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SEO techniques

Search engines are the biggest platform to grow your online business in which people are looking for? If your site wants to rank in top search engines, you need to follow the guidelines of search engines for better organic traffic and better SERP results.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO became the core fundamental part and essential for search engines to rank accordingly on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. Every website is to be optimized properly without violating webmaster guidelines. Because the webpage should follow the guidelines without any linkbait and provide value to visitors who are interested in the topic.

If you see the SEO strategy, the Search Engine Optimization is divided into 2 categories of optimization: On-Page and Offpage optimization. Where on-page is completely optimized within the site but off-page is a promotional part of website in various niche sites, social media, directories, guest posting, press release, and many more.

But in this article, we focus on On-page optimization concepts to get more visibility and get organic traffic in search engine results

1) Develop your site with good cms system

Actually, there are 100’s of content management systems in which some of them are open source and some are paid cms software. If you planned to develop your website with CMS then you can go for free open source cms software like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.

These are widely used open source content management to run their online business, personal blogs, without need to have much technical knowledge and also many developers contribute free add-ons to make your site more flexible. The software can be downloaded freely from their respective sites without registration and it is created by authorized community developers all around the world. Give a try on of the top content management system like WordPress / Drupal / Joomla and start your online business

2) Identify and choose SEO optimized theme

Once you have identified the type of content management system for your business or blog. It may be WordPress, Drupal or Joomla or any other cms as per your requirements. The cms offer number of optimized themes that suitable to your business, blogs or e-commerce sites, etc.

If you want your website to look great including content, images, sites so you need to have well-optimized quality themes. For example

WordPress is most widely used content management system all over the world. Many different community developers have contributed wonderful themes to the WordPress community for free in order to build strong online presence for both technical and non-technical persons.

In order to improve the quality of the site, many beautiful themes are available online and can be installed on your site within few seconds. The developers who have built these themes are well optimized for responsiveness including laptops, mobile, and tablet, etc.

3) Write Great Valuable Content for the Users

You may probably be thinking that what should I write on great content about? If you writing a blog post on a particular topic, the blog post should solve the problem of what people are looking for. Only it requires great understanding of the industry, creative ideas, basic knowledge on topic to write.

Keep researching on the topic:

Research for top bloggers related to your niche, understand the technique of writing quality content related to your niche. Just keep drafting content from various sources and make a unique design in writing to be presented to the readers.

Once you understand the subject, develop a strong and creative topic related to the niche where it helps the readers with meaningful results.

Find the purpose of your blog that you are writing high quality content related to the industry needs or not. The key concept is to make visitors attracted by the topics and build audience to your blog.

In order to attract visitors, the blog owner should be updated constantly content every few days to make look site fresh to the readers and search engines. Because there are no tricks to be played with search engines for increasing organic traffic, only way is to build your audience by giving valuable information to the visitors who are searching for.

Write great valuable content for the readers with well graphical images, so that the readers feel very interesting to read your entire story without closing immediately the site. Readers visualize more graphical images than the just content, so keep update images wherever related to your topic.

4) Interlink your web pages

Interlinking is one of the key factors for SEO ranking because it passes authority from one page to another page in order to keep webpage ranking higher in search engine results. Always interlinking between web pages is done by anchor text keyword wherever relevant in the content.

If you take an example of a blogging site, website owners link their pages using anchor text with long-tail keyword. The main reason it is done because search engine robots find crawlable links to make them busy in faster indexing and ranking in search results. Also it is helpful to the readers on which they find similar niche trending information

Interlinking should be done by both techniques like linking pages internally and externally using anchor text to make sure robots keep crawling your site frequently and boost your rankings.

If you see How much important interlinking is

1. Helps easily to navigate pages without confusion
2. To make search engines crawlable faster and indexes to help visitors find relevant information related to the keyword on what they are looking for?
3. Search engines frequently visit and update the latest information to the database based upon the keyword frequency used on site.
4. If more relevant links updated on-site, the more the search engines will take interest and reduces the bounce rate of your site by ranking in top of search engine results.

Note: Always check for broken links and over linking pages to meet the necessary SEO requirements as per search engine guidelines.

5) Image optimization

You may already be thinking why everybody is talking about image optimization and how it is important? Images are most often remember by the people than the text, visual images are stronger to remember because it increases memory capacity by 50%.

What I have explained just now is only about presence of images in real online world. Ok, now let's focus on image optimization how to be done

Key recommendations for Image optimization

1. Images always to be posted on-site using PNG format, because it takes small amount of memory space than compared to other types of image format. And also it makes loads faster web pages without waiting much time for the visitors
2. An image should be optimized with alternate text or called alt tag optimization using long-tail keyword smartly to rank better in search engines. Because it adds SEO value to the website and increases chances of finding exact images in image search engines.
3. Along with the alt tag make sure your image file name is optimized with a long-tail keyword. It would help users understand your image name while searching.
4. If you are using thumbnail images, make sure it takes less load time. If your thumbnail image dimensions are big, resize them using the image resizer tool and compress the images to load faster

6) Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the main issues of SEO so that the search engines penalize if the site has duplicate content on the page URL. Because search engines find difficult to show to the users which version is real for indexing and ranking.

Search engines always prefer to go one version of URL format either www or non-www version in order to avoid duplicate content. Not only this type of SEO URL issue we have, but there are also other types of URL page issues to be taken very seriously for easy SEO optimization.

Nowadays search engine algorithm became very intelligent to find spam SEO sites vs original sites. Not only search engines find these issues, it is also focusing on duplicate content within the site. Imagine, having similar content on different versions of URL will lead to problem in SEO growth and fall in rankings over a period of time.

Duplicate content can be fixed if the following measures taken at the initial stage

1. Fix dynamic URL type

Suppose if the site opens the same content with different versions of URL’s like

Original URL

yourwebsite.com/post

Duplicate URL’s

yourwebsite.com/?post=1

yourwebsite.com/?post=2

yourwebsite.com/?post=3

For this type of you can rewrite using .htaccess method,  use htaccess mod_rewrite tool to convert dynamic URL’s into static URL’s

2. www and non-www URLs

According to search engines like google, bing and yahoo, web pages that open with both www and non-www versions of URLs will be treated as duplicate pages. So that it would hurt SEO growth of website having both versions of URL’s

For example, the site yourwebsite.com and www.yourwebsite.com open the same webpage, you will be thinking as different. But in case of search engines it is similar to www and non-www URL versions.

To avoid the negative results in SEO, use the htaccess 301 redirect code

//Rewrite to www

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite.com[nc]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

The above code will help you solve the non-www and www versions of URL by redirecting all non-www to www version. Hence it is best practice to make site URL SEO friendly to search engines and the visitors

If you want to generate 301 redirect code use Htaccess redirect

3) Fix Canonical issues

If you are not able to solve www and non-www URL issues, canonical method is the alternative method to solve this issue. HOW?

It is very simple to use canonical tag, it specifies the original URL page to be used in given page. By implementing a canonical tag, search engines will take a single original page and indexes properly for the visitors. This avoids duplicate page issues on the website.

Let's say you have a site yourwebsite.com, but the site will open with www version called www.yourwebsite.com, then create a canonical URL http://www.yourwebsite.com by placing a small Html code in head section of your code

<link rel="canonical" href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com" />

The above code will help you solve the duplicate content using the canonical method, suppose you are running a PHP based site. Just copy the code below to solve SEO issues for PHP based site

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']; ?><?php echo parse_URL( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PHP_URL_PATH ); ?>" />

If you developed a website using the top content management system like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. Then you will have big issues with website, because the cms are built by large community of developers around the world to make website cleaner, faster and SEO friendly website, you can find huge variety of themes for business or blog, addons for optimizing website more efficiently, etc.

Hence it is completely open-source to use the cms for business, blogs or any other according to your needs. Click the below cms scripts and download for free

• Wordpress
• Drupal
• Joomla

7) Build High Quality backlinks

Backlink is the main signal or factor for the google search engine to rank the websites. Because backlinks tells that the links achieved from authority sites will have more value than non-authority sites. Once the crawler sees the links and shows positive signal to rank the webpage against the competitors.

To gain more visibility in SERP page, you must develop strategy and implement to build high quality backlinks for your website.

The  most common ways to build high quality links is to build great quality content, share on social media platforms, engage in forums and community sites, build profile links, do directory submission, bookmarking submission, fix broken links, outreach related niche bloggers, and much more.

To get competitor backlinks related to specific niche you can use ubersuggest or Ranksignals.com

8) Optimize Meta Tags on all the webpages

Meta tags are one of the most important parts of SEO website optimization because it is understood by all search engine and displays only title and description to the visitors on search engine results page

If Meta tags are implemented on a web page, it tells about the page to search engines on what the page about? Since meta tags are placed in header tag of Html code but not visible directly to the users.

The 2 important meta tags optimization is the title and description tag

i. Title

The title is the first SEO meta tag optimization to be done as per SEO technique, without proper meta title search engine will not have proper information about the site to be indexed.

The only impact on the title is the keyword phrase, it will be part of search engine rankings only if a long keyword placed in title but according to the webpage content. Because this is first appearance on search engine results page to be shown when a user types a keyword on google search box.

As you already know the title tag appears after the utf-8 meta tag which is present in the header section of the Html code. The minimum length of title tag is 70 characters according to latest updates of google 2016.

If your tag exceeds more than the length of the original length, the search engines will truncate the remaining length and will not appear on the search engine results page. In order to avoid this kind of mistake, please write a short and understandable title within 70 characters of length.

Keyword + Title = Optimized Meta title

<title>Please give title text here with long tail keyword</title>

ii. Meta Description

Meta tag description is the second most important element of on-page SEO, when meta description appears on results page it tells about the content of the page on what the page about?

The description doesn’t have much impact on SEO rankings,but when a correct keyword is placed in description tag it helps to increase maximum click-through rates(CTR) for that particular page.

When a user searches on google for information, the google search engine identifies all the relevant sites and displays on the search engine results page. If your sites match with the keyword, it will display to the visitors by highlighting the words on the results page of the description.

To create meta description you need to focus on 4 main things

1. Use a long keyword in the description
2. Give clear information
3. Add catchy words on description to get more visibility and clicks
4. Make sure description readable

Meta description length

According to the latest updates of google 2016, a  maximum length of the meta description should be around 280 characters. If the length of characters exceeds, the search engine will ignore and truncate the remaining text.

Syntax:

<meta name="description" content="Here is your webpage meta description that displays on search engine results page.">

iii. Meta Keyword Tag

Since the year 2014, Google has removed the meta keyword tag in algorithms that do not have any SEO impact on search engine rankings. Only it focuses on keywords in webpage content, so I am not going to discuss on meta keyword tag.

9) Create a Sitemap

What is a sitemap?

The sitemap contains list of pages of a particular website, sitemap will either be in XML format or Html format file to be submitted to search engines for faster indexing in easy way.

How to create a sitemap?

The easier way to create a sitemap is using sitemap generator tool. The tool automatically scans all the pages in your site and create an XML file to be submitted to search engines.

How to submit the XML sitemap to Google?

Here are below few steps to submit XML sitemap to google webmaster:

1. Login to google webmaster and select your website
2. Click the crawl on the left sidebar
3. Click the sitemap that appeared on crawl
4. Then, click on the top right side called add/test sitemap.
5. Give the path of a sitemap in the textbox.
6. Then click submit, and your sitemap has been submitted to google

10) Create a Robots File

Here there are two types of robots i.e robots txt file and robots meta tag

Robots txt file - It is text file name robots.txt, the purpose of this file is to tell the search engines which pages to index and which pages to block(means not be indexed). Robots txt file should be handled very carefully otherwise it will block the pages from indexing on search engines

Case1:

The below shown is a default robots.txt file

User-agent: *

Disallow:

Case2:

If you want to block all pages from indexing

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Case 3:

If you want an only particular page to block from search engines

User-agent: *

Disallow: /page

Case4:

If you want to block the entire folder from indexing on search engine

User-agent: *

Disallow: /folder

Robots meta tag:

Robots meta tag is another way of indexing pages or no indexing the pages to search engines.

It should be placed in the header section of other meta tags

How to create a robots meta tag?

The robots meta tag can be created by name attribute called robots and the content attributes. The content attributes majorly are index,noindex, follow, nofollow.

There are 4 combination types of meta tags can be created

The below tag explains search engines will index the page and follow the links in page frequently

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>

 

The below tag explains search engines will index the page and do not follow the links in page

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow”>

 

The below tag explains search engines will not index the page and follow the links in page

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>

 

The below tag explains, search engines will not index the page and no follow the links in page regularly

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

11) Submit a website to google webmaster

Every time you create a website or page with proper design, content, images and should go to publish online.

In order to index the pages, you need to submit your website or webpages to google, yahoo and bing webmasters. So that all your pages will be indexed properly and track the progress of pages

To submit your website to Google Webmaster, click the link below

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-URL?pli=1

To submit your website to Bing and Yahoo webmaster, click the link below

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url

Conclusion

For any niche search engine optimization is very important from finding keywords, building content, optimizing for SEO, generate backlinks and many more to bosst your site rankings. So in this we have updated 12 seo techniques which will help you site gain more visitors in the long run.