10 Cracking SEO Ideas to Improve Your Website Design

This Guest Post is from Ushan Arya of  Black iD on improving the SEO basics to have a cracking website design.

Websites play a very important role to achieve business success online. They can make business’ brands and services known to audiences visiting them. But, this is possible when websites are designed with the aim to achieve ranking on the web page result.

If website don’t have good ranking on the web page result that means they are out of the sight of visitors, and thus loose the chance to get browsed by them. Therefore, to avoid the websites that are not search engine friendly, you need to follow some basic SEO ideas. Getting these ideas solidated from a reputed SEO Company will enhance your result.

You will come across some great SEO ideas online or in some popular blogs like MOZ or Social Media Examiner. Do you want to have a share of some good ideas to improve your website design? So, here it is. Let’s start gathering ideas and keep in your secret basket.

MENTIONED BELOW ARE 10 CRACKING SEO IDEAS

Idea 1: Effective Navigation

Make sure your website has an effective navigation feature. Effective navigation should be a prominent feature of your design. Keep in mind that search engines really find a hard time while crawling websites that are having an improper navigation feature. Navigation feature designed by using CSS and JavaScript can be effective. This could help search engines to crawl websites easily, and to display them immediately to visitors.

Idea 2: Successful Coding

Place JavaScript and CSS outside of the HTML document when you are coding a website. Search engines always tend to go through the HTML document. If JavaScript and CSS are not placed outside of the HTML document then they might make crawling of search engines slower.

Idea 3: Unique Content

Design a website with the unique content having a good structure. Content is a very important part of the website, and search engines consider it very seriously. Websites with good structure content (headings, paragraphs, and links) are easily grabbed by search engines and show them with higher ranking on the web page result.

Idea 4: Collect Best URLs

Design a website with the best URLs. Best URLs are those containing keywords, which help to describe the page content. Such URLs are easy to crawl by search engines.

Idea 5: Avoid Block Pages

Block pages of a website that you don’t want search engines to read. Such pages are not of any importance to your content, like server side scripts.

Idea 6: Image Attributes

Website designing should be done with descriptive image alt attributes. All image attributes should be 100% W3C- complaint. Search engines read and consider image alt attributes when determining the relevant page.

Idea 7: Fresh Web Content

Make sure that the web content is fresh. Keep on updating content time to time, as it indicates the website is still alive and well for the search engines.

Idea 8: Unique Meta Data

Use unique set of Meta data for every page of a website. This would help search engines get a better grip on a website.

Idea 9: Proper Use of Heading Tags

Make sure that the heading tags are used properly in the web page content of a website. Search engines gives higher value to these tags than any other text of the web page. Avoid multiple use of <h1> tag on a single web page.

Idea 10: Maintain W3C Standards

Design a website according to W3C standards. With W3C standards, website can be well formed and clean coded to get easily crawled by search engines.

My dear readers, they are not just some tips or ideas to keep in mind for few moments and forget. Implement them, out it to use now, since they are going to bring effective results to your website.

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Google Places: Changing the Face and Outlook of Local SEO

We have written and shared our views on Local SEO in our blog post How Local SEO Helps In Your Small Business? It was due to the incredible dominance of Google+ that was playing in Local SEO last year that we shared how Local SEO has a great impact on small business. Its 2013, Google Places and Google+ have started growing even closer.

Google has launched their social media platform Google Plus on June 28 2011, three more days to celebrate its 2nd birthday. It has become important to the business in these few days and Google continues to merge new phases of development.

You might have dismissed the use of Google Plus in the beginning, but you might have started to pay attention since the end of the year 2012. Well, for the readers I am going to explain some common terms related to Google.

• Google Plus – Social networking platform from Google launched in 2011

• Google Places – Place where SEO specialist manage their local listing

• Google Plus Local listing – Shares information about your business locations, reviews and hours spend.

How Google Places Incorporate Google Plus?

Google Places is the facility where you get to manage the Google Plus Local Listing. This is the place where small business owners share their information with nearby users when they search for various products and services. Check out what Google Plus is offering you when users will search for you.

• Say if you search for “coffee“in the Google, you will see that they carry local intent which helps to display the Google Plus Local information which gets displayed in the sidebar.

• To serve the nearby users Google Plus Local results helps to trigger users search for your business or products and offers it with a geo-modifier, like a city or a name of the state.

Google Plus is ever evolving and updates continuously roll out to the current users, parallely in the next few weeks fresh updates and info’s will be available to the new users.

What you need to know about the recent Google Plus behavioral pattern?

There are certain changes, which will affect the Google Places listing during this year. These include:

1. An updated version of Google Places will be given the closer proximal view of the Google+ and other Google products.

2. Google Places will be given the opportunity to edit the Google Plus Business Page via a link in the left column.

3. Google Plus Local updates will take place quicker, reducing the time and the time it takes to edit will be displayed live.

How the changes will affect the Local SEO?

Joey Headley of Google in a recent post shared the different situations, which users might face and how they should respond to those. 

Google Plus Business will turn important, if Google continues to merge product management roles under Google Plus.

If you do not have a Google Plus Business page for the physical location of your business, then please take the advice of a reputed SEO consultant. The Google Plus Business page can share information with the Google Plus Local Listing, when your business type is local. You will thus improve your Google Plus Local listing with this kind of shared info’s.

Recent studies have given a thumbs up for Google Plus Local. It is important to carry on a profitable business this year.

• 24% of Google searches carry the local intent.

• Searches on the mobile devices are having 66% more local intents than the desktop search.

Therefore, what are you waiting for. Take a ride on the Google Plus Local to give your business an edge over your competitors. Make it easily searchable in one click.

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10 Wrong Social Steps That You Have Hidden Under Your Sleeve

Having a blog does not mean that you are posting quality contents. You might have contents that are worth reading but that does not allow to tag them as unique or quality contents.

When you see that, your blog or website is attracting less traffic you go on adopting wrong ways to drive traffic. You purchase social media tools to keep your audience engaged. Have you ever thought that these might have some wrong effect on your social image?

You preach people about quality and not quantity, but you keep your auto-tweets on every day, even on the weekends. Fake social profiles, social tool bags, it’s a serious grave in this web world. You have to consider the matter deeply.

People or rather our readers might be annoyed and will not like to comment or share the post. However, people you are doing wrong. You have hidden tactics under the sleeve. Let’s see what wrong you do with your audience.

Check out the 10 things that bloggers and website owners often do:

1.       Buying Fake Followers

Do you have ever realized that the fake followers are nothing more than robots? They do not have real friends and hence they cannot be your real followers.

2.       Counting Your Fake Followers
You cannot ignore that you add or count your fake followers account in the press release, speeches, share of webinars that you post or share in your blog.

3.       Auto-Tweets

You tell people about quality and you tend to shift the focus from that lesson. You keep your auto-tweets switched on 24 hours a day, even on weekends and on the holidays.

4.       To Increase the EdgeRank Score

You might be posting fill in the blank question on the Facebook pages to raise the EdgeRank score. Do you think that it is a justified way to engage your audience at your website?

5.       Tagging in Images and Videos

You keep on tagging people on the posts in Facebook. It might be images or may be videos that you share directly from the blog or from your personal places. You keep on tagging people to those media contents just to make your followers visit them and forcefully engage them in turn to increase the EdgeRank score.

6.       Increasing the Klout Score

You might be going on increasing the Klout score with the use of simple way to thank or retweeting the post of those followers who favorite one post of yours.

7.       Retweeting

Yup, you retweet a lot. Retweeting help you to build a strong social identity and thus attract a huge crowd at your blog.

8.       Having Fake Accounts

You set up your own fake accounts on Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, Twitter and other popular social media sites to retweet, share, like, comments, pin or +1 your own contents.

9.       Copying From Your Competitors

You often do this. You copy the service description of your competitor or some other bloggers, which you find good and share them on your own profile. However, you forget the fact that someone on the Web is watching your actions.

10.   Email Lists

You often register yourself in the to an email list to receive free stuff and them opt-out immediately after copying the information to share them on your own blog.

Aha! So you have started feeling guilty and you are trying to close the tab to ignore the blog post shared here. However, people, stop using these wrong tactic as it will demoralize the value and won’t bring that essence back with which you have entered the blogosphere.

Concentrate on your audience from today and stop focusing on the increase of scores.

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Penguin 2.0: Roadmap to Penguin Recovery

This guest post by Cole West will tell you the ways to have a steady Penguin recovery. You do not fear the Penguin updates all you need to follow the right SEO tactics to head for future benefits and enjoy a great traffic at your website.

What is Penguin 2.0?

On May 22, 2013, Google announced the launch of latest algorithm update, which is “Penguin 2.0” confirmed by the web spam team head, Matt Cutts.

Why Google every time updates its algorithm?

Most of us having this question in our mind - Why Google might be doing it for repeated number of times? 

Google changes its algorithm around 550-600 times in a year. While most of them are minor, but every few months it roll out a major search algorithmic update like Panda, Penguin etc, that affects the search results.

Google primarily concerns to help people provide better information on the web, so effective search engine optimization can make a site crawlable and make the pages easier and accessible.

How It Helps White Hat SEO And Black Hat SEO?

Those who are doing “white hat SEO” often enhance the usability of a website and create great content, make sites faster, which is better for both search engines as well as users, so doing good SEO can generate good marketing.

“Black Hat SEO” customarily defined as tactics that used to acquire top searching rankings in an unethical manner. It refers to the use of aggressive SEO tactics and strategies and usually does not obey the search engine rules.

Some Black Hat SEO techniques are:

• Keyword Stuffing

• Invisible Text

• Doorway Pages

The main goal of Google is to help searchers to get websites that provide a better user experience in order to fulfill their information requirements. Therefore, Google will fight against the “spamming methodologies” and updates its algorithm in order to reward the good website (those who follow Google’s guidelines).

What is the Google Penguin2.0 updates designed to do?

It mainly targets on “spam on the web” and drop off the rankings of sites, which the algorithm distrust, violate the existing Google’s quality guidelines. In previous time, the update only targets the top-level pages and now it started to target the lower level pages of a site.

Penguin Affected Websites

SEO experts explained that latest penguin update 2.0 sought to let down the page ranks (PR) of websites that had duplicate content, paid links and poor user engagement. The websites, whose rankings are not affected, had a great valuable unique content and videos that aided users.It mainly focuses on link spam.

It targets on Advertorials: lets in paid advertising, which violates according to Google’s quality guidelines. If somebody pays for advertising or coverage, then the ads should not flow page rank.  

Google explain, “Page rank should not be sold or bought”. At the same time, Google will give higher importance in terms of page rank for authority websites detected which follow the genuine SEO strategies.

Is Penguin a Penalty?

According to Matt Cutts, “neither panda nor penguin is a manual penalty and also explained that panda was all about spam and penguin was set to tackle the stuff in the middle between the content and spam.

Therefore, getting a penalty means, you made a mistake and Google will penalize the site.

If rankings stepped down, does it sense that penguin has affected the page? - For this question, the answer is, it may or may not.

It is not made that all decreased rankings (PR) can affect by the penguin2.0. Many branded companies are employed a form of search engine optimization. In some cases, your PR can be diminishing just as your competitor doing work hard to get their sites in top place.

However, some of the links that used to raise the page rankings are no more doing so. This is because a few days back Google took action against the link sellers. Right now, there is no value for all their outgoing links, which got devalued.

How Do You Recover From Penguin Penalty?

• Low Quality Profile Link:

The sites we use to sign up for joining community or discussion must have high quality along with relevancy. As making too much low quality link profiles can be a major reason for the penguin penalty.

How do you overcome the problem?

It is the time to remove all those low quality links. With the help of some online website analyzer tools like “a hrefs” and SEOMOZ check the low quality back links from PR0 sites, low quality directories, etc. 

Find out the low quality links, make a list of these and send request to respective site webmasters to remove your back links from their sites. Once again, check your back links for existence. 

If they still exists after multiple attempts of request, then use Google disavow tool with contact request proofs to intimate Google not to give value those links.

• Non-Relevant Links:

Getting back links from non-relevant sites, which are not associated with your niche, is also one reason for penalty.

How do you overcome the problem?

By using, the Google disavow tool remove all unrelated back links from non-relevant websites and try to get high and good quality back links from the relevant sites.

• Low Quality Contents:

Penguin 2.0 also penalizes the low quality contents in your site. What is a low quality content? It means having ’”copied or duplicate content, content mainly concerns on keywords, content missing and unauthorized contents”.

How do you overcome the problem?

Firstly, remove all the duplicate or copied content from your. Fill the missing content and write keyword focused contents. Make clear that you are having unique and original content on every single page of your site.

• Creating Unbalanced Back links:

With in the short period creating too many back links is also one of the factors for penalization. Therefore, without a reason creating a bulk back links can let you face penguin effect.

How do you overcome the problem?

Try to avoid creating too many back links in hacked websites, low quality websites, spam domains etc. Don’t use link-building software to create back links. So, try to get good and quality limited links from related quality niche sites.

• Keyword Matching Anchor Text:

Penguin also penalizes sites, which are having too many back links that are centering on exact keywords with specific match anchor text.

How do you overcome the problem?

Modify all the anchor text to your brand associated and make them look natural.

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How Competitors Can Help You To Analyse Your Online Business Status?

One vital way in which a company can learn about itself is to analyse its position in relation to its competitors. Once you’re in the process of looking at competitors, there’s also a number of other ways in which they can help you and your business by examining what appears to be working for your competitors and how you can emulate that in your own business and marketing practices.

The kind of analytic tools offered up on the web give companies and marketers more data than ever that can be used to collate information about what works for a company, its competitors and how that can be transformed into action. A number of vital areas for analysis can yield a huge amount of useful strategic pointers to get a company out of a rut and motoring in a new direction.

The power of back-links

Back links are a powerful indicator of the likelihood of a website being scored highly in search engine optimization  The number and quality of the sites from which hits have been received have a big impact on the way search engines rank websites when returning search results.

Finding out where your competitors’ back links are coming from can help you build your own back-linking strategy

By analyzing a competitor websites back links, it’s possible for you to understand where their web traffic is coming from and get a picture of what might be valuable for your company. If analysis identifies a number of high-value back link sites that aren't currently in your own portfolio, it can make sense to target these for inclusion of content to bring about increases in your own company’s search engine ranking.

Words are key

One of the ways in which companies build their search rank is through the selection of relevant keywords that customers and potential customers could click to find them online. The choice of those keywords can make the difference between getting seen by your customers and being passed by.

This is true, but your keywords do say a lot about you

Analyzing the keywords that your competitors are prioritizing in their strategies can give pointers to the kinds of words you should be targeting in your own online marketing activities. Although there may be some that don’t seem relevant to the type of consumer you’re targeting, they may have hit gold with keywords you haven’t prioritized that would be very relevant to your own activities if you chose them alongside others that are bringing you results.

Keep it simple

Of course, there are some very simple, low-tech ways in which you can keep an eye on your competitors. Back link analysis and keyword comparisons are relatively resource intensive, but not all comparison with competitors needs to be highly data driven. Things as simple as checking out competitors’ websites, blogs and other online activities can give a feel for the way in which they are engaging with their customers. 

One of the best things you can do to keep abreast of developments with your competitors is to sign up for their e-newsletter. Many companies now have mailing lists that regularly distribute information about their activities and this can give you a picture of what they’re doing and, more importantly, what they feel ready to share about their activities. This can help you keep a close eye on your place in the market and adjust your own strategies to take account of what is going on around you.

About the author

Tom Shurville, the managing director of SEO agency Distinctly Digital, offering professional SEO services such as social engagement and competitor analysis.

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