Posts About ‘seo 101’

25 Ways to Learn SEO for Free

Learn-blackboard

This is a guest post by IrishWonder, who has been practicing SEO since 2000, is an independent SEO consultant at irishwonder.com and a CMO for ContentMango.com.

Search engine optimisation, albeit often rumoured to be dead or about to die, is getting more and more popular as a career path. It’s hardly taught anywhere formally, one of the reasons being its ever-changing nature (by the time you get a University course prepared and approved it’s already largely outdated). The bars to entry into the industry are ridiculously low – or insanely high, depending on how you look at it. There is no formal certification but there are plenty sources of information and too many of them are either outdated or complete garbage. There is no lack of SEO conferences and workshops – but many of them are quite expensive, speakers sometimes pitch their services rather than provide useful information, and travel costs do add up as well. So how do you learn SEO without making costly mistakes and spending a fortune?

Believe it or not, there are ways to do it completely free or almost free. The ways listed below range from easily doable by anyone to ones requiring certain skills/knowledge, but it all depends on your character and how willing you are to learn. Majority of these ways also require serious social skills – so while our industry is known for stories about making millions from home in your pyjamas never having to meet other people, you probably cannot afford not having social skills at all. (more…)

Good Rel.ations – A Beginners Guide to Rel Attributes

rel-attributes

In recent times we’ve covered a lot of stories about HTML tags that include, canonical, author, publisher and many more for reasons that they are (relatively) new; topical, useful and beneficial for webmasters seeking to get more (and more relevant) traffic to more and more appropriately indexed pages.

We bandy about terms like “attributes”, “tags” assuming we’re talking to an initiated audience which is often the case. However not all our readers are search professionals, web developers or HTML proficient. Many are webmasters and small business owners who wear many hats. We thought it might be useful to collectively examine the more useful of these tags in their employ as rel attributes; particularly the ones that might directly boost our efficacy or solve a problem from an organic search perspective. (more…)

18 Daily SEO Tips – Our October Updates

state-of-search-seo-tip-of-the-day

This month we started something new, on our Facebook page we give away one SEO tip per day. Each day a tip from one of our bloggers or from one of our readers is displayed. For learning purposes.

At the end of each month all the tips will be collected in one post. And that is this post. Find below all the tips from October! If you would like to stay up-to-date every day of the new tips be sure to like our Facebook page so you will see the updates every day. If you have additions, do send them in!

Without further ado, here are the 101 Tips for October: (more…)

Long-Tail Keywords – Your Licence to Kill

007

We must never forget how life-changing the internet has been for the people of our tiny planet. It’s too easy to think of it as being nothing more than a great way for businesses to make bigger revenues, but it really has done so much more. It’s broadened people’s horizons, made education accessible, and given the public a voice. Forget eBay, forget Amazon and forget the likes of www.buycheapfatburningpills.com; the internet is about people solving problems and enriching lives. You need something? You ask Google where you can get it. If you can’t afford it you ask Google where you can get it cheaper. If you still can’t afford it you ask Google how you can “make money online without investing a penny” – and guess what, Google has an answer for that, too! (more…)

Get One SEO Tip A Day and Help Give More

state-of-search-seo-tip-of-the-day

State of Search is going to give you the ultimate overview of SEO tips in the world. Coming from the entire blogging team and with your help we will create the best list ever.

SEO is changing, Google is using different metrics than 10 years ago, people search in different places and people are behaving differently. Every now and then this means we get to see posts proclaiming ‘the death of SEO’ in one way or another. The truth is: SEO is far from dead, the opposite actually, it is just turning into a ‘real’ part of the marketing funnel. It is being taken out of its corner and integrated into proper marketing.

But still, with all the changes that are going on, there is a lot of ‘elementary SEO’ you can do. I would almost call it ‘basic’, but in fact it is more than just basic. It is elements which are part of optimising your content on your website we all need to do. Relatively simple things you can do to make your content more visible to search engines and thus to the people searching for answers. (more…)

What Baby Books Can Teach Us About SEO

8 months ago by Agnete Tøien Pedersen 4 Comments
baby-books

Being a new mom, just finishing off my maternity leave, I have done my fair share of baby book reading over the last months. Baby books are made to organize the world`s things for brand new people with no pre-knowledge. Babies and search engines are on the same level of naivety, experiencing things for the very first time every time they crawl, and therefore they can remind us of the most important basics of SEO.

As a website owner, it is not unusual to lose the perspective of your own content. Maybe you have worked for years to create unique, great content to rank better in the search engines. You have read about SEO and you have done everything by the book. And somewhere along the way, you lost your focus. The website is now about everything and nothing, and the rankings are not improving. Why? You have lost sight of the most basic element of SEO.

I see this many times every week when meeting (potential) clients. People over-complicate things in their desperation to rank better. And somewhere along the way, they lose both the rankings and the usability of their site. This is where the baby books can help us; to go back to the absolute basics of communication, and therefore also the very core of SEO. (more…)

Political SEO – Can it be done?

Obama-on-SEO

Here in the States it’s election season. I recently had a conversation with a campaign worker that said there is “no way” to SEO for a political election. Well my friends, we’re going to spend our day putting together a SEO strategy guide for those with political dreams.

I am going to cover the three most influential search optimization strategies out there for political SEO. The only thing I ask, if you have an idea for something to add – post a comment! (more…)

The Benefit of A Sitemap According to Googles John Mueller

directions-police

So many SEO’s talk about sitemaps. But there are many marketers out there who have no idea what a sitemap is, let alone what the use of having one is.

This week Google’s John Mueller decided to answer on a question about this specific topic on the Stackexchange forum. Here is his answer.

“A Sitemap file helps search engines to discover new and updated URLs on your website. In particular, if your website is fairly large, then this can help them to be able to focus on the new & updated content, instead of having to blindly crawl through everything to see if anything has changed. That can result in new content being found much faster, which can be quite noticeable especially if the site is larger or more complex.

 

With Google in particular (I work at Google; I don’t know how other search engines handle these), it also does the following:

 

  • Find the number of indexed URLs for your website: These statistics are recalculated daily and very accurate. You can find these in the Sitemaps detail page.
  • Discover canonicalization issues: If the numbers there don’t match up, that’s frequently a sign that you’re specifying URLs in the Sitemap file that don’t match what we find during our crawling. That’s usually a sign that you need to work on canonicalization.
  • Help with canonicalization: When we find multiple URLs on your site that show identical content, we will give any URL that’s listed in a Sitemap an extra edge, even if you don’t use other canonicalization methods.
  • Find badly-indexed parts of your site: These counts are supplied per Sitemap file, so you can create separate Sitemap files for logical sections of your site, to discover areas where Google isn’t indexing as much as you’d like.
  • Prioritize crawl errors: In the crawl errors section, URLs that were specified in Sitemaps files are listed separately. Since you specifically supplied these URLs, we assume that you want them indexed, and that any crawl errors there are important.

 

Additionally, you can use several extensions in Sitemaps files (eg for images, video, News, or internationalization), should you choose to do that. These extensions are all optional.

 

For most websites, the most visible element of Sitemaps files is that you can see the indexed URL count. It can take a day or so to appear, so if you just submitted a Sitemap for the first time, you may need to be a bit patient. While other ways (eg a site:-query) are very, very rough approximations, this count is extremely acccurate.”

Our question now is: is he missing anything? What would you add to this answer?

Does Linking to “Bad” Sites Hurt You? Cutts Says No to an Extent

Bad links, there is a lot of discussion going around them at the moment with Panda and Penguin fresh in our memories. And with all the ‘outing’ going on, you better watch your steps right?

The question asked to Matt Cutts in his latest Webmasterhelp videos “What happens if I link to a good page that later becomes spammy?” therefore is one where the answer is listened to carefully by many SEOs.

The question is whether or not a site you link to, which used to have good content before, now turns ‘spumy’, will have a bad influence on your rankings. The answer? Cutts says ‘not to worry’, at least as long its not too many of these kind of links.

International and Multilingual sites: The Criteria to Establish an SEO Friendly Structure

intro-international-multilingual

Although many articles have been written about international and multilingual SEO I would like to dive deeper in the decision making process and the relevant criteria to select the most suitable structure depending on the site business, geolocalization and language goals, requirements and restrictions.

After having managed a certain amount of international SEO processes I’m convinced that if the site owners would have known the most important criteria from the beginning and understood the consequences of their first site internationalization decisions they would have taken them more seriously, probably would have chosen a different option, ended with a much more cost-effective, SEO friendly structure… and I would have had a much easier job afterwards :) (more…)

Checklist For Launching New Websites

checklist

If you are developing a new website then you must recognize that in the last fase of building there are always a lot of small things that have to be taken care of. Because several points are critical and may not be forgotten when a site goes live I’ve made a small checklist to see if everything on a site or a shop is working correctly before launch.

The original checklist is in Dutch and can be found here with additional information.

If you have any points that aren’t on the list but should be, please share it in the comments or on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or via email. So without further ado, the checklist: (more…)

Meta Description Tags – Billboarding Your Site on SERPS

Billboard-buy-product

So you are now ranking where you want to be, but you simply are not seeing the results that your research tells you to expect. It could be that you suffer from having weak meta description tags. Don’t listen to the “experts” that say it doesn’t matter – let’s billboard your page!

A lot of search marketers now believe that the meta description is meaningless. They say that since because it is not a part of the algorithm in determining rankings that they will shift their focus from it. I ask why, they give reasons, and we both end up feeling unfulfilled from that conversation. So during my drive from Michigan to Florida, I got some motivation for this months article. (more…)

Page 1 of 212