seo

The first thing you need to do when you're deciding whether a keyword is relevant to your business, is to ask yourself one simple question: Does the keyword you found accurately reflect the nature of the products and services that you offer?

The number one objective of a search engine is to find and deliver the mostrelevant content to its users for a given search term. The best way to understand your customer's search behavior is to put yourself in their shoes.

One way to look at this is by evaluating the keyword in the Paid Search, orCost per Click markets. The number of search advertisers actively bidding on a keyword can be a good proxy for just how difficult the keyword is going to be on the organic side.

 Generate a steady stream of link worthy content.

• Social Media => Audience Building
• Relationship Building & Asking => Link Building

Again, our targets of 65 characters for a title and 156 characters for adescription are not hard limits by any means, but they're guidelines that willavoid search engines truncating this information on the search engine results page. The first step is to populate the spreadsheet with your existing web pages. Be sure to include every page of your site, including your Homepage, About page, Location page, Contact page, and other general kinds of content pages. Remember, search engines want to see unique information for each and every page, and listing them all out here is a good way to quickly spot any duplications.

Ongoing keyword evaluation is critical to the long-term success of your SEOefforts, and it's really the last step of the keyword research cycle. With all of the great keyword data that we can look at, the one data point that we can't find out about those keywords is how they'll actually perform for us. Once we start ranking for the keywords that we've targeted, and we start to get traffic coming to our pages as a result of those search engine rankings, we'll need to see if those keywords are actually driving conversion actions and business objectives

A quick way to do some testing is through Paid Search. Using Google AdWords or Microsoft's adCenter, you can buy the keywords that you want to evaluate for a short period of time, and collect the data that will help you understand whether or not these keywords are going to provide business value for you.

While Paid Search clicks do tend to behave a little differently than clicks onorganic search results. This can be a good proxy, and potentially save you months of work and lost opportunity. And don't forget that SEO isn't just a one-time, set-it-and-forget-it project. It's a continuous process that has to be maintained over the long term. 

By staying abreast of changes with fresh research and focusing on how yourtarget keywords contribute to your website's organic traffic and businessobjectives, you'll be developing a better understanding of your visitors, theirsearch patterns, and how you can serve them better with the pages of your sitemonth after month and year after year.

Content optimization is the process of improving the quality and relevancy ofyour site's content. 

Now this might be about backpacking in California, but reading the document, it's not very clear. You put the page down and you're probably disappointed. Even if the exact phrase "backpacking in California" was used in the text here and there, the narrative was all over the place, and there's really no central theme to focus on. Both people and search engines expect clarity and quality from your web pages.

They want to know without any hesitation what your content is all about. And even more importantly, they want content they can trust.

Create good meta descriptions

The description attribute within the <meta> tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description.

• Make sure that every page on your site has a meta description. The HTML suggestions page in Webmaster Tools lists pages where Google has detected missing or problematic meta descriptions.


• Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.


• Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.

  <meta name="Description" content="Author: A.N. Author, 
  Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, 
  Length: 784 pages">

  In this example, information is clearly tagged and separated.
  


• Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.


• Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren't displayed in the pages the user sees, it's easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google's search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.

Search engines do a good job identifying what the overall content of a web page is about. But you may have parts of a web page that contain very specific types of content, like product reviews, an embedded video, or even a food recipe. Search engines can stand to benefit from a little help in understanding the semantic focus of these bits of content, and fortunately, we can give them some assistance. One universal code format that will help us do this is the schema.org microformat. Microformats give us a special syntax to use to help search engines identify very specific types of content on your pages.

This not only helps search engines identify these pieces of content, it alsohelps them identify very specific attributes of your content. Here is an example of some recipe text. We can look at this quickly, and identify it as a food recipe. But for a search engine, the short sentences and many line breaks are a bit awkward, and they can't possibly understand what each line really means.By augmenting the code behind this recipe text using the schema.org microformat for recipes, you have the opportunity to explicitly tell search engines exactly what this content is.

   business owners understand why having a content strategy will help propel them forward and achieve success with their search objectives. A content strategy is the planning, creation and management of usable content. Let's take a look at each of these components individually. Before you begin writing content and posting it or syndicating it across the web, you need to have a plan. This starts by understanding who your target audience is and what their needs are.

Think about content as bait, and your audience are the fish. If you use the wrong kind of bait, or if you throw the right bait in a pond where there aren't any fish, that's no good. You won't catch what you're looking for. But understanding who your audience is, where they hangout and converse online, and what they're talking about, will help you to both find your targets and learn what's important to them. When you couple this with keyword research, you'll have a strong understanding of the themes and the kinds of topics that you'll want to produce content for. When it comes time for the actual creation, there is no question that content is king.

Creating content is a task that you're going to need to factor into your onlinemarketing plan whether you like it or not. If you're not writing content and publishing on the web, you're losing out on a share of traffic to your site.Every way that you can think of to help your potential customer that's relevant to the themes and keywords that you've targeted and the audience that you're going after is an opportunity. And if you think about it, if you're not answering the common questions that your customers are asking, then your competitors will. Content creation involves writing usable, relevant, and targeted content.