There is no such thing as the best SEO method. There may be more than a dozen of techniques and they may all work if done correctly. This is why you can ask different webmasters about it and you may get different answers. They have different experiences that could affect their answers. However, there seems to be a kind of web content that is effective regardless of the SEO technique being used.

The Kind of Web Content You Need

In the world of SEO, all you need is quality and relevant content. With quality and relevance in mind while making contents, they will surely be able to get high rankings in search engines results pages or SERP. It is best to ensure quality whether you are creating content for your site or an external page. You should also ensure that the content is relevant to your site or niche. This kind of content can easily get links from other websites. Take note that the link popularity is what search engines use to determine your site’s worth.

The Future of Low Quality Contents

Google has a 0-1 logarithmic toolbar, which is out of date and does not have a direct impact on the ranking of sites. One should be more concerned about the Panda update. It is a proof that the big search engine, Google, is getting rid of low quality contents. With the algorithm changes, the future of low quality, irrelevant or plagiarized content is at the last pages of the SERPs.

In fact, the main goal of the Panda update is to determine the low quality sites and the high quality ones. The low quality sites are those that are not very helpful to users or those that copy the contents from other web pages while the high quality ones are those that provide original content with valuable information.

Why Produce High Quality Contents?

A lot of webmasters know the importance of producing high quality contents. However, pleasing the search engines or the internet users is not the only reason why you should choose to provide only high quality contents. You should also do it for yourself. Everyone can surely take pride of original and high quality contents.

How to Come Up With Quality Contents

Regardless of the SEO method that you will use, it is important to come up with useful, informative and relevant contents. They do not need to be journalistic pieces but they should be at least well written (i.e. free from grammatical errors). Some website owners who are not very skillful or passionate about writing can rely on web content writers. There are a lot of them these days.

With web contents, you need to use keywords in article but a web article should not be guilty of keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffed articles do not only appear unnatural but can also call on the spam filters of search engines.

The web stats are the term that is used to refer to combined data about your website’s visitors. They may also include referrals. Why do you need to know your web stats? They can help you to identify the results of your SEO campaign or what methods you need to apply. Your web stats have 9 elements. Take time to study each one of them.

Unique Visitors

How many people visited your website? Every person who visited your site is counted as one unique visitor regardless of the number of pages he visited and links he clicked. Knowing the number of unique visitors is important in identifying if your traffic is improving or declining. It will also tell you if there’s a need to do more or change your SEO tactics.

Location of Visitors

Your web stats may also tell you the location of your visitors. You can see where your visitors are located by percentage. This is important especially if you are targeting a worldwide audience.

Search Keywords and Phrases

The web stats will also let you know the exact search keywords or key phrases that the visitors used to reach your site. This is very important since SEO tactics are very dependent on the right keywords. Knowing what words and phrases bring the most number of visitors will surely help you.

Referrals

You should also take a look at the referrals in your web stats. It will tell you the websites where your visitors come from before landing to your website. It helps you to determine which sites help you get traffic. For instance, a particular article directory may be delivering the most number of traffic so you may opt to submit more articles to that directory.

Pages

Your web stats will show you which of your website’s pages are visited the most. This can help you in analyzing what the other pages, which don’t get a lot of visit, need.

Entry and Exit Pages

In your web stats, you will also be able to know which of your pages serve as entry and exit for the visitors. This can help in several ways. One is that you can identify the content that attracts the visitors to a certain page and consider having similar contents in other pages. This may also signal you in which SEO or link building method works. A site that links to an inner page may be doing much better than the one that has a link to the home page. With the exit pages, the web stats can help you know where you need to put the sales pitch or call to action. You can also use this data to prevent the visitors from leaving your site so soon. You may come up with a solution for particular page that always makes every visitor leave.

Time and Day

The web stats can tell you the time and the day when the most number of visitors come to your website. This is useful especially if you are paying for live chatters. It may also help you know the right time to launch special offers.

Duration of Visits

You may want to know how long does a visitor stay at your website. The duration of visits may give you an idea if the visitors are spending time to look at your site’s content. Sometimes, visitors tend to leave immediately after seeing the home page. It can signal you that there’s a problem. Sometimes, they may just be looking for another type of site.

Error Reports

It is also through web stats that you will be able to determine if the users have been getting errors when they visit your site. Checking this element in the web stats can help you act on the issue as soon as possible.

A lot of website owners rely on SEO companies and consultants. However, many of them have been burned with empty or misleading promises. It is not good to lose trust on all companies because there are trustworthy companies out there. You just need to identify the bad ones and run away from them as fast as you could. Below are ways to identify a bad SEO company.

Bad Practices

Some bad SEO companies can easily be identified through the bad practices that they advertise. Some bad practices that you need to avoid are automated writing, doorway pages, link buying, cloaking, and link farm (inclusion in a network of sites). Some may even call these as innovative techniques. Whether they are just misinformed or do this to fool you on purpose, there is no better thing to do than to avoid them.

Unbelievable Claims

Bad companies that are not trustworthy often claim unbelievable results. Some examples of unbelievable claims are the guaranteed top position in search engine results pages or submission to thousands of search engines.

Know the Company

You can do an online research about the company and the people behind it. Take a look at the company’s website. Some bad companies have photos of blue-eyed and blonde people who look very professional (this does not mean that such kind of picture automatically means that the company is a bad one). Call the SEO company that you want to hire and ask for a personal meeting. You’ll know if the people in the photos are the ones who will serve you or if they are really located in California or in Florida as they stated in their website.

You may also observe their online reputation. The company may claim to be an ethical one. You’ll be surprised to see that this company’s site in paid link directories or sharing a contact page with three other companies.

You should also determine the company’s SEO experience. Come up with a tricky question. You can ask about an outdated optimization technique like the page rank sculpting or make up your own (make sure it sounds like real).

You should also ask about the techniques that they will implement in case you hire them. Many companies will not automatically share with you every bit of detail but they should if you will ask. Run away from a company that does not disclose information that you ought to know.

Almost all small enterprises who want to succeed online should take search engine optimization (SEO) seriously. It will surely help you achieve and maintain a high ranking in search engines, which will help in getting online visitors.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is a process wherein a website is fine-tuned for some search terms, which are commonly referred to as keywords, to be appealing to search engines. A part of the strategy is link building wherein the site being optimized gains links from other sites. It is important that the links come from reputable and related sites.

On-Site and Off-Site Optimization

There are two main types of search engine optimization: on-site and off-site. The on-site optimization refers to the process of optimizing pages on your website. It involves titles, headings, descriptions, putting some texts in bold font and creating alternative texts for images. On the other hand, the off-site optimization is done in other websites. The goal is to enhance the online reputation of the site being optimized through links from related sites. With more strict policies of search engines today, one should be aware that posting links in just any site won’t work. Relevance matters more than ever.

Both types of SEO involve primary and secondary keywords. They must be in proportion according to search engines’ standards. Otherwise, your site may be penalized for over-using keywords. This is often called as keyword-stuffing. Unfortunately, there is no pre-determined keyword density. One who is knowledgeable in search engine optimization should know the right keyword density for different business needs considering the type of business, goal of the website owner and the current competition.

SEO Is Not Enough

The webmasters could not stress the importance of SEO enough. However, an owner of an online business should know that having a high ranking on search engines is not enough. There are other factors that you should take seriously if you want online success. Some of them are social media, email marketing, website design, traffic analysis and quality data capture.

For social media, you can create a business page in Facebook, be active in Twitter and create a blog. It’s important to be active in these social media sites and invite people to bookmark your site and your blog in social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon. It is also possible to hire a social media marketer or a ghost blogger if you are too busy to do these stuffs.

Email marketing is an effective way to reach new customers and keep existing customers. It can be done through weekly or monthly newsletter. Note: Selling something in every email should be avoided.

For website design, get some people who are not affiliated to you business to look and review the look and feel as well as functionality of your site. It’s important for your site to have a call to action, too.

Traffic analysis should be done if your site gets a lot of traffic but seems to have poor conversion rate. You should be able to identify which keywords bring visitors to your site, what type of visitors are brought to your site, etc. The visitors who have been visiting your site may only be looking for advice and not for products. You can adjust or change your keywords if this is the case.

Lastly, you should be able to capture quality data about existing customers as well as those who are not yet customers. It is easy to get data from your customers. You can simply ask them to provide details before purchase. How about the non-customers? A good solution for this is to offer a free stuff in exchange for details such as email address. You should be courteous enough to inform them that by getting the free stuff, you will add them to your email list.

Like other industries, the industry of search engine optimization is continuously developing with new techniques discovered every time. To become knowledgeable in SEO is definitely what you need if you want go side by side the ever changing algorithms of search engines. While new methods and techniques are discovered or introduced every after several weeks, the basic rules of search engine optimization have stayed the same.

Understand the Users

Regardless of the kind of site that you want to optimize, you need to understand the users and their needs and wants. If the site is selling clothes then you may want to understand what kinds of clothes the users want. You should know that a certain user may look for casual clothing. Others may look for urban or professional clothing items. The users are normally specific when searching through search engines and so should you. The inability to understand the users and their ways of searching may mislead you, wasting all your efforts for SEO.

Be Patient with Link Building

Link building is very important in SEO. However, the link popularity of your site should slowly grow. Natural links will not grow over night and quality links are those that embody white hat SEO. The search engines can easily identify the spammers and unethical optimization practices. Sometimes, even quality links when developed too quickly may make

search engines doubt.

Create Quality Content
You may have heard that “content is king” so many times. Why? Because it is the truth. In the web, content is anything that can be seen and shared by every internet user. Some examples are blog posts, videos, and articles. To ensure good quality content, you should think of the end users – the people who surf the web – and not the search engines but make sure that it is optimized in such a way that the search engines can find and index it.

Don’t Spam

Don’t spam the users and search engines. While you can get thousands of links by making hundreds of accounts especially in social media sites, you should also think of the links’ quality. Always think whether the links will help your brand and reputation when creating them.

Learn to Wait

Your SEO efforts may not give obvious results tomorrow or even next month. You need to learn to wait especially if your site is newly launched. Thus, search engine optimization is not a quick fix to low search engine ranks. However, its benefits can last for a long time when done properly and ethically.

In order to be successful, SEO should be in mind during the inception phase of a project. The most common mistake is launching a project and just turning to SEO after the implementation phase because of low rankings and traffic. This makes it more difficult to repair the problem and infuse SEO strategies making it more complicated for the SEO expert to come up with a solution.

How to Do It

Education

The organization should be able to understand correctly the numerous benefits of SEO. A good way is to train employees in different departments so they will have a good comprehension of the advantages of using SEO. This will make the SEO expert’s job easier by minimizing resistance to your strategies. This will also result to having more SEO advocates that ensure the implementation of effective SEO strategies in different departments of the organization.

Consistency

Consistency is the key when it comes to infusing SEO in the inception phase. The SEO team should be well-informed regarding all projects that are being created. This way, they can create a strategy that will ensure success in having high rankings and traffic. Everyone should know the different expectations and requirements with regard to SEO at each stage of the development of a project.

Support from Executives

This makes it easier to implement SEO tactics throughout the process. The SEO team should be given enough freedom to do what they need to in order to ensure the success of the project. An executive can make a difference by giving an order to all departments to involve the SEO team in all the stages of the project. Again, this minimizes resistance that makes it more difficult for the SEO team. The problem is that some departments consider this optional and they tend to skip this part to save time. Of course, this will result to problems later on during the implementation phase.

The Main Goal

In most organizations today, all projects should be approved by the SEO team to ensure that everything has been done before launching the project. However, the success rate is significantly higher if SEO is infused in the inception stage of the project and not just an afterthought. Basically, if you want to succeed, you have to make sure that SEO in infused in the inception, development and implementation phase of the project. This will ensure success, high rankings and high revenue once the project is launched. Of course, it is also very important to use the right strategies and not just infuse the most popular SEO practices at the moment.

The world has been very good to Google especially now that the Android platform is taking over the market share globally. It has reached 48% of the global market share which is something that really wasn’t expected of the Android. Trailing behind is the iPhone; it currently has 19% of the global market share.

Canalys Report

Canalys is an independent technology-focused analysis group that makes studies and researches about everything that is going on in the technology industry. Right now, an official report from Canalys shows that Google’s Android has first place with 48% of the market share. iPhone has 19% and is in second place while Samsung comes in third place with 16% market share. In fourth place is Nokia who previously held the second place. Sad to say, Windows Phone 7 is nowhere near getting 1% of the market share. Maybe Nokia and Windows Phone 7 need to start their SEO campaign immediately and start gathering customers online.

Regional Leads

Since Google holds the first place, it just goes to show that they are leading in the majority of regions as well. Canalys examined a total of 56 countries and in 35 of them, Google’s Android was at the top. The Asia Pacific has the most number of units shipped with 39.8 million of smartphone units shipped. Europe has 35 million smartphone units shipped while America has 32.9 million.

Nokia, who used to be the global leader in mobile phone, is now leading in just a few countries like India, Brazil, China and Russia. These places have a higher demand for cheaper and older models of mobile phones. Further, the team-up with Nokia and Microsoft may not be going well too. Both companies are not performing well in the mobile phone industry as of late.

Nokia and Microsoft may be lacking in their online marketing schemes which may be a reason why they are not getting enough market share. SEO techniques must be employed to get them back in the game. SEO techniques will surely help Nokia and Microsoft go up a notch in a few months.

Things Doesn’t Look Bad for iOS

There is no need to pity Apple’s iPhone as it has significantly grown too. In the past 6 months, iOS has a 19% growth. This growth was also helped by Nokia’s decline in the market share position. On the other hand, Apple should be doing something more to compete with the 44% growth and 379% sales increase of Google’s Android. Maybe they should also have some SEO campaigns in their marketing schemes too.

People nowadays are becoming more and more visual. Maybe because we are now living in a fast paced world and people do not have much time to sit and read a whole article or even stare at SEOs. People in this generation need visual products. A busy person will search for a word but can’t spare 5 minutes so what does he need? A picture that tells it all. And that is what Bing is giving its users. Visual search is the name of the game.

The Visual Search Project

What the heck is this? With the slogan “Why type when you can see it?”, it’s easy to have a hunch. Bing has developed the Visual Search wherein when users type in a keyword, the image appears. For example, when you type in “movies” in Bing, it will show pictures of a variety of movies. Try placing the cursor over the image, you will see the details: title, reviews, ratings, even its earnings at opening night can be seen all in one click.

Why?

Why was this developed? Well research says 20 % of the consumers can remember and process easier and faster the results when they are pictures when compared with text organic search results. So when you want to look for a movie but do not remember the title, this visual search will make it much easier. You will immediately remember the face of that cute actor or that pretty actress, but not the name. So studies are true when they say that pictures or images are retained easier by the brain than plain old texts.

Today, Bing has 88 available and updated visual searches. So if you are looking for books to read or books you have read and want to recommend it to your friends but you just can’t seem to remember that title, go on Bing and find the book cover you will never forget.

Need help with exercise? The Visual search helps you as well. If you search for Yoga Poses, you will find tabs where you can select which level of Yoga you are at or you want to be in. Do you want to focus on your abs or the thighs? You can select that at the visual search tab as well.

This Bing feature let’s you choose what you want to see and what you don’t want to see. This is definitely a big change in the SEO world, but of course, it is also a breakthrough for SEO.