing its current state. So as a first step in your SEO process you need to study the current website. Check each and every aspect of the site. Some of them are:

• • Design and architecture
  • User friendliness
  • Current keywords used
  • Current rankings in search engines
  • Link popularity
  • Content originality and freshness
  • W3 validation

• Keyword research

You need not be told that right keywords and their proper placements are very important in SEO. There are many things that you need to take care here. Your research should include:

• • Reasons for the inadequacy of the current keywords
  • Improvised keywords
  • Keyword Matrix
  • Competitors’ keywords

• Industry Analysis

If you are selling any product or service the main thing you need keep checking is the current trends in the industry. Only that would take you to a position where you yourself set the new trend or where you can predict the future trends accurately. The changes that happen and the new trends that appear should be studied and accordingly implemented in the website.

• Competitor Analysis

When it comes to your competitors, what you need to keep in mind is that one customer they gain is one customer lost for you. Hence you need to make yourself familiar with all the following:

• • Main competitors
  • Their strengths and weaknesses
  • Their different strategies that keep them in the front

Are you now familiar with all the points discussed above? Then you have taken the first step to implement your SEO effectively and successfully. However, what you need to keep in mind is that this study is only preliminary. SEO is an ongoing process. You need to keep your learning continuous and keep your SEO a process of constant improvisation and updation.

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What is a static URL?

Static URL is one that doesn’t change. It won’t have any URL parameters and would be quite simple. These are the favorites of search engines. Updating such URLs are time consuming. This is so in the case of shopping websites and blogs that stores a lot of information and frequently needs to be updated. In the case of such websites, webmasters normally go for dynamic URLs.

What is a dynamic URL?

These URLs are created from searching a database-driven website. They are generated from specific queries to a website’s database. Here the date is changed in the database instead of in the HTML code. These URLs normally contain many variables and are difficult for the users to understand.

Why are static URLs preferred to dynamic URLs?

Search engines rank and index static URLs better than dynamic ones. Besides, static URLs are visibly more pleasing for the users as they are more simple and understandable. A brief glance through a static URL gives the reader an idea of what the page is all about. Whereas a dynamic URL contains variables and does not make much sense to a non-technical person. For this same reason users are more likely to click on static URLs that they understand than the dynamic ones.

Dynamic URLs take the last positions in search engines for another reason. That is, they normally do not have any keywords in them. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN give a lot of weight to URLs with their main keywords in included in the domain name. Google now has made some progress with ranking dynamic URL, but if the webmasters try to make the URL look static and hide the parameters, it makes crawling difficult. And this might have an adverse effect.

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Social media can increase your online popularity and make your web presence felt, thus bringing in more and more visitors to your website. More importantly, it is a big source of incoming links for your business website, one of the best ways to increase your ranking in search engines. But don’t be under the impression that just by creating a profile and updating it with some random information you can grab those links.

Many prominent websites like Digg, Youtube, Flicker, Facebook and Twitter apply the “nofollow” attribute that prevent the search engines from leaving them through external links. So you don’t benefit much from adding your links there. Then what is the advantage of these sites? Well, the advantage is that they let you have an RSS feed of your content in them. Meaning, if the readers, especially bloggers, click your link and find the content worthy, they will follow you from their own website.

So how do you make people take the trouble of following you through your RSS feed? Well, social media requires a little more attention from you to get what you want. Here are a few tips for you to get people link to you through blogs and micro blogs:

• Don’t add just any content in the social media sites. Make sure that the readers would find it important. If you add something regarding the internal projects in your company nobody would be interested. Readers will follow if they find the content useful and interesting to them.
• Be cordial to other members in the community. This is your business profile and you cannot afford to sound rude or, worse, silly here.
• Be active in the account. Keep updating frequently, comment for others’ entries and reply punctually for the comments others posted.
• Constructive criticism is good. But keep away from criticizing someone harshly. If you have nothing positive to tell someone it is better to keep silent. Same way, be open to good criticism from others.
• Get to know the website well. Sometimes you might just stick to updating and commenting and nothing more. It is good to know all the aspects of a website.

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Recognizing your target audience is crucial to your business much more than you realize. Doing a little bit of research to know this is going to be absolutely worth your time. Here are a few details that you need to know about your prospective visitors aka customers:

• Which locality are they from?
• What is their age range?
• What language do they speak?
• What information would your site visitors want to know?
• What would be their online behaviour?
• What kind of products are they looking for?

Once you decide and research on the target audience you could design your website with all these details in mind. Make sure you have an inviting layout that would encourage the visitors to take a tour further in the site. The content has to appeal to a broad audience and at the same time cater to the specific purpose the website was built for. Once the website is created you could give it a “mom’s test” as formulated by Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide.

Mom’s test is where you get someone, probably your mom, who represents the user community to browse and purchase a product from a website. Get her in front of the monitor and ask her to purchase a product or fill up an enquiry form. There needn’t be any instructions other than the main goal. Now check out what are her steps to reach there.

• Which is the search engine she uses to browse?
• Which are keywords she uses to find what she wants?
• What does she do when she enters a website?
• Which page does she go to when she enters the site?
• Does she find it difficult to find the product she wants?
• Does she come back to the search page quickly?
• Does she go through the product specifications or descriptions carefully?
• Does she check out other related products?
• How easily does she find the conversion button?
• Are the payment and delivery conditions clear to her while purchasing?

If you find her struggling with any of these steps you know you have to rework on your site to make it friendlier for the users. Most often, your users are going to be just like that. They would know just to use the Internet and click the button that they can see easily. This makes it necessary for you to keep all the important buttons right under the visibility span of the visitors.

Next time you feel that you are not getting enough of conversions in spite of doing everything possible to make the website inviting and visible, check whether you are providing exactly what your target audience is looking for. Or, make sure your analysis of your target audience is accurate. Once you do that you could see the increase in the number of conversions and thus an amazing growth in your business.

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Google News is one of the prominent news website that is followed religiously by many individuals and organisations. To establish your presence in Google News you need to play a very different game. In other words the algorithm for Google News is quite different. Let’s see some of the factors that can affect the ranking in Google News:

• Freshness

When it comes to news, whether it is online or offline, freshness matters most. If you come across an event that happened some 2 weeks back you are not going to be very amused or thrilled, right? It’s the same principle that you follow for offline news. Nobody reads a newspaper that is a week old. Same way, if you post some news that is just not the latest or the most updated you can’t expect Google to rank it high.

• Relevance

Being relevant to what a user is looking for is what qualifies a news article to be listed by Google. Google is believed to classify news articles based on the topic. If your article is original and contains substantial information regarding the topic with the right keywords, it would naturally get a good listing.

• Treatment of recent developments

If you post an article about a hurricane that happened last week and another about an archaeological discovery you can rest assured that your article about the hurricane would get more clicks and therefore more ranking. This is because when it comes to news, users would prefer to hear more about something that involves more urgency and directness than something that wouldn’t affect them, however breathtaking that news is.

• Local reporting

The idea of local reporting strikes with Google News. If there is an event that happens in a particular place Google would prefer those in that region to report it with their own local version.

• Credible authority

The best thing about Google News is that you don’t have to have the label of BBC or CNN to report something. Google gives weight to the news source for each news and each category. Therefore, all you need to do is to become a trusted source for the category of news you report and your article will be ranked accordingly.

• Speed

Do you want Google to rank you high as well as other news sites to refer your site? Then be the first to report an event. It is of course not news for you that speed matters a lot in news reporting. This is one field where “early bird actually catches the worm”. Hence, report something as soon as it happens and before someone else reports it and get your position safe in Google.

• Originality

Remember that if you copy and paste the news from another site or even reproduce sentences from other news sites Google would recognise the similarity. Make sure that the content you provide is original and unique. Even if you provide the original source of the content Google would rank that original source higher than your content.

Reporting for Google news is almost like reporting for a newspaper or television channel. Not only from an SEO perspective but also from a journalistic perspective the factors mentioned above would help you in creating and submitting news that can bring you under the visibility span of Google News faster.

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