SEO – Page 3

Uniting Search Engine Optimization with Useful Content

You know you’ve got a great product, but how do you let the rest of the world know that too?

You build a website, of course, to explain why your product is so great. You do your research to find the best ways to sell goods and services on the Internet.

But all you find is a lot of contradictory information about online marketing. Half the web seems to say you need to apply all the tricks of search engine optimization, while the other half says you should focus on content to get your product noticed.

Search engines will certainly be a major source of traffic to your site, which makes it easy to see why search engine optimization is important. But, while employing the whole range of search engine optimization techniques might bring you visitors, all those potential customers will soon leave if all they find are pages stuffed with irrelevant keywords.

So, if search engine optimization and providing useful content both have their advantages, where should you concentrate your efforts?

The benefits of search engine optimization

Search engine robots crawl over your webpages gathering information about your site.

You can use many search engine optimization methods to direct these bots to the keywords and phrases on your pages and make the search engines aware of your content.

The search engines log this information, and when someone searches for keywords that occur often in your text, they will be directed to your site.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot to apply search engine optimization to your website, and it can work for you 24 hours a day.

The benefits of useful content

One of the great advantages of having a website in the first place is that people can find all the information about your product or service at any time. You don’t have to pay sales staff to cold call or set up a consumer service department to answer customer queries.

Your website, therefore, has to contain the right information. Your pages have to answer most, if not all, of the questions a customer might ask. If your customers cannot find the details they’re looking for, they will quickly go elsewhere. They will click on the second link the search engine provided, and then the third, and so on, till they find what they’re looking for. All that effort put into search engine optimization to make sure you appeared at the top of the search results will be wasted.

In other words, your content has to be useful to your customers, and it has to be relevant.

You don’t need to choose

The obvious answer is to apply search engine optimization techniques to a website full of useful content.

But that would appear to be easier said than done.

Many companies offer either search engine optimization or webpage content. Very few offer both.

The key to providing content that will serve your customers and search engine robots is simply to practice. Work on trying to naturally introduce relevant keywords into the right places in the text to give your customers the information they’re looking for.

Uniting useful content with proper search engine optimization can help you get to the top of the search results and keep your customers on the page when they arrive.

Top 6 SEO Audit Tools

SEO audit tools can help you improve your search engine rankings

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of designing a website so that its webpages appear in the first pages of search engine results. The position of a webpage in search engine results pages (SERPs) is called its ranking, and a high ranking is a great way to attract customers to your website. Most search engine users rarely go beyond the first page of search engine results, so it is vital to use SEO audit tools to check and refine your digital marketing strategy. If you don’t have the time to research all the SEO audit tools out there, don’t worry — this roundup has done the work for you.

1) My Site Auditor

You are most likely to become a customer of My Site Auditor if you run an SEO consultancy. This tool produces a report on the SEO qualities of a particular page. Search engine rankings are based on a page’s relevance to a specific search term. That term, when used in a page, is called a keyword. My Site Auditor evaluates a given page for the presence of a specific keyword, and its report presents the results, either through an instantly downloadable PDF or via email. SEO consultants can integrate the My Site Auditor service into their websites to capture the email addresses of enquirers, which allows them to follow up with a sales pitch to any casual visitor who tries the tool on their site. If you sign up for this SEO audit tool, be sure to enter the Coupon Code REFER603946 to get the best deal.

2) Wpromote SEO Audit Tool

Wpromote’s SEO Audit Tool performs a quick comparison between your website and that of your competitor. One of the best features of this SEO audit tool is that it does not limit its comparisons to a given keyword. Instead, it calculates the keywords for which the two sites rank best. This is useful, since it may show you that your site is not hitting the keywords you think it is. The tool is free, and you can use it repeatedly to compare your site to many other sites, one at a time.

3) Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The SEO spider by Screaming Frog is pretty unique among SEO audit tools because you don’t access it through a website. Instead, you access it through a program that you can download onto your computer for free. This SEO audit tool produces an enormous amount of data, which SEO newbies may find overwhelming. The program emulates a “web bot,” which is the program that search engines use to index and score pages. It will take you a while to get to know this SEO audit tool using the free version, which only crawls up to 500 pages. When you are ready to deepen your analysis, removing this limit costs 99 pounds sterling for a one-year subscription, which is quite cheap.

4) UpCity Free SEO Report Card

If you work through each of the recommended sites in this review, you may find the My Site Auditor’s report a little light and the Screaming Frog SEO spider report a little daunting. If that’s the case, try the UpCity SEO Report Card. It falls slap-bang in the middle in terms of complexity. You can access the SEO audit tool using the UpCity website and compare your own site against others, one at a time. You don’t want to swamp yourself with too much information, so tackling your competitors one by one is a useful strategy. Even better, you are not limited to one free try on the SEO audit tool.

5) Web CEO Technical Website Quality Audit

The Web CEO SEO audit tool offers a comprehensive dashboard of features, which are too numerous to list in this review. You have to create an account to access the dashboard, but this “account creation” just involves entering an email address and a password. The dashboard includes an analysis of the social engagement of your site, which covers Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. You can also request a keyword analysis for your site and see the keywords that your competitors use. The SEO audit tool has a comprehensive range of link auditing tools, including a list of broken links on your site. This is a very extensive SEO audit tool, and it is free.

6) Hubspot’s Marketing Grader

For ease of use, the Hubspot Market Grader wins hands down. You might find some of the SEO audit tools listed in this roundup a little too simple, while others might overwhelm you with their complexity. The benefit of the Hubspot SEO audit tool is that it offers two levels of detail. This is a web-based SEO audit tool, and the analysis output initially shows you a summary. However, each reporting point is expandable. This format caters to two types of enquirers: the casual visitor and the detail hound.

Pick an SEO Audit Tool

It will take time to work through each of the six SEO audit tools listed in this article. However, it is worth the effort because, without analyzing your website’s performance, you don’t stand much chance of improving your rankings. Try the free versions of each of these SEO audit tools to figure out which one is best suited to your business needs.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

If you’re new to doing business online, you’re probably asking yourself, “What is search engine optimization? Is it something I need for my website?”

The answer to the second question is an indisputable yes. Whether you write a blog celebrating the daily adventures of your Persian cat or you’re the webmaster for a multinational corporation, you want people to visit your website. The more visitors you get, the more success you’ll have with your website. But, with over 1.5 billion sites on the web, how will anyone find yours?

Search engines, such as Google Search, Bing, and Yahoo!, will almost certainly be a major source of traffic to your site. Since very few people click past the first page of search results, you need to make sure your site gets listed on the first page of results, as close to the top as possible. This is where search engine optimization can help. Now, let’s get back to the first question.

What is search engine optimization?

The answer to that first question takes a little more explanation. Let’s start by looking at how search engines work.

Search engines use a complex series of algorithms. They crawl through the web gathering information about the content of websites. When they find a page where certain words or phrases—keywords—are repeated often in the text, the search engines get an idea of what that site is about.

For example, if the search engine encounters the phrase “what is search engine optimization” several times in a single article, it can conclude that the page is about search engine optimization. The search engine stores that information, and the next time someone types the search term “what is search engine optimization,” the search engine will include that article in the results.

But if thousands, even millions, of web pages cover the same topic, how can you make sure your page is one of the first results the search engine shows?

How can you use search engine optimization?

Keywords are extremely important for search engine optimization. The more a keyword appears on the page, the easier it is for a search engine to categorize that page.

But be careful!

It can be tempting to write for the search engines and forget that your intended audience is human. People will be put off when they read a page where a keyword is constantly repeated and that appears in odd places within a sentence.

Even worse is when you try to trick the search engine by including a popular keyword that is not relevant to your content. Visitors will quickly see that your website doesn’t actually contain the information they’re looking for and will quickly leave, unlikely to ever return.

It’s always useful to do some research to find out what search terms people usually type when searching for your kind of content. Choose appropriate keywords that are relevant to your website, and include them often but naturally within your text. Overdoing it will get your site penalized for “keyword stuffing.”

Search engines also categorize the content depending on where the keywords appear in the text. Include the keywords in the page title and in subheadings to help the search engine recognize that these words are important to the content. It also helps if the keywords appear often at the beginning of the text.

Freshness and dwell time

Another aspect of search engine optimization is how often you add new content to your website. Search engines assume that sites that are updated frequently are more likely to have relevant and useful information. So it is important to keep your site “fresh” by adding new material regularly. You can do this by having a blog or articles section on your site.

The content must be useful however, and one of the ways search engines measure this is by the average “dwell time” of users on your website. If a web surfer comes to your site and finds poorly written material or nothing of use, he/she will likely exit the site quickly. If, on the other hand, they see compelling material, and stick around for a while to read it, you’ve clearly provided something of value. How do search engines measure this? By calculating how long it takes users to come back from your site to the search engine results page for the same term.

Other factors

There are many other factors involved in search engine optimization, of course; SEO experts have estimated that there are anywhere from 80-200 critical factors. No one knows for sure, because search engines don’t want to reveal the secret sauce to their indexing process. But there is one special factor to rule them all, and it’s one that search engine representatives have stressed over and over again: provide value and quality on your website. Then again, that should come as no surprise, because customers want that from your products and services too.