The Famous Five Golden Rules of SEO

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No matter what kind of website you run, making sure that you can be easily found online should be one of your top priorities. And there is no doubt that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) holds the key to you achieving your goals. However, to people not in the know, it can seem like a seriously confusing area which is difficult to navigate.

Of course, the solution of many people is to head to the SEO Experts for some much-needed help. But it still helps to know a few of the golden rules and things which you can do yourself. This is where this article comes in.

Content

Google and the other major search engines love to see fresh content being produced on a regular basis. So, populating your website with regular, well-written words should be one of your highest priorities. Of course, you should be aiming to produce content which provides genuine value to people’s lives, so make sure that you write with your audience firmly in mind.

Keywords

While you  should tailor your content to be read by a human audience and not a machine, you still need to input some keywords to give yourself the best chance of being found when these terms are searched. However, this doesn’t mean that you should simply stuff your articles full of a certain word or phrase as this is going to seem totally unnatural. Make sure that you check out factors like monthly search volume, competition level and bid value to decide which keywords to target.

Responsive

With so many people using the smartphones to access the internet, you are missing a trick if your website is not responsive to their requirements. If your website needs to be redesigned to suit the preferences of your users, this is a step that is certainly worth taking. Different devices are used to access the internet and you need to accommodate everyone’s individual requirements.

Links

You should be actively seeking backlinks on other websites which redirect users back to your site. However, the website that you are seeking to obtain backlinks on should be genuinely high-ranking or ‘valuable’ sites. One of the most popular ways of achieving backlinks these days is with guest blogging, and this is certainly something which you could look into.

Speed

In today’s fast-paced world, your website needs to suit the demands of your users. So, your sire should be to be both quick and responsive. This is not only important for SEO; it also ensures that users stick around to check out your content. Make sure that your images are no larger than they need to be and that they are in the correct file format.

The above points should provide you with a good starting point in the world of SEO. It is not an exact science, but keep doing the right things, and you should start to receive the rewards that you seek.

Making Sure Potential Customers Make Their Way to Your Site

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For a few years now, new business owners have decided to start up their ventures online rather than going down the old brick and mortar business route. While this may go against tradition, it has proven extremely profitable for many, and for good reason! When you’re starting out, you don’t have a reputation, recommendations, or established brand image to support you in the market. It’s difficult to get your products to stand out amongst all of the competitors out there. But by operating online, you significantly reduce running costs and can offer your goods and services at lower prices – something that is always bound to catch any buyer’s eye. However, when it comes to making a success of your online business, everything won’t necessarily be plain sailing. After all, the web is a large and heavily saturated place, and it can be difficult to direct potential buyers to your page, regardless of whether you’re offering low prices or not. So, how do you go about ensuring you get as much traffic as possible? Here are a few ideas to get you started on the right foot!

PPC

The first thing that you want to do is to advertise. Advertising is what will expose your products to potential buyers and encourage them to look further into who you are, what you have to offer, and (hopefully) how to make a purchase from you. If you’re operating online, the best place to advertise is also online. This is because your adverts could include direct links to your website where the customers will be able to push their purchase through and make you profit. However, as we are all aware, advertising can be expensive. The best option for people who are watching their budget is often PPC advertising. Now, there’s PPC directly targeted to near enough every sector out there… PPC for Car Dealers, PPC for clothing companies, PPC for events companies. But each runs off a relatively similar concept. PPC stands for “pay per click”, which means that you only have to pay the advertiser for each unique web user who is directed to your page. This means that you are only paying for genuine traffic!

SEO

“SEO” is yet another acronym that you should familiarise yourself with. It stands for “search engine optimization”. While it may sound complex, it is simply the process of helping your webpage to appear as high in search engine results pages as possible. It sounds relatively insignificant, but if you think about, people use search engines to find pretty much anything they want or need on the web. If your page features higher in the results, they’re more likely to click it. How often do you go past the first page or two of search results yourself? Probably very rarely! So, collaborate with an SEO specialist in order to secure a high ranking and gather the maximum traffic possible.

These are just a couple of techniques that you should try out to ensure that you get as many visitors as possible on your site. Remember that the more visitors your page receives, the more people who are being exposed to what you are selling and the more profit you are likely to make!

15: Alex Harris Explains A/B Testing & SEO For Startups

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Alex Harris is the president of Alex Designs LLC. He graduated from FSU in 1998, then worked as Creative Director at eDiets.com from 2000-2011. In 2001, Alex Harris began doing conversion rate optimization and designing landing pages. The diet subscription website was a top 10 advertiser during this time and we created one of the first “Free Diet Profiles”. This profile came to be know as a conversion funnel. Alex managed all the creative for the conversion funnel. This included optimization of landing pages, emails, banners and affiliate programs.

8 Tools for the Startup SEO Rookie

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A Rookie's Overview of SEO Part 3

Hopefully, by reading parts one and two of this blog series, you guys are feeling more and more comfortable with the idea of SEO. In this final post, we want to make to make this SEO overview a little more actionable for you. We will go over some of the many tools that SEOs use and how to measure and evaluate your efforts.

Tools/Services

The great thing about this whole process is that you aren’t completely on your own. There are several different elements offered that will help you along the process. Because search engines want to be able to easily access websites’ content, they encourage SEO and provide a variety of tools to do so. They also encourage certain practices that website creators can use to make SEO easier, as stated below.

Sitemaps. Sitemaps are files that you can create that give search engines directions on how to navigate through your website as well as to find areas on your site that they would probably miss on their own. In order to learn more about sitemaps you can go towww.sitemaps.org, and you can create one of your own atwww.XML-Sitemaps.com.

Robots.txt. This is a file that you can find on a website’s root directory that instructs search engines how to navigate your site. Site owners can use the robot to indicate which parts of their website they would not like automated web crawlers (search engines) to travel to and where to go to find the sitemap. Interested in knowing more? Moz can help you out.

In addition to these and other such robots, both Google and Bing offer webmaster tools to assist with search-friendly pages. Here are the links:

Finally, Moz has a website that can also provide similar assistance for your website. It’s called the Open Site Explorer.

Measuring and Evaluation

The key to successful SEO is being able to track and measure certain aspects and evaluate what is going well and where you need to improve. When evaluating SEO, there are specific things that you will want to measure:

The Traffic Sources to Your Site. At the end of a certain time period (it’s best to evaluate at the end of each month), you will want to take note of all of the different traffic sources to your site, whether they be from referral traffic, direct traffic or search traffic. If you know where all your traffic comes from, you will be able to determine where you need to improve. In addition, you will be able to track this traffic over a long period of time. If traffic temporarily spikes but doesn’t remain high in the long-run, this didn’t do much for you.

Both Visits and Conversion Rate By Specific Keywords. It is obviously very important to determine which practices are actually getting you the results that you desire. Not only will this tell you what is working, but it can also help you further improve these rankingsfor conversions, as well as help you to determine the best possible landing page for these hot key words.

The Amount of Your Site’s Pages that Receive Search Engine Traffic. By knowing which of your site’s pages are drawing in traffic from search engines, it will give you an idea of how many of your pages are included in the search engine’s index. The more pages you have included, the far more successful you will be (especially if you have a large website).

These are just some of the many things you can look at and measure. For a more complete list, you can visit this blog post: Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators. Wondering where exactly you will find these analytics? The truth is, there are many services online that offer great analytics, but we are particularly partial to Google Analytics.

This post originally appeared on the Tailwind blog.

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Should Startups Fight the SEO War?

SEO warAbout a year ago, three friends and I began the daunting journey of building our tech startup, GreenPal.

Taking the leap of faith to start was the hardest part, as often, ideas are stillborn. They require a plan with relentless execution for them to manifest into reality.

By now we are all familiar with the lean startup methodology of deploying, testing, and iterating new ideas to discover and establish a product’s problem-market fit. Once a startup has launched a product and gained early adopters’ feedback, and the founders discover they are scratching an itch, what are the smartest methods to begin distributing that product to more early adopters?

With resources scarce, does it make sense for a startup to invest your precious few dollars of seed capital on paid acquisition methods such as PPC campaigns, search retargeting, or FB marketing? Or should a startup invest resources into organic SEO? A few key points should be considered with respect to SEO marketing and your startup.

 Time and Faith are vital:

Getting your site to naturally rank well for the keywords you are targeting, known as organic SEO, will require months and years of building the necessary momentum to see tangible benefits. While there are over 200 factors to Google’s search algorithm, SEO today is still heavily weighted on what is called Domain Authority (DA) and Page Rank (PR). It takes time (3-12 months of steady work) to establish strong enough values to improve meaningfully how your site will rank. The beginning will be an exercise in faith, as there is little instant gratification to organic SEO work.

 Who is going to put in the work:

So the question is, who in your startup team will dedicate the hours to SEO, primarily the grueling work of building quality back links from authoritative sites? My experience is that a robust link building campaign will require a minimum of 20 hours per week of steady dedication, writing quality articles, and creating attractive linkable assets such as graphics, illustrations, industry reports, and videos to name a few. Then, outreach must be conducted to find webmasters and bloggers that will want to feature this content and link back to your site. All this takes time, plain and simple.

In our team we have assigned the SEO discipline to our non-technical cofounders to grind on while product development is taking place before initial launch. However, when post launch bandwidth dries up, balancing the time needed to stay the course on your SEO strategy is challenging as the job is never finished. It will takes years to build your DA to the level of established incumbents who have big marketing budgets and most likely full time experienced SEO’s on staff.

 Why not just outsource your SEO?:

It is possible to outsource the heavy lifting of your SEO strategy such as the creation of attractive linkable assets, the manual outreach, and the link-building. However, it may prove to be cost prohibitive for your cash strapped startup. There is no immediate measurable ROI on SEO efforts, so explaining that seed capital burn will be a difficult conversation with your stake holders. Additionally, the lag in time for when the money invested in SEO activities through an agency will yield actual fruit proves prohibitive for most startups. This is why most startups double down on PPC and other paid channels—such methods yield an immediate result and ROI.

 So, should a Startup even fight the SEO war:

My humble opinion is, yes, if at all possible. Once a startup has created a product that people will actually like to use, growth is all that matters. Forget growth hacking; every startup must have a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that encompasses a blend of channels. Whether paid acquisition such as AdWords, FB marketing, Search Retargeting, or natural organic methods such as SEO, content marketing, and intensifying the viral coefficient of your product, every startup has to experiment to find the proper marketing formula. While this will certainly vary from product to product, in most cases, natural SEO will be a large component to the strategy.

I recommend startups make the time to begin SEO efforts early. For two reasons: first, because it takes so long to build the momentum in natural SEO, and second, because the investment of time builds equity in your company’s DA. Once authoritative DA is established, this is an asset that will yield returns in perpetuity in the form of your homepage and landing pages ranking well for targeted keywords.

In the end, you’ll be glad you no longer have to pay Google $3 for that click.

 Bryan Clayton is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of GreenPal.

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