“Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don’t lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won’t stand up either.â€
- Evan Esar -
You just need to be better than your competition
Today is the last lesson of our on-site mastery course and we are going to invest it in getting a final overview of our on-page optimization work based on keyword density, keyword proximity, and keyword prominence.
All those data could be a real hassle and extremely time consuming to compute and analyze but luckily for us, all those processes can be done very easily using a smart tool.
Getting Started with IBP
Ok, for those of you won’t don’t already have it or don’t know what it is, IBP stands for Internet Business Promoter.
This SEO software is available in 3 different versions, free (the one we are going to use today), and 2 paid versions.
This software is a full SEO toolbox by itself providing you everything you need for your SEO work, from keyword research, submission, link building, etc…; however the part we are particularly interested in today (and principally the main reason why I use this software) is the on-page analysis report it can generates for you.
“Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.â€
- Thomas J. Watson -
More link juice and more pages viewed!
All too many people fail to leverage on the potential they have on their site alone. Remember that before off-site SEO became popular with Google, SEO was one entirely on-site.
If off-site SEO has become dominant, this doesn’t mean that on-site SEO doesn’t have value anymore! Today I’m going to review with you what you can do with your site links to enhance your on-site SEO.
What is an internal link?
An internal link is a link that point towards another page within your site, in opposition with the external links which points toward an external source.
We’ll talk more about the external links in the last part of our 21 Days SEO Mastery course. From this point on, when I talk about links, I’m only referring to internal links.
People like to talk about how off-site optimization is important for your search engine rankings, well I’m here to show you that it all starts with doing a good job on-site.
Why should you care about your internal links?
The links inside your site have 3 major purposes:
Facilitate the navigation for your visitors.
Facilitate the crawling of the search engine spiders.
Build custom inbound links to your different pages.
Links for Navigation and Crawling Purpose
The main purpose of SEO is to bring targeted visitors to your pages, and retain them on your site for as long as possible.
One easy way to do that starts by making navigation on your site simple to understand.
When somebody lands on one of your pages, what are his options from there, where can he go, what can he do?
Obviously based on our 3 Tier site structure, the following links are expected based on the Tier your visitor lands on.
It was actually meant to be an email interview, but as I was really lazy and couldn’t think what to write, I decided to just record a video of me answering the questions. Louis from ProfitsMasterPlan.com sent these questions to me and it’s focused on how to outsource an Internet business.
I’m sure you’ll gain a lot of out of this Interview as there’s lots of tips and relevant content to help anyone who is looking to outsource their Internet business.
Enjoy!
Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Here’s Day 15 and this is continuing on from out guest post series on Search Engine Optimization. If you haven’t completed yesterday’s lesson, you can read it at: DAY 14: Optimizing Your Content.
“A picture is worth a thousand words.â€
- Napoleon Bonaparte -
Small trick, big difference
It’s a fact today that images are an integrand part of most of the pages designs and content. Having pictures make your site more vibrant, alive, and user friendly in many instances compare to a boring plain text site.
Today’s lesson is about helping you understand how search engines see your pictures and what you can do to influence what they see.
What you see is not what the search engine gets
What you see and what the search engines see when they crawl your page is not the same, but you already know that.
The reason is simple, many coding tricks, including the usage of CSS now allows us to make our site appearance much more user friendly, while maintaining a simple and easy to read page for the search engines without all the unnecessary clutter of layout junk.
The easiest way to get an idea of how the search engines see you page is simply by looking at it from a text browser. You can do that easily by looking at the cache version of your page.
“Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.â€
- Joe Paterno -
Always write with your readers in mind
This statement is by far one of my favorite and one I abide to strongly. Now, because you should always write with your readers in mind, doesn’t mean that you can’t do something for the search engines too, right?
Today’s lesson is not focused on what you should do to write an article that is pleasing for your readers, but instead focuses on the small tweaks you can do to make your great post search engine friendly.
Why Should You Optimize Your Content?
I mean, if you have been reading any bit about SEO before, you may probably have heard things like:
On-page optimization doesn’t matter anymore; it’s all about off-page optimization.
Google doesn’t care about keyword density anymore.
Write for your visitors, not the search engines.
So why should you bother with optimizing your content?
The value of your off-page optimization is enhanced by matching on-page optimization. For an anchor text link to be really powerful, the same keyword should exist on the destination page.
Google new algorithm is based on concept relevancy, which includes synonyms and related search terms within your niche, not just the keyword itself. Unless you have those terms on page, you may fall down in the relevancy scale.
Write for your visitors to keep them on your pages, but don’t forget that it’s the search engines that bring you those visitors in the first place.
It’s a start of a new week and we will be continuing on from our guest post series of Search Engine Optimization. We are now over the half way point! To see previous posts, check it our the Search Engine Optimization posts.
“Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.â€
- Elbert Hubbard -
Useless for SEO, but not for Conversion
If you have been following my posts in the past, you should be well aware by now that Meta Tags, in particular Meta Keywords and Meta Description don’t carry the value they used to have.
In fact, the situation reached an extend where they fundamentally are both useless for SEO, this is why more often than not, I strongly simply recommend people just to skip them as there are many other ways much more productive for you to get traffic towards your site.
What is the Meta Description?
The Meta Description is a small piece of text (150 characters long) that is used to describe the content of your page as a snippet along with the page title in the search results.
The Meta Description is nowhere to be seen or found on the actual content of your page; it is purely designed for the search engines result page display.
In the past, the Meta description was useful as another place to add your keywords and increase your site relevancy just like the Meta keywords and page title.
As SEO evolved, both the Meta keywords and Meta description have been rendered useless where all the weight of SEO has been carried over onto the page title.
The snippet used as Meta description is contained in the header of your HTML source code and looks like this:
Why do I talk about the Meta Description?
Since I said it’s no longer beneficial for SEO, why do I keep talking about it and not the Meta keywords?
Well, there’s one major difference between the meta keywords and the meta description; the meta keywords have lost their value and are totally invisible, not to be seen by the search engines (it is assumed that some search engines now directly skip that meta tag), while the meta description is still displayed in all the search results.
“There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.â€
- Josh Billings -
A bit for your visitors, a lot for the search engines
Once you got your site structure right, the one piece of SEO that is the most important when it comes to on-page optimization is without the shadow of a doubt the Page Title.
Although the Page Title is originally designed to tell your visitors what your page is all about, in practice, it’s much more to tell the search engines what your page is all about.
What is a Title Tag?
Do not confuse the Title Tag, and the Post Title or Content Title.
The Title Tag is the header line of text that is returned in the search engines result pages:
And on top of your browser window:
While the Post Title or Content Title, are only visible on the page itself and in <header> tags.
The Title Tag is a piece of information that tells both your visitors and the search engines what is the topic of your page.
The information should be enclosed by the <title> and </title> tags within the <head> tags in the HTML code of your page.
When it comes to SEO, keep in mind that since each title describes a specific page, they each should be absolutely unique.
Why is it important to optimize for the Title Tag?
Like I just told you, or you may already know, the title tag is the most important on-page optimization factor for you.
The search engines primarily identify the content of your page based on the Title you are using. If your title contains or matches the search query of a user, then you are much more likely to rank high for that search term.
Not only do you increase your chances of ranking better for that search term, the search engines have a very neat feature that bold their search query in the results listed on the result page.
That means, if you have the keyword the person is looking for in your Title, description, and URL, they all will be bolded, and trust me; this draws even more attention to your listing!
The purpose of this search engine feature is to help the users recognize if the page returned is likely to be relevant to their search.
“Definition of Statistics:
The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.â€
- Evan Esar -
Get ready to track your SEO performance
Now that your website is up and running, we want to make sure that we can monitor what’s going on, and whether or not our hard work is paying off.
The best way to do that is by setting up a couple of Analytics and Stats monitoring systems that will enable us to follow up with our progress.
Site Monitoring Systems
This type of monitoring system will analyze how your site fares within the specific search engine.
Important data such as the crawling information, indexing of the pages, linking status, and other webmaster’s related information of your site will be provided.
The service is provided free from each of the major search engine, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.
1.  Go to Google Webmaster Tools.
2.  If you already have a Google account, just enter your account information and hit the button “Sign inâ€.
If you don’t have a Google account, click “Create an Account Now!” and follow the wizard.
In today’s lesson we will be exploring the blog system WordPress and how to use this to leverage our SEO efforts. You can see the previous post: Day 9: Cascading Style Sheet Design to help you understand the technical aspects of SEO as well.
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.â€
- Steve Jobs -
To be the best you have to use the best
WordPress is by far the most popular blog engine online and for a good reason; it’s not only open source, totally free, extremely powerful, it’s also loved by the search engines and Google in particular.
WordPress is like a search engine spider’s magnet, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to leverage on that!
The moment of truth
This is it; finally after 10 days of hard labor, you are finally ready to take the next step by officially designing your site.
In the past 10 days, you have worked so hard and methodically to
prepare a solid base for your site, from the best possible keywords, structure design and optimization, architecture and navigability; there’s just a final step left for you before giving birth to your site.
And that step is choosing the right engine support for your site.
The time of static sites is over, we are in the WEB 2.0 era, whether
you want it or not. Now, if you had to chose an engine support for your site, even if it’s a static one, which one would it be:
Support static pages but not WEB 2.0 technology.
Support static pages and WEB 2.0 technology.
Of course, one should go with the one that supports static pages and WEB 2.0 technology even if you don’t implement it, at least it’s available for you if you want it to.
“A picture must possess a real power to generate light and I’ve been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.â€
- Henri Matisse -
Developing a SEO friendly framework
Although more related to web design than SEO, it is important for you to understand some basics of HTML and other related languages if you really want to improve your SEO work.
Whether you are going to implement the changes yourself or get a competent web designer to put your site together, the information we are going to discuss today will have a tremendous impact on your on-page SEO.
What Are Cascading Style Sheets?
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a fairly new method of formatting and styling the content of your pages.
Traditional HTML pages where quite limited in what you could personalize on page and how you could customize and style your design.
All to this has changed with the introduction of CSS; you can now
customize as many elements of your content as you wish!
Not only CSS allows for much nicer web designs, it also allows much neater code as search engines don’t read cascading style sheets.
CSS are the best method to show ethically one thing to the search engines, and another one for the human visitors, this way you have an optimized page both for the search engines and your visitors!
How Cascading Style Sheets Work?
I’m not here to teach you how to program in CSS, that’s not the objective of this lesson, but nonetheless, I just want to show you with illustrations what I mean.
A traditional old HTML page would look like this:
Cascading Style Sheets work differently; instead consider each styling information as a new “layer†that you apply on top of the previous one:
While the search engines will see the basic non styled page (as above) containing all what they need to know, the visitors will be greeted with a pleasant layout and overall design.
The Meta Description is nowhere to be seen or found on the actual content of your page; it is purely designed for the search engines result page display.
Although the Page Title is originally designed to tell your visitors what your page is all about, in practice, it’s much more to tell the search engines what your page is all about.
My name is Tyrone Shum and I'm on a journey to outsource and automate my business to allow me to work only 12 hours a week. On this website I share with you my outsourcing strategies to achieve this goal and I have a passion to teach others about what I do. Read more 