DIY Seo Tips

Today I going to show you some diy seo tips that I learned recently from training in the back office of empower network. Most people shy away from doing any SEO for themselves thinking it is too difficult. I will show you today that with some diy seo you can soon be ranking high in the search engines. Don’t pay for your seo Do It Yourself.

First off you will have to realise that you are not going to be able to take on the big boys on the big keywords like “what is seo” for example. Which when you search in google gives 5,720,000 results that is much too high to take on. No you need to do your “diy seo” correctly and target keywords that are less competitive.

What you need to look for is low competition keywords. Once you have chosen your keyword integrate it into your blog post. Make sure you don’t overdo the use of these keywords about once every 100 words should be fine. So if you write a 500 page post for example add your keyword 5 times.

Some More DIY Seo Tips

Another tip here is to highlight your keyword. Pick three of your keywords, bold one like this, also put another in italics and finally put your keyword in quotation marks “like this”. This let’s google know this is the keyword you are targetting.

You also need to know the best place to insert your keywords for ranking high in the search engines. First you must have the keyword in your blog post title, you must also put it in the first sentence of your post and finally make sure it is in the last sentence of your post.

Now we move onto something you may not have heard of before, putting your keyword in a H1,H2,H3 headline. Basically this is adding your keyword into a title 3 times during your post. The H1 headline goes at the top of your post, H2 somewhere in the middle and H3 at the bottom of your post. Look at this post you are reading to see what I mean.

Also try and add a link to another relevant  post on your blog, like I have with low competition keywords above.

Finally before I forget You also want to add an image so you can add an ALT tag. See below.

Doing all of the above will help your posts get noticed by the search engines. This will result in higher search engine ranking for all your posts in the future.

That’s it for your diy seo all you have to do now is take action on what you have learned here today. Let me know when you notice your posts getting ranked higher.

5 Slightly Unusual SEO Tips to Increase Traffic

When you have a new website, getting more traffic is definitely a priority. But odds of users stumbling across your website in a population of over billions are almost astronomical. So you must take it in your own hands to guide users towards your site, leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the search engine spider to pick up.

Social Signals

Social signal means the references that your pages get through Google+1s, or Facebook Likes and Shares, or featuring in a Tweet. These increase your backlinks and definitely reach a wider user base. Apart from asking your readers to share, you can go to ping.fm or contact SYNDD. SYNDD promotes blog content with social signals.

Reverse Engineer Competition

The world is ruthless because there is virtually no walk of life that does not have a competition. So you must imbibe this spirit and make use of backlink Watch to put yourself ahead of the rest. For a certain keyword, you can use backlink Watch to find out which pages or websites rank highest. After that you can use backlink analysis tools to search all those pages that backlink to your toughest competitors. Now you can try and obtain backlinks of your website from them. A neat trick, but it requires a lot of patience and be ready to hit blind lanes.

Use Less Ads

This tip is devised on the belief that the fewer ads you put on your website, the fiercer the competition among marketer gets. This will increase your cost per click. But if you use a lot of ads, then a number of low-bidding advertisers will fill your website.

Add another Ad as Image Only Ad

You cannot add an image beside an already existing ad, but you can add another Image Only Ad with it. This will boost your Click Through Rate.

YouTube

When you search for something, often on you see the top four or five videos at first. The theory is, if you have related video content on your website and it happens to rank among the top four slots of the entire search results, your video, and thus your pages, will automatically be shown at the top of the results even if you don’t have a first page rank. Google doesn’t index video but once your video is ranked, it will rope in users.

SEO Tips for Start Ups – Part Two

On Monday, we presented extended details of Google’s first 6 SEO Tips for
Start Ups, which included:
Use of www. in domain name
Verifying ownership in Webmaster Tools
Running a domain background check
Submitting URLs for indexing
Using search engine analytics
Building a great site

Here are the next 6 tips. As before. we’ve extended these with actionable tips and advice that spans more search engines than just Google.

#Tip 7: Define Your Conversions

What do you want visitors to your site to do? Buy a product? Join a mailing list? Download a resource? Read a blog post? You should define all your conversions and make sure that every page has a conversion attached to it.

Without defined conversions your site will lack purpose and your visitors won’t be sure what you want them to do.

You can then track your conversions easily in Google Analytics and find out which pages are working and which aren’t, helping you finely tune your site to improve your conversion rate.

# Tip 8: Be Smart About Content

We’ve said ‘content is king’ so often now it’s almost getting a bit boring – but that’s something your content never should be!

Your content is so vital to your site performing well in search and with your users. I don’t just mean blog posts, I mean every bit of content on the site from the home page to the contact page.

Think about what users want from those pages  as well as how you want to come across.

In terms of old school SEO you should still consider keywords for every piece of content. As a rule there should be one piece of content per keyword and one keyword per piece of content. This is the easiest way to optimise a page to appear in results.

Try not to think about keywords when writing, they should appear naturally. There are quite a few tools including SEOmoz and Scribe that will tell you if you have too few keywords so you can try to place a few more strategically without upsetting the flow of text.

Think about answering your customers’ questions – what do they want to know? If they can’t find the answer on your site they will head to a competitor. Content such as guarantees and independent reviews are often left out due to far too much ‘buy this’ waffle.

Use rich media – text is just a bit dull on it’s own. Add high quality original images (and optimise for image search) add video (and optimise for video search) and consider interactive or gamification devices to get your visitors engaging on your site.

Every page must have:

A unique topic (the keyword you want that page to rank for)
Unique title (including the keyword)
Unique meta description (this is the snippet that appears in search)
Description anchor text for every link internally and externally

Description anchor text for every image on the page

When linking internally or externally use descriptive anchor text rather than ‘click here’. A person may be able to tell that ‘click here’ is referring to a certain page but a search engine can’t. Anchor text links help search engines determine the content of a page so you should do your best to make this easier for them so they know which pages to rank for which queries.

Creating great content isn’t always easy and can be a daunting process.
For help with devising a workable content strategy come on our Content Marketing course. As well as teaching you why content is so important it will give you an idea of how to measure what works and what doesn’t, and implement your own strategy for creating content that helps you rank better and drive conversions.

#Tip 9: Don’t Break the Rules

This post is all about doing SEO yourself – something we really encourage with our courses. There are some great agencies out there but it’s always good to have at least one person in the team who knows SEO.

When the web (and email spam folders) are full of 1,000s of “100% guarantee of No.1 spot on Google for cheap” companies it’s very easy to just throw money down the drain. If a company claims that they will guarantee you high rankings then don’t believe them. You might strike lucky but most of the time you’ll end up out of pocket and possibly penalised by Google.

Since recent Panda and Penguin updates there are plenty of website owners who are claiming unfair penalisation because the SEO company they hired did something dodgy. Funnily enough they didn’t care while it was working!

The best practice is just to do everything you can to meet the guidelines of the search engines (there is always room for a slight tweaking of the rules) and make sure you know exactly what any hired SEO agencies are doing. Find out what they are doing, why they are doing it, and whether it is a search engine approved method.

Similarly, don’t do blackhat SEO yourself! Avoid those link schemes like the plague and concentrate on doing cool stuff instead. You’ll spend the same amount of time and effort and the rewards are much better. It’s also more fun doing things for humans than for bots.

Finally, don’t build a fancy site at the expense of indexability and searchability. You might have an awesome site but nobody will ever find it.

#Tip 10: Check Your Page Speed

As pointed out in the video, a study by Akamai said that 2 seconds is the acceptable site speed threshold for e-commerce sites. Any longer and searchers click on a competitor instead. Google themselves aim for half a second and so should you.

A number of correlation studies show a link between page speed and ranking. It’s unclear if this is entirely true but if your site has a slow page speed then you might also have a higher bounce rate, lower click through rate and less engagement – all of which do affect rankings.

#Tip 11: Check Your Rankings

Once you are all set up with the 10 tips above, it’s time to start monitoring your rankings and find out how your customers are finding your site.

You can use the Webmaster Tools Search Queries tool but it’s quite off the mark for rankings. We recommend using a rankings tool such as SEOmoz which will give you weekly updates on your target keywords.

Google also recommends checking your brand name. You should always be at number 1 for this search term, and you should also have site links to other pages on your site:

As an extra tip, sign up to Google+ and Google+ Local and either your G+ page or Local page will also appear in search results, giving your customers an alternative way to reach your business.

#Tip 12: Be Sociable

Google saved the best tip ’til last – get social. It’s often not enough to appear in search results as a new business. Nobody has heard of you or your product. They might not even be searching for what you are trying to sell, you need to get out there and show them why you’re great.

Traditionally this has been done through advertising but these days it’s all about engaging socially.

Go and find communities and audiences on forums, blogs and social media networks and communicate with them. Write guest posts for other sites, talk to other businesses and individuals, and create content that gets people talking and sharing.

Google are explicit in their love for social media in the video. Social signals are increasingly important for rankings so not only are you reaching out to potential customers and building your brand but you are also helping your site visibility.

As Maile Ohye says, “provide an awesome product then attract buzz”; this will lead to natural links and social shares – and subsequently to higher rankings and more sales.

Social Media also gives your customers another entry point to your site other than search. You should direct people through social media to your site where you should then direct them to converting.

Play to authentic strengths – who in the startup is already active on social media sites? Use them – it’s easier than building from up followers from scratch and is more of a personal approach. It also helps if they are an authority in their field.

The main this is to focus on where your audience is and don’t shout in the dark – it will just be a waste of time. If you are unsure about using social media, our social media workshop will teach you not just how to use social networking tools but also how to use social media to effectively market your business.