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SEO Best Practices

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On my previous post, I talked about how search engines compete. You’ve learned that they compete much the same way other types of businesses do. Each wants to be regarded as the best service provider, the most relevant, and the most trusted of all search engine companies. I asked a few questions in that post.  Questions that, if you know the answer to, can lead to knowing how to succeed in the game of SEO. I am going to try to answer those questions the best I could in today’s post.

The first one:

What you can do so that your website or blog is ranked better than others who offer the same product, service, news, tutorial as yours?

Here’s a list of what you can do:

Make sure you follow search engine guidelines. Each of these guidelines (ex. Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Search Engine Optimization for Bing, Yahoo! Content Quality Guidelines) is tailored to serve each individual search engine company’s purpose. Guidelines may slightly differ from one another. However, the main thing you must know and understand is, each search engine wants to please their customers just like you want to please yours.

By following Search Engine Optimization guidelines, you are making sure that your business website or blog has the qualities that will make a search engine look good in the eyes of its users. If you can do that, search engines will love you. You’ll get this “love” in terms of higher rankings and exposure for a lot more search queries than you’ve initially imagined.

Focus on doing things that make you stand out from the rest.  After you are in the search results and at the top of the rankings, work on ways to get people’s attention. People will most likely click through to visit your website if you stand out from the rest of the search results. The easiest way to achieve that is by improving on your title tag and meta description until you are convinced that you are getting enough clicks.

Your web page html’s title tag and meta description are the front-liners  of your campaign. They are the first things that the search engine user sees in search results for his or her query.

First, you have to make sure that your main keyword is in the title and also in the description of each webpage your are promoting. For best results, do your best to put your main keyword in front of both the title and description. Second, spend the time writing an excellent pair of title tag and meta description for your webpage.

Always ask yourself before you publish, purely based on your webpage title and description, if you would click through to visit your own website. Work hard until the answer is Yes.

Stand by your promises. Upon learning about your online presence via a search engine results page, your website must be well equipped and ready to keep each visitor on it without leaving so soon to go back to search again and end up on your competitor’s domain.

A website visitor must find what he or she expects to find on your webpage. You must consistently keep the promises you make in all your titles and descriptions throughout your website. Those promises come in the form of keywords.

The website visitor who clicked on your website, as one of the search query results, must find the same keyword(s) that you put in the html title and meta description of your webpage. If it is a keyword that best describes a product, that keyword must also be a part of the publicly displayed name of the product and of any additional content you use to describe the product.

The second question from my previous post:

What are you going to do about the fact that search engines want information about your business as it happens?

Here is my answer:

Create an environment of constant activity. Let’s face it, we humans are drawn to anything that can stimulate our interests. This need to be excited about anything anytime and all the time must be met especially when we are on the Internet. Search engines crawl the entire web to find all these current events and they never want to fail to have the information about these activities that are happening right now around the world.

Blogging

Blogging is one of the most powerful ways you can feed that need. Unlike a blog, you can only put so much content on a static webpage of your website. With your own blog, you can publish every current or upcoming promo, company update, product launch, webinar etc. your company or organization is doing.

Social Media

Another way is through social media. Be active and engaging in all social media networks you and your team can handle efficiently. Through social media, you can even produce events, promos, or contests online that are tailored specifically to the things that interests your online community the most. You’ll be surprised how many people will start to link to your website, share your content, and talk about your company on their own blogs.

Both blogging and social media have the ability to make people want to come back. They cannot help but come back unless they want to be left behind the latest developments surrounding your company. May it be tweets, shares, likes, +1s, the possibilities are endless if you think about it.

Let’s move on to the last of the three questions:

 What are the things you would do to gain search engines’ trust?

Build a strong brand. Your brand can serve as one of your foundations when building a successful online business. Like the foundation for a house to stand on, you must build a strong brand that signifies the mission of your business on the web.

Throughout the years, people have been learning who to trust and who not to trust. If you can get people to trust you, search engines will trust you.

Also, search engines have since improved their technology to know whether you are contributing to making the Internet a better place or you are only out there to spam and scam everybody.

Your brand, reputation, and credibility will all depend on how you handle yourself and your business around the Internet. You don’t want to tarnish your digital footprint with a string negative reviews, angry customers, and unwanted products. That kind of bad publicity can sometimes work towards gaining extreme popularity for a few. However, trust makes your life as an online marketer a lot easier.

Do your best to stick with white hat SEO practices. Search engines hate it when webmasters try to game the system. On the other hand, they reward those who do their best to follow search engine optimization guidelines and best practices.

I’ll let in on a little secret.

Search engines have a very big problem. They’ve built their search engine a long time ago and the world continues to have trouble keeping up with the technology. That’s why they publish their guidelines and patents (ex. Google Patent Search, Yahoo! Inc. Patents, Baidu Patents) for you to read. They are all available for free access on the Internet.

Therefore, you are just making it worse for yourself if you ever decide to do even a few of those black hat SEO techniques.

Concentrate all your time, money, and energy on things that will get you rewarded and stay away from the things that will get your blog or company website penalized (lowering or removing from search rankings).

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