Top 15 Blogs to Follow to brush up your SEO knowledge

To read more:
http://www.webdesignbooth.com/seo-blogs-to-follow-to-brush-up-seo-knowledge/

SEO Success Pyramid

This is a nice SEO pyramid that can be used as a checklist on a SEO project. Main components of this pyramid are commitment, patience and planning. Read more at: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/the-seo-success-pyramid/971/

Art of Link Building in SEO

Rather than having enormous internal and external links to/from your website - you should be thinking about how to best use links - Always start with on-site navigation. Upkeep of your internal links are more important that people who are linking to you.

On-site navigation should follow these rules:

• Always use absolute (fully spelled out) URLs
• Always use fully-embedded HTML links for navigation
• Always include an HTML sitemap for sites with more than 10 pages
• Always use meaningful, relevant, but concise anchor text on internal links
• NEVER attempt to prevent a unique page from being crawled or indexed

Badly designed on-site navigation usually incorporates one or more of the following mistakes:

• Mixing formats of relative URLs (rather than using only absolute URLs)
• Incorporating non-existent directories in the URL paths (bad taxonomy)
• Incorporating unnecessary parameters in the URLs (bad taxonomy)
• Using bland anchor text or images as anchors
• Hiding links in onMouseOver-managed text blocks, Javascript-fired objects, and other transient content
• Failing to link consistently and uniformly on every page
• Using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links
• Using “noindex” and/or “noarchive” robots directives on tag or category pages
• Creating only XML sitemaps for large sites (rather than HTML sitemaps)

Your inbound anchor text priorities should focus on creating brand visibility and value. The best use for link anchor text is to show people that you have a Website that is important and valuable to them. If you try to prove you’re important and valuable to search engines you’re missing golden opportunities to work with visitors.

Read more on - http://www.seo-theory.com/2011/01/14/how-best-to-use-links-for-seo/#comments

Off-Site SEO - Content is King!

Off Site Search Engine Optimization is a process of improving page ranks without making changes to the page itself. For example, I can positively or negatively impact a business by adding comments in favor or against a website. I can force millions of directory submissions which can link back to your page. One of the biggest advantage of Off Site SEO is that it directly affects the page rank. So determination is based on how many other websites link back or refer to your website. The more no. of link backs, the higher rank the website gets. So it all depends upon the content of your website and what articles are referring back to you.

Here is what you require for effective Off Site SEO (source - http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/basic-off-site-seo-implementation-1148748.html). We also liked: http://prominentseo.com/off-site-seo-tips.htm

• Content: The basic necessity for effective Off site SEO is for your website to have useful and good content. The Off Site SEO depends a lot on this. Many websites provide links on their webpage for reference purposes. If the content of your site is good, some websites can refer to your page which will earn you points in terms of page ranking without actually having to do anything on yourself. A website with good content in itself can get links to it and hence a high rank.
• Link Exchange: A link exchange is just as the name suggests, linking to another page in exchange of that page linking back to yours. With the amount of information available on the World Wide Web, there will be many websites that deal with the same topic as your own. Doing a link exchange with such websites will not only get you a good rank but also traffic.
• Article Submission: Another way is to submit articles to directories with a high page ranking. Many directories offer free article hosting and let you provide link to your website on your profile displayed alongside the article.
• Forum Signatures: Many forums allow you to post links in the signature. Whenever you reply to any thread, the link to your websites is displayed in your signature.

These are the very basic Off Site SEO techniques to help the rank of your website. There are even more advance techniques that you can research about and implement.

 

More on off-site SEO:

 

http://www.nowsell.com/internet-marketing-basics/off-site-seo.html

 

 

Things you don't want to miss during SEO

The Meta Keywords, Description and Robots tag — Google used description copy to market your site in its results, treat this as optimized sales copy. Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines

The Title Tag – The MOST important aspect of on-page SEO, just take our word for it.

The Body Text (focus on the body text in bold, for this denotes strong emphasis to the search engines)

The first sentence in the body text and the first words used per sentence are the most important ones for advanced on-page SEO necessities (Make it humanly readable and SE readable — The words used in the first sentence are most important due to the implementation of Google’s LSI algorithm)

The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be SEO’d (i.e. http://domain.com/real-estate/real-estate-marketing-ideas.com would fetch a high ranking for a page dedicated to real estate marketing ideas – especially with many highly authoritative, relevant, deep in-bound links)

The H1 and H2 Texts are highly important – Why? They show the search engine the main subjects and Table of Contents for the content to be indexed. Make these keyword friendly and reflective of your page’s title tag.

Same Site Link Texts — The links connecting the pages of your site together must have your targeted keyword terms in them as well as all links throughout the site — even though it seems excessive, having variations to your targetted keywords would also help when linking out to other pages within your site.

Same-Site Link URLs — Not only should you be using your keywords to describe pages within your site, those URLs you link to must have SEO URLs ( eg: http://domain.com/your-keyword.html)

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/12-basic-on-site-seo-tactics-for-optimized-results/5966/#ixzz19dAJViLU

How to grade your website?

Ever wonder how to grade your website and improve SEO ranking? AllTech not only performs SEO but also believes in educating clients, so they can make informed decisions to improve their SEO rankings.

We really like the tool from Hubspot: http://www.websitegrader.com/

It has all the basic features available to effectively grade on-site SEO parameters for example, it checks for blog, sitemap, link building, 301 redirect, URL age, etc.

For off-site SEO, we suggest using: http://atniz.com/2009/10/06/free-onsite-and-offsite-seo-analysis/

Almost every where we have seen, the developers will forget to double check their code to make sure they've got content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags and not having the robot.txt to prevent personal folder access.

Here are some references to learn more about grading websites:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4450910_grade-your-website.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/24-onsite-seo-checkups-even-a-clueless-developer-marketer-should-do-when-launching-a-site

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
The acronym "SEO" can refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.