Great content is where it all starts. You can have all the keywords in the world, but if your content is no good, people won’t stick around on your site and search engines won’t find your site valuable.

Write unique content

Unique content is important too. You need to provide content that has different information than what is on other sites and other Web pages.

Add new content all the time

Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant content on your site, which also improves your rankings.

Create a great keyword phrase

The first thing you should do when working on search engine optimization is find a great keyword phrase for that page. You shouldn’t try to optimize your entire site to one keyword phrase – instead focus on writing pages for specific keywords and phrases.

Choose a phrase that is popular, but not too popular

When trying to decide on a keyword phrase, you want to find one that is popular but not extremely popular. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the reality is that extremely popular keywords are very desirable and so very competitive. It’s better to try to optimize for keywords that you can rank higher. You’ll get more pageviews from a less popular keyword when you’re on the first or second page of the search engines, than from a super popular keyword that you only make it to page 50 of search engines.

Write an accessible site

Accessible HTML is accessible to both search engine spiders and screen readers. The more accessible you make your pages, the easier it will be for search engines to read and rank your pages.

Use the keyword phrase in your title tag

The title tag is one of the most important tags on your Web page. And placing your keyword phrase in the title tag, preferably at the beginning, is very important to get that phrase into the search engines. Plus, that puts your keyword phrase as the link in the search engine index.

Get a domain with your keyword phrase

Putting your keyword phrase in your domain name is a great way to optimize for that phrase.

Use the keyword phrase in your URL

Even if you can’t get your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URLs. Search engines read the URLs and assign value to the text they find there.

Use your keyword phrase a lot, but not too much

The ratio of your keywords to the rest of the text on your page is called the keyword density. It’s important to repeat your keywords in your document, but not too much. Keyword density should be between 3 and 7% for your primary keyword phrase and 1-2% for any secondary keywords or keyword phrases.

Use your keyword phrase in headlines

Headline tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) are a great place to use your keyword phrase and secondary keywords. Search engines recognize that headlines are more important than the surrounding text, and so assign greater value to keywords found there.

Use your keyword phrase in anchor text of links

Link text is another great place to put your keyword phrase. Links stand out on most Web pages, and so are given higher priority than surrounding text.

Ask other people for links to your page

A great way to get inbound links is to simply ask for them. But remember that excessive cross-linking can be viewed as spammy, so be careful about trading links or otherwise buying links on external sites.

Try to get your keyword phrase inside incoming links

Inbound links are a great way to improve your page rank. But you can’t really control how people link to your pages. Chances are they won’t use a phrase that has anything even remotely close to your keyword phrase. Remember that they are doing you a favor by linking to you. If it makes sense, you can ask them to change the text of the link, but be careful, as people can be very touchy, and you might just get your link removed.

Another way to get your keyword phrase in inbound links is to provide your customers with the link text ready-made.

Try to get links from reputable sites

Reputable sites that link to you will increase your reputation. After all, if a reputable site feels that your site is valuable enough to link to, that means that your page has more value. You can tell if a site is considered reputable both by how high it appears in search engines and it’s Google PageRank. Also, .edu sites have a higher reputation because they represent schools and universities.

Try to get links from similar sites

Inbound links from sites similar to your own are important as well. This indicates that your site does have content related to that topic. Plus, it indicates that your competition finds your site valuable, and that gives your site more credibility.

Try to get links from .edu, and .gov sites

Sites that are on .edu and .gov top-level domains have a large amount of credibility because they are very difficult to get. So if you can get the designers of those sites to link to you, that gives your site more credibility as well.

* Ideally, 2-3 words long
* Specific (keywords that are too broad or general will not reach users as effectively as keywords that are highly targeted)
* Directly related to the text in your ad
* Directly related to the page your ad links to (specified by the destination URL)

What keywords should I choose?

First, look at your website content and write down every word, word combination or phrase that describes each category of your business. This is the starting point for creating your keyword lists.

Include all brand and product names as well as plurals, synonyms and alternate spellings for each word or phrase. Capitalization does not matter. Take out keywords that are very generic, irrelevant, or obscure.

Then, group your keywords into close-knit themes and create a new ad group for each theme. Put your keywords into these new ad groups. For example, if your campaign is for digital cameras, you can group together mini digital cameras in one ad group and SLR digital cameras in another.

Try using negative keywords. Negative keywords prevent your ad from showing when a word or phrase you specify is part of a search term. If you specify the negative keyword -repair, for instance, your ad won’t show for search terms such as digital camera repair.

Want more keyword information and examples?
How can I tell if my keywords are working well?

Check your keyword performance regularly in the ‘Keyword’ tab of your account.

An ‘Eligible’ status means your keyword is eligible to trigger ads. Click on the icon in the status column to get more detail on your individual keyword performance.

Then, one of the most important metrics to assess is the clickthrough rate (CTR), as it shows the proportion of people who clicked on your ad after they saw it. Keywords that produce a relatively low CTR (e.g. less than 1% on the search network) can often be improved. Implementing the tips above will help improve your keyword performance. A higher CTR will help to increase your ad’s position on Google.

How do my keywords impact how much I pay?

If your keywords are well chosen and you follow the tips above, your ads may show in a higher position or at a lower cost.

AdWords bidding works on an auction-style system, with advertisers bidding for keywords that will trigger their ads to appear. As multiple advertisers will often bid on the same keywords, Google must determine which ads will show, and in what position on the page. To do this, it looks at both CPC bids and the quality of your keywords:

* Cost-per-click bids (Maximum CPCs) are the amount you are willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad
* Quality score relates to how relevant your ads and keywords are to searches on Google, which is determined by a number of things, including your CTR

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Types of breadcrumbs

There are three types of web breadcrumbs:

* Path: path breadcrumbs are dynamic and show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page.
* Location: location breadcrumbs are static and show where the page is located in the website hierarchy.
* Attribute: attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page.

An SEO is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided. A search marketer, by the way, is someone that ensures listing in both paid and unpaid listings.

Rand Fishkin:

SEO is the combination of tactics and strategies, including, but not limited to, optimization of information architecture, usability, content focus, audience targeting, design, development, keyword research, keyword placement, link building, social media marketing and any other online or offline branding/marketing elements that support the goal of receiving more traffic from search engines.

Neil Patel:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of understanding search engines and and using that knowledge to make a website rank high on search engines.

Andy Beal:

Making changes to the on-page and off-page relevance of a web page in an effort to increase the volume of quality traffic from the search engines.

Lee Odden:

Whatever can be searched on can be optimized. Optimization for bots improves content discovery, indexing and trust (algorithmically). Optimization for the user experience improves clickthroughs, conversions and community. People that called themselves SEOs in the past are really just online marketers leveraging a mix of technology, creative and fundamental marketing expertise to make sales online. They’re more marketing consultants then SEOs even though the “SEO” moniker persists.

Definitions of SEO will change as search channels and user behaviors change, so it’s a waste of time to try and create a standing definition – in my opinion anyway.

Michael Gray:

Search Engine Optimization: The process, of building, designing, creating, or updating a website, or it’s contents, with the goals of increasing visibility within search engines, and improved placement on search engine results pages, for a desired set of keywords terms or market segment.

Marcus Tandler:

The practice and methods of improving a website´s ranking in the organic results of searchengines.

Dax Herrera:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

The SEO’s mission is to organize the client’s information and make it robotically accessible and profitable.

Patrick Gavin:

The art and science of raising a web page’s natural search engine rankings. SEO is broken into two distinct buckets: on page factors and off page factors. On page factors including such items as: a website’s crawl-ability, internal linking set up, keyword selection and placement, meta tags, etc. Off page factors being building link popularity (inbound links) into your website. I believe link building to still be the single most important part of the SEO equation.

Aaron Wall:

SEO is the art and science of publishing and marketing content in a way that brings significant profitable and targeted traffic to your website. As the web has grown and Google has become more sophisticated, the field of SEO has been aggressively merging with traditional marketing, with emphasis on branding, framing, story telling, user engagement, viral marketing, and public relations.

Abraham Lincoln once said “With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.” That is where profitable sustainable SEO is headed.

Rebecca Kelley:

In my opinion, SEO is simply a facet of traditional marketing that focuses on the Internet medium. It involves implementing strategies and changes that make your website both search engine and user friendly — search engine friendly so that your site ranks well in search engine results for appropriate keyword searches, and user friendly so that you can provide a solid customer experience and yield high conversions.

Darren Rowse:

How do I define SEO? Good question – there are a number of thoughts that come to mind:

1. the right answer – SEO is something that helps a website to increase it’s ranking in a search engine.

2. my ‘historical’ answer (ie what I would have answered a few years ago) – SEO is about manipulating Search Engines in order to get them to send you as much traffic as possible.

3. the ‘in practice’ answer (ie how it impacts me these days) – SEO for me these days is a combination of:

• about knowing some of the general principles that help a site or page to rank well in search engines
• building the best quality site that I can with content that meets the needs of readers (and as a result attracts links from other sites).

I guess I’ve come to learn that when you build a high quality website that SEO tends to largely look after itself.

Ted Murphy

SEO is the art of optimizing an online presence in order to maximize relevant search engine traffic.

Stephan Spencer:

In our view (here at Netconcepts), SEO is the application of techniques that make websites and web content more findable for particular keywords being searched on by search engine users. While SEO is not a hard and exact science (there is definitely an art to it), SEO experts do seek to apply rigorous logic to reverse engineer the “black box” that is the search engines’ algorithms, in order to “deconstruct” (identify, quantify and qualify) the hundreds of factors which play a part in search engine ranking. From those factors, SEO practitioners derive methods to engineer webpages whereby search engines will favor their content in the rankings. Classically, SEO addressed more simplistic factors such as the “spiderability” of sites/pages and the tuning of technical factors found directly on the pages and within the website’s architecture (such as URL structure). However, as the search engines continue to evolve, advanced contemporary SEO practices increasingly need to include attention to off-page factors which address meta-data about the linked content. These include, among other things, more subtle and indirect strategies such as syndication, viral marketing, social media “optimization”, and community-building efforts.

Joost Devalk:

Search Engine Optimization is the practice of improving a sites’ content, code, server settings, internal structure and external linking, with the intent of making the site rank higher in the search engines. If done well, SEO is a part of each (online) marketing act, resulting in the improved visibility of the site.

Note that I do NOT think that a site should rank higher than “it’s meant to be” if there IS such a thing. In the end, SEO should make a site WORTHY of a higher ranking, not push it beyond what it’s worth. In practice, this means that if a site is sh*t, link building for it is neigh to impossible, so it won’t work, and we’ll tell people to improve their site. That means that in the end, an SEO is more off a total online marketer and site consultant than just someone pulling some tricks to quickly make a site rank better.

Quadzilla aka Seo Black Hat:

“ Web spam SEO is when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts so that their Web site shows up higher [in search results rankings] than it deserves to show up,” – Matt Cutts QuadsZilla

Todd Malicoat:

SEO is an evolving marketing school of thought born from the desire to rank high in search engines…not a process. It is the art and science of blending user experience, conversion, monetization, and search-ability for optimal web site performance. The irony with SEO is that the acronym is poor marketing created by a new generation of marketers – it should be WSO – Web Site Optimization.

Tamar Weinberg

SEO is a form of internet marketing that entails designing websites for search engine awareness and visibility as well as for user friendliness (especially with regards to relevancy). SEO is on-page optimization that focuses heavily on improving the site’s content with an emphasis on keywords in the site’s architecture, which includes link structure, navigation, title tags, and other on-page elements.
Thanks everyone for participating.

Chris Winfield:

SEO is a component (one of the most important) of Internet marketing. Good
SEO entails (a) giving a search engine spider what it wants (b) creating, or
optimizing, great content and (c) getting quality websites to link to your
website. Good SEO will result in targeted traffic and will drive sales.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Indexing:
Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving results:
When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

Google’s Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it’s because we’ve algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user’s query.

SEO Expert is competing with number of websites for the targetted keywords to get good positioning on the SERP. In order to get number one postion in SERP the quality of content must be unique. Another thing is to get good links from high page rank sites having minimum outbound links. we can get quality links from forum posting, blog posting and link exchage and one more important thing is to get links from relative category pages.so that the search engines can give good quality to the webpages.

SEO expert considers their SEO Best Practices for optimal ranking in the search engines.

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