SEO Tutorial For Beginners 2015

What is SEO?

A simple definition of search engine optimisation in 2015 is that it is a technical and creative process to improve the visibility of a website in search engines, with the aim of driving more potential customers to it.

These free seo tips will help you create a successful seo friendly website yourself, based on my 15 years experience making websites rank in Google. If you need optimisation services – see my seo audit.

An Introduction

This is a beginner’s guide to effective white hat seo. I deliberately steer clear of techniques that might be ‘grey hat’, as what is grey today is often ‘black hat’ tomorrow, as far as Google is concerned.

No one page guide can explore this complex topic in full. What you’ll read here is how I approach the basics – and these are the basics – as far as I remember them. At least – these are answers to questions I had when I was starting out in this field. And things have changed since I started this company in 2006.

The ‘Rules’

Google insists webmasters adhere to their ‘rules’ and aims to reward sites with high quality content and remarkable ‘white hat’ web marketing techniques with high rankings. Conversely it also needs to penalise web sites that manage to rank in Google by breaking these rules.

These rules are not laws, only guidelines, for ranking in Google; laid down by Google. You should note that some methods of ranking in Google are, in fact, actually illegal. Hacking, for instance, is illegal.

You can choose to follow and abide by these rules, bend them or ignore them – all with different levels of success (and levels of retribution, from Google’s web spam team). White hats do it by the ‘rules’; black hats ignore the ‘rules’.

What you read in this article is perfectly within the laws and within the guidelines and will help you increase the traffic to your website through organic, or natural search engine results pages (SERPS).

While there are a lot of definitions of SEO (spelled Search engine optimisation in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, or search engine optimization in the United States and Canada) organic SEO in 2015 is mostly about getting free traffic from Google, the most popular search engine in the world (and the only game in town in the UK):

The guide you are reading is for the more technical minded.

Opportunity

The art of web seo is understanding how people search for things, and understanding what type of results Google wants to (or will) display to it’s users. It’s about putting a lot of things together to look for opportunity.

A good optimiser has an understanding of how search engines like Google generate their natural SERPS to satisfy users’ NAVIGATIONAL, INFORMATIONALand TRANSACTIONAL keyword queries.

A good search engine marketer has a good understanding of the short term and long term risks involved in optimising rankings in search engines, and an understanding of the type of content and sites Google (especially) WANTS to return in it’s natural SERPS.

The aim of any campaign is increased visibility in search engines.

There are rules to be followed or ignored, risks to be taken, gains to be made, and battles to be won or lost.

A Mountain View spokesman once called the search engine ‘kingmakers‘, and that’s no lie.

Ranking high in Google is VERY VALUABLE – it’s effectively ‘free advertising’ on the best advertising space in the world.

Traffic from Google natural listings is STILL the most valuable organic traffic to a website in the world, and it can make or break an online business.

The state of play STILL is that you can generate your own highly targeted leads, for FREE, just by improving your website and optimising your content to be as relevant as possible for a customer looking for your company, product or service.

As you can imagine, there’s a LOT of competition now for that free traffic – even from Google (!) in some niches.

The Process

The process can successfully practiced in a bedroom or a workplace, but it has traditionally involved mastering many skills as they arose including diverse marketing technologies including but not limited to:

• website design
• accessibility
• usability
• user experience
• website development
• php, html, css etc
• server management
• domain management
• copywriting
• spreadsheets
• back link analysis
• keyword research
• social media promotion
• software development
• analytics and data analysis
• information architecture
• looking at Google for hours on end

It takes a lot, in 2015, to rank on merit a page in Google in competitive niches, and the stick Google is hitting every webmaster with (at the moment, and for the foreseeable future) is the ‘QUALITY USER EXPERIENCE‘ stick.

If you expect to rank in Google in 2015, you’d better have a quality offering, not based entirely on manipulation, or old school tactics.

Is a visit to your site a good user experience? If not – beware MANUAL QUALITY RATERS and BEWARE the GOOGLE PANDA algorithm which is looking for signs of poor user experience and low quality content.

Google raising the ‘quality bar’ ensures a higher level of quality in online marketing in general (above the very low quality we’ve seen over the last years).

Success online involves HEAVY INVESTMENT in on page content, website architecture, usability, conversion to optimisation balance, and promotion.

If you don’t take that route, you’ll find yourself chased down by Google’s algorithms at some point in the coming year.

This ‘what is seo’ guide (and this entire website) is not about churn and burn type of Google seo (called webspam to Google).

What Is A Successful Strategy?

Get relevant. Get trusted. Get Popular.

It’s is no longer just about manipulation. It’s about adding quality and often utilitarian content to your website which meet a PURPOSE that delivers USER SATISFACTION.

If you are serious about getting more free traffic from search engines, get ready to invest time and effort into your website and online marketing.

Google wants to rank QUALITY documents in its results, and force those who want to rank high to invest in great content, or great service, that attracts editorial links from other reputable websites.

If you’re willing to add a lot of great content to your website, and create buzz about your company, Google will rank you high. If you try to manipulate Google, it will penalise you for a period of time, and often until you fix the offending issue – which we know can LAST YEARS.

Backlinks in general, for instance,  are STILL weighed FAR too positively by Google and they are manipulated to drive a site to the top positions – for a while. That’s why blackhats do it – and they have the business model to do it. It’s the easiest way to rank a site, still today. If you are a real business who intends to build a brand online – you can’t use black hat methods. Full stop.

Google Rankings Are In Constant Ever-Flux

It’s Google’s job to MAKE MANIPULATING SERPS HARD.

So – the people behind the algorithms keeps ‘moving the goalposts’, modifying the ‘rules’ and raising ‘quality standards’ for pages that compete for top ten rankings. In 2015 – we have ever-flux in the SERPS – and that seems to suit Google and keep everybody guessing.

Google is very secretive about its ‘secret sauce’ and offers sometimes helpful and sometimes vague advice – and some say offers misdirection – about how to get more from valuable traffic from Google.

Google is on record as saying the engine is intent on ‘frustrating’ search engine optimisers attempts to improve the amount of high quality traffic to a website – at least (but not limited to) – using low quality strategies classed as web spam.

At its core, Google search engine optimisation is about KEYWORDS and LINKS. It’s about RELEVANCE, REPUTATION and TRUST. It is about QUALITY OF CONTENT & VISITOR SATISFACTION. A Good USER EXPERIENCE is the end goal.

Relevance, Authority & Trust

Web page optimisation is about making a web page being relevant enough for a query, and being trusted enough to rank for it.

It’s about ranking for valuable keywords for the long term, on merit. You can play by ‘white hat’ rules laid down by Google, or you can choose to ignore those and go ‘black hat’ – a ‘spammer’. MOST seo tactics still work, for some time, on some level, depending on who’s doing them, and how the campaign is deployed.

Whichever route you take, know that if Google catches you trying to modify your rank using overtly obvious and manipulative methods, then they will class you a web spammer, and your site will be penalised (normally you will not rank high for important keywords).

These penalties can last years if not addressed, as some penalties expire and some do not – and Google wants you to clean up any violations.

Google does not want you to try and modify your rank. Critics would say Google would prefer you paid them to do that using Google Adwords.

The problem for Google is – ranking high in Google organic listings is a real social proof for a business, a way to avoid ppc costs and still, simply, the BEST WAY to drive REALLY VALUABLE traffic to a site.

It’s FREE, too, once you’ve met the always-increasing criteria it takes to rank top.

In 2015, you need to be aware that what works to improve your rank can also get you penalised (faster, and a lot more noticeably).

In particular, the Google web spam team is currently waging a pr war on sites that rely on unnatural links and other ‘manipulative’ tactics (and handing out severe penalties if it detects them) – and that’s on top of many algorithms already designed to look for other manipulative tactics (like keyword stuffing).

Google is making sure it takes longer to see results from black and white hat seo, and intent on ensuring a flux in it’s SERPS based largely on where the searcher is in the world at the time of the search, and where the business is located near to that searcher.

There are some things you cannot directly influence legitimately to improve your rankings, but there is plenty you CAN do to drive more Google traffic to a web page.

Ranking Factors

Google has HUNDREDS of ranking factors with signals that can change daily to determine how it works out where your page ranks in comparison to other competing pages.

You will not ever find them all. Many ranking factors are on page, on site and some are off page, or off site. Some are based on where you are, or what you have searched for before.

I’ve been in online marketing for 15 years. In that time, I’ve learned to focus on optimising elements in campaigns that offer the greatest return on investment of one’s labour.

Learn SEO Basics….

Here is few simple seo tips to begin with:

• If you are just starting out, don’t think you can fool Google about everything all the time. Google has VERY probably seen your tactics before. So, it’s best to keep your plan simple. GET RELEVANT. GET REPUTABLE. Aim for a good, satisfying visitor experience. If you are just starting out – you may as well learn how to do it within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines first. Make a decision, early, if you are going to follow Google’s guidelines, or not, and stick to it. Don’t be caught in the middle with an important project. Do not always follow the herd.
• If your aim is to deceive visitors from Google, in any way, Google is not your friend. Google is hardly your friend at any rate – but you don’t want it as your enemy. Google will send you lots of free traffic though if you manage to get to the top of search results, so perhaps they are not all that bad.
• A lot of optimisation techniques that are effective in boosting sites rankings in Google are against Google’s guidelines. For example: many links that may have once promoted you to the top of Google, may in fact today be hurting your site and it’s ability to rank high in Google. Keyword stuffing might be holding your page back…. You must be smart, and cautious, when it comes to building links to your site in a manner that Google *hopefully* won’t have too much trouble with in the FUTURE. Because they will punish you in the future.
• Don’t expect to rank number 1 in any niche for a competitive without a lot of investment, work. Don’t expect results overnight. Expecting too much too fast might get you in trouble with the spam team.
• You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing natural, or free listings. It’s common for the major search engines to find your website pretty easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so much easier if your website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content (via XML sitemaps or RSS for instance).
• To be listed and rank high in Google and other search engines, you really should consider and largely abide by search engine rules and official guidelines for inclusion. With experience, and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules can be bent, and which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be avoided.
• Google ranks websites (relevancy aside for a moment) by the number and quality of incoming links to a site from other websites (amongst hundreds of other metrics). Generally speaking, a link from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page the link points to. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Rankings are HUGELY affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page is on. BACKLINKS (links from other websites – trump every other signal.)
• I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with ORIGINAL COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t found before. It indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start (within a second, if your website isn’t penalised!). So – make sure each of your pages has enough text content you have written specifically for that page – and you won’t need to jump through hoops to get it ranking.
• If you have original quality content on a site, you also have a chance of generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is found on other websites, you will find it hard to get links, and it probably will not rank very well as Google favours diversity in it’s results. If you have decent original content on your site, you can then let authority websites – those with online business authority – know about it, and they might link to you – this is called a quality backlink.
• Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be ignored by search engines with the rel nofollow attribute.
• Search engines can also find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted any site to a search engine in the last 10 years – you probably don’t need to do that. If you have a new site I would immediately register it with Google Webmaster Tools these days.
• Google and Bing use a crawler (Googlebot and Bingbot) that spiders the web looking for new links to spider. These bots might find a link to your home page somewhere on the web and then crawl and index the pages of your site if all your pages are linked together (in almost any way). If your website has an xml sitemap, for instance, Google will use that to include that content in it’s index. An xml site map is INCLUSIVE, not EXCLUSIVE.  Google will crawl and index every single page on your site – even pages out with an xml sitemap.
• Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google – I think this depends on the quality of the incoming links. Sometimes your site will rank high for a while then disappears for months. A “honeymoon period” to give you a taste of Google traffic, no doubt.
• Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site – and this classification can have a DRASTIC affect on your rankings – it’s important for Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do you want to classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a domain holding page, or a small business website with a real purpose? Ensure you don’t confuse Google by being explicit with all the signals you can – to show on your website you are a real business, and your INTENT is genuine – and even more importantly today – FOCUSED ON SATISFYING A VISITOR.
• NOTE – If a page exists only to make money from Google’s free traffic – Google calls this spam. I go into this more, later in this guide.
• The transparency you provide on your website in text and links about who you are, what you do, and how you’re rated on the web or as a business is one way that Google could use (algorithmically and manually) to ‘rate’ your website. Note that Google has a HUGE army of quality raters and at some point they will be on your site if you get a lot of traffic from Google.
• To rank for specific keyword phrase searches, you generally need to have the keyword phrase or highly relevant words on your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) or in links pointing to your page/site.
• Ultimately what you need to do to compete is largely dependent on what the competition for the term you are targeting is doing. You’ll need to at least mirror how hard they are competing, if a better opportunity is hard to spot.
• As a result of other quality sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain amount ofreal PageRank that is shared with all the internal pages that make up your website that will in future help provide a signal to where this page ranks in the future.
• Yes, you need to build links to your site to acquire more PageRank, or Google ‘juice’ – or what we now call domain authority or trust. Google is a links based search engine – it does not quite understand ‘good’ or ‘quality’ content – but it does understand ‘popular’ content. It can also usually identify poor, or THIN CONTENT – and it penalises your site for that – or – at least – it takes away the traffic you once had with an algorithm change. Google doesn’t like calling actions the take a ‘penalty’ – it doesn’t look good. They blame your ranking drops on their engineers getting better at identifying quality content or links, or the inverse – low quality content and unnatural links. If they do take action your site for paid links – they call this a ‘Manual Action’ and you will get notified about it in Webmaster Tools if you sign up.
• Link building is not JUST a numbers game, though. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could be all you need to rank high in your niche. Of course, the more “trusted” links you build, the more trust Google will have in your site. It is evident you need MULTIPLE trusted links from MULTIPLE trusted websites to legitimately get the most from Google.
• Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with relevant, or at least natural looking, keywords in the text link – not, for instance, in blogrolls or site wide links. Try to ensure the links are not obviously “machine generated” e.g. site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from pages, that in turn, have a lot of links to them, and you will soon see benefits.
• Onsite, consider linking to your other pages by linking to them within text. I usually only do this when it is relevant – often, I’ll link to relevant pages when the keyword is in the title elements of both pages. I don’t really go in for auto-generating links at all. Google has penalised sites for using particular auto link plugins, for instance, so I avoid them.
• Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all search engines when you want to feature for specific key-terms. For example; “seo scotland” as opposed to http://www.hobo-web.co.uk or “click here“. Saying that – in 2015, Google is punishing manipulative anchor text very aggressively, so be sensible – and stick to brand links and plain url links that build authority with less risk. I rarely ever optimise for grammatically incorrect terms these days (especially links).
• I think the anchor text links in internal navigation is still valuable – but keep it natural. Google needs links to find and help categorise your pages. Don’t underestimate the value of a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for instance how many words Google counts in a link, but don’t overdo it. Too many links on a page could be seen as a poor user experience. Avoid lots of hidden links in your template navigation.
• Search engines like Google ‘spider’ or ‘crawl’ your entire site by following all the links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your pages. Google will crawl and index your pages, and within a few days normally, begin to return your pages in SERPS.
• After a while, Google will know about your pages, and keep the ones it deems ‘useful’ – pages with original content, or pages with a lot of links to them. The rest will be de-indexed. Be careful – too many low quality pages on your site will impact your overall site performance in Google. Google is on record talking about good and bad ratios of quality content to low quality content.
• Ideally you will have unique pages, with unique page titles and unique page descriptions if you deem to use the latter. Google does not seem to use the meta description when actually ranking your page for specific keyword searches if not relevant and unless you are careful if you might end up just giving spammers free original text for their site and not yours once they scrape your descriptions and put the text in main content on their site. I don’t worry about meta keywords these days as Google and Bing say they either ignore them or use them as spam signals.
• Google will take some time to analyse your entire site, analysing text content and links. This process is taking longer and longer these days but is ultimately determined by your domain authority / real PageRank as Google determines it.
• If you have a lot of duplicate low quality text already found by Googlebot on other websites it knows about, Google will ignore your page. If your site or page has spammy signals, Google will penalise it, sooner or later. If you have lots of these pages on your site – Google will ignore your efforts.
• You don’t need to keyword stuff your text and look dyslexic to beat the competition.
• You optimise a page for more traffic by increasing the frequency of the desired key phrase, related key terms, co-occurring keywords and synonyms in links, page titles and text content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density. Keyword stuffing is a tricky business, too, these days.
• I prefer to make sure I have as many UNIQUE relevant words on the page that make up as many relevant long tail queries as possible.
• If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too – but again, it depends on the site in question. Who you link to, or HOW you link to, REALLY DOES MATTER – I expect Google to use your linking practices as a potential means by which to classify your site. Affiliate sites for example don’t do well in Google these days without some good quality backlinks.
• Many search engine marketers think who you actually link out to (and who links to you) helps determine a topical community of sites in any field, or a hub of authority. Quite simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages, but I have never really seen any granular ranking benefit (for the page in question) from linking out.
• I’ve got by, by thinking external links to other sites should probably be on single pages deeper in your site architecture, with the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the higher pages in your site structure (the home page, your category pages). This is old school though – but it still gets me by. I don’t need to think you really need to worry about that in 2015.
• Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” – in Google’s opinion. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site, but again. I usually err on the safe side – I always aimed for massive diversity in my links – to make them look ‘more natural’. Honestly, I go for natural links in 2015 full stop.
• Google can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary” and a ‘poor user experience’.
• Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and whom you link to. These – and other factors – help ultimately determine where a page on your site ranks. To make it more confusing – the page that ranks on your site might not be the page you want to rank, or even the page that determines your rankings for this term. Once Google has worked out your domain authority – sometimes it seems that the most relevant page on your site Google HAS NO ISSUE with will rank.
• Google decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can help Google by linking to your important pages and ensuring at least one page is really well optimised amongst the rest of your pages for your desired key phrase. Always remember Google does not want to rank ‘thin’ pages in results – any page you want to rank – should have all the things Google is looking for. PS – That’s a lot these days!
• It is important you spread all that real ‘PageRank’ – or link equity – to your sales keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site pages, so Google does not ‘demote’ pages into oblivion –  or ‘supplemental results’ as we old timers knew them back in the day. Again – this is slightly old school – but it gets me by even today.
• Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and other important pages on your site.
• Focus on RELEVANCE first. Then, focus your marketing efforts and get REPUTABLE. This is the key to ranking ‘legitimately’ in Google in 2015.
• Every few months Google changes it’s algorithm to punish sloppy optimisation or industrial manipulation. Google Panda and Google Penguin are two such updates, but the important thing is to understand Google changes its algorithms constantly to control its listings pages (over 600 changes a year we are told).
• The art of rank modification is to rank without tripping these algorithms or getting flagged by a human reviewer – and that is tricky!

Welcome to the tightrope that is modern web optimisation.

Read on if you would like to learn how to seo….

Keyword Research is ESSENTIAL

The first step in any professional campaign is to do some keyword research and analysis.

Somebody asked me about this a simple white hat tactic and I think what is probably the simplest thing anyone can do that guarantees results.

The chart above (from last year) illustrates a reasonably valuable 4 word term I noticed a page I had didn’t rank high in Google for, but I thought probably should and could rank for, with this simple technique.

I thought it as simple as an example to illustrate an aspect of onpage seo, or ‘rank modification’, that’s white hat, 100% Google friendly and never, ever going to cause you a problem with Google. This ‘trick’ works with any keyword phrase, on any site, with obvious differing results based on availability of competing pages in SERPS, and availability of content on your site.

The keyword phrase I am testing rankings for isn’t ON the page, and I did NOT add the key phrase…. or in incoming links, or using any technical tricks like redirects or any hidden technique, but as you can see from the chart, rankings seem to be going in the right direction.

You can profit from it if you know a little about how Google works (or seems to work, in many observations, over years, excluding when Google throws you a bone on synonyms. You can’t ever be 100% certain you know how Google works on any level, unless it’s data showing your wrong, of course.)

What did I do to rank number 1 from nowhere for that key phrase?

I added one keyword to to the page in plain text, because adding the actual ‘keyword phrase’ itself would have made my text read a bit keyword stuffed for other variations of the main term. It gets interesting if you do that to a lot of pages, and a lot of keyword phrases. The important thing is keyword research – and knowing which unique keywords to add.

This illustrates a key to ‘relevance’ is…. a keyword. The right keyword.

Yes – plenty of other things can be happening at the same time. It’s hard to identify EXACTLY why Google ranks pages all the time…but you can COUNT on other things happening and just get on with what you can see works for you.

In a time of light optimisation, it’s useful to earn a few terms you SHOULD rank for in simple ways that leave others wondering how you got it.

Of course you can still keyword stuff a page, or still spam your link profile – but it is ‘light’ optimisation I am genuinely interested in testing on this site – how to get more with less – I think that’s the key to not tripping Google’s aggressive algorithms.

There are many tools on the web to help with basic keyword research (including the Google Keyword Planner tool and there are even more useful third party seo tools to help you do this).

You can use many keyword research tools to quickly identify opportunities to get more traffic to a page:

Google Analytics Keyword ‘Not Provided’

Google Analytics was the very best place to look at keyword opportunity for some (especially older) sites, but that all changed a few years back.

Google stopped telling us which keywords are sending traffic to our sites from the search engine back in October 2011, as part of privacy concerns for it’s users.

Google will now begin encrypting searches that people do by default, if they are logged into Google.com already through a secure connection. The change to SSL search also means that sites people visit after clicking on results at Google will no longer receive “referrer” data that reveals what those people searched for, except in the case of ads.

Google Analytics now instead displays – keyword “not provided“, instead.

In Google’s new system, referrer data will be blocked. This means site owners will begin to lose valuable data that they depend on, to understand how their sites are found through Google. They’ll still be able to tell that someone came from a Google search. They won’t, however, know what that search was. SearchEngineLand

You can still get some of this data if you sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (and you can combine this in Google Analytics) but the data even there is limited and often not entirely the most accurate. The keyword data can be useful though – and access to backlink data is essential these days.

If the website you are working on is an aged site – there’s probably a wealth of keyword data in Google Analytics:

This is another example of Google making ranking in organic listings HARDER – a change for ‘users’ that seems to have the most impact on ‘marketers’ outside of Google’s ecosystem – yes – search engine optimisers.

Now, consultants need to be page centric (abstract, I know), instead of just keyword centric when optimising a web page for Google. There are now plenty of third party tools that help when researching keywords but most of us miss the kind of keyword intelligence we used to have access to.

Proper keyword research is important because getting a site to the top of Google eventually comes down to your text content on a page and keywords in external & internal links. All together, Google uses these signals to determine where you rank if you rank at all.

There’s no magic bullet, to this.

At any one time, your site is probably feeling the influence of some sort of algorithmic filter (for example, Google Panda or Google Penguin) designed to keep spam sites under control and deliver relevant high quality results to human visitors.

One filter may be kicking in keeping a page down in the SERPS, while another filter is pushing another page up. You might have poor content but excellent incoming links, or vice versa. You might have very good content, but a very poor technical organisation of it.

Try and identify the reasons Google doesn’t ‘rate’ a particular page higher than the competition – the answer is usually on the page or in backlinks pointing to the page.

• Do you have too few inbound quality links?
• Do you have too many?
• Does your page lack descriptive keyword rich text?
• Are you keyword stuffing your text?
• Do you link out to irrelevant sites?
• Do you have too many advertisements above the fold?
• Do you have affiliate links on every page of your site, and text found on other websites?

Whatever they are, identify issues and fix them.

Get on the wrong side of Google and your site might well be flagged for MANUAL review – so optimise your site as if, one day, you will get that website review from a Google Web Spam reviewer.

The key to a successful campaign, I think, is persuading Google that your page is most relevant to any given search query. You do this by good unique keyword rich text content and getting “quality” links to that page. The latter is far easier to say these days than actually do!

Next time your developing a page, consider what looks spammy to you is probably spammy to Google. Ask yourself which pages on your site are really necessary. Which links are necessary? Which pages on the site are emphasised in the site architecture? Which pages would you ignore?

You can help a site along in any number of ways (including making sure your page titles and meta tags are unique) but be careful. Obvious evidence of ‘rank modifying’ is dangerous.

I prefer simple seo techniques, and ones that can be measured in some way. I have never just wanted to rank for competitive terms; I have always wanted to understand at least some of the reasons why a page ranked for these key phrases. I try to create a good user experience for for humans AND search engines. If you make high quality text content relevant and suitable for both these audiences, you’ll more than likely find success in organic listings and you might not ever need to get into the technical side of things, like redirects and search engine friendly urls.

To beat the competition in an industry where it’s difficult to attract quality links, you have to get more “technical” sometimes – and in some industries – you’ve traditionally needed to be 100% black hat to even get in the top 100 results of competitive, transactional searches.

There are no hard and fast rules to long term ranking success, other than developing quality websites with quality content and quality links pointing to it. The less domain authority you have, the more text you’re going to need. The aim is to build a satisfying website and build real authority!

You need to mix it up and learn from experience. Make mistakes and learn from them by observation. I’ve found getting penalised is a very good way to learn what not to do.

Remember there are exceptions to nearly every rule, and in an ever fluctuating landscape, and you probably have little chance determining exactly why you rank in search engines these days. I’ve been doing it for over 10 years and everyday I’m trying to better understand Google, to learn more and learn from others’ experiences.

It’s important not to obsess about granular ranking specifics that have little return on your investment, unless you really have the time to do so! THERE IS USUALLY SOMETHING MORE VALUABLE TO SPEND THAT TIME ON. That’s usually either good backlinks or great content.

Fundamentals

The fundamentals of successful optimisation while refined have not changed much over the years – although Google does seem a LOT better than it was at rewarding pages with some reputation signals and satisfying content / usability.

Google isn’t lying about rewarding legitimate effort – despite what some claim. If they were I would be a black hat full time. So would everybody else trying to rank in Google.

The majority of small to medium businesses do not need advanced strategies because their direct competition generally has not employed these tactics either.

Most strategies are pretty simple in construct.

I took a medium sized business to the top of Google recently for very competitive terms doing nothing but ensuring page titles where optimised, the home page text was re-written, one or two earned links from trusted sites.

This site was a couple of years old, a clean record in Google, and a couple of organic links already from trusted sites.

This domain had the authority and trust to rank for some valuable terms, and all we had to do was to make a few changes on site, improve the depth and focus of website content, monitor keyword performance and tweak.

There was a little duplicate content needing sorting out and a bit of canonicalisation of thin content to resolve, but none of the measures I implemented I’d call advanced.

A lot of businesses can get more converting visitors from Google simply by following basic principles and best practices:

1. always making sure that every page in the site links out to at least one other page in the site
2. link to your important pages often
3. link not only from your navigation, but from keyword rich text links in text content – keep this natural and for visitors
4. try to keep each page element and content unique as possible
5. build a site for visitors to get visitors and you just might convert some to actual sales too
6. create keyword considered content on the site people will link to
7. watch which sites you link to and from what pages, but do link out!
8. go and find some places on relatively trusted sites to try and get some anchor text rich inbound links
9. monitor trends, check stats
10. minimise duplicate or thin content
11. bend a rule or two without breaking them and you’ll probably be ok

…. once this is complete it’s time to … add more, and better content to your site and tell more people about it, if you want more Google love.

OK, so you might have to implement the odd 301, but again, it’s hardly advanced.

I’ve seen simple seo marketing techniques working for years.

You are better off doing simple stuff better and faster than worrying about some of the more ‘advanced’ techniques you read on some blogs I think – it’s more productive, cost effective for businesses and safer, for most.

Beware folk trying to bamboozle you with science. This isn’t a science when Google controls the ‘laws’ and changes them at will.

You see I have always thought that optimisation was about:

• looking at Google rankings all night long,
• keyword research
• observations about ranking performance of your own pages and that of others (though not in a controlled environment)
• putting relevant, co-ocurring words you want to rank for on pages
• putting words in links to pages you want to rank for
• understanding what you put in your title, that’s what you are going to rank best for
• getting links from other websites pointing to yours
• getting real quality links that will last from sites that are pretty trustworthy
• publishing lots and lots of content (did I say lots? I meant tons)
• focusing on the long tail of search!!!
• understanding it will take time to beat all this competition

I always expected to get a site demoted by:

• getting too many links with the same anchor text pointing to a page
• keyword stuffing a page
• trying to manipulate google too much on a site
• creating a “frustrating user experience”
• chasing the algorithm too much
• getting links I shouldn’t have
• buying links

Not that any of the above is automatically penalised all the time.

I was always of the mind I don’t need to understand the maths or science of Google, that much, to understand what Google engineers want.

The biggest challenge these days are to get really trusted sites to link to you, but the rewards are worth it.

To do it, you probably should be investing in some sort of marketable content, or compelling benefits for the linking party (that’s not just paying for links somebody else can pay more for). Buying links to improve rankings WORKS but it is probably THE most hated link building technique as far as the Google Webspam team is concerned.

I was very curious about about the science of optimisation I studied what I could but it left me a little unsatisfied. I learned building links, creating lots of decent contentand learning how to monitise that content better (whilst not breaking any major TOS of Google) would have been a more worthwhile use of my time.

Getting better and faster at doing all that would be nice too.

There’s many problems with blogs,too, including mine.

Misinformation is an obvious one. Rarely are your results conclusive or observations 100% accurate. Even if you think a theory holds water on some level. I try to update old posts with new information if I think the page is only valuable with accurate data.

Just remember most of what you read about how Google works from a third party is OPINION and just like in every other sphere of knowledge, ‘facts’ can change with a greater understanding over time or with a different perspective.

Chasing The Algorithm

There is no magic bullet and there are no secret formulas to achieve fast number 1 ranking in Google in any competitive niche WITHOUT spamming Google.

Legitimately earned high positions in search engines in 2015 takes a lot of hard work.

There are a few less talked about tricks and tactics that are deployed by some better than others to combat Google Panda, for instance, but there are no big secrets (no “white hat” secrets anyway). There is clever strategy, though, and creative solutions to be found to exploit opportunities uncovered by researching the niche. As soon as Google sees a strategy that gets results… it usually becomes ‘out with the guidelines’ and something you can be penalised for – so beware jumping on the latest fad.

The biggest advantage any one provider has over another is experience and resource. The knowledge of what doesn’t work and what will actually hurt your site is often more valuable than knowing what will give you a short lived boost. Getting to the top of Google is a relatively simple process. One that is constantly in change. Professional SEO is more a collection of skills, methods and techniques. It is more a way of doing things, than a one-size-fits all magic trick.

After over a decade practicing and deploying real campaigns, I’m still trying to get it down to it’s simplest , most cost effective processes. I think it’s about doing simple stuff right. From my experience, this realised time and time again. Good text, simple navigation structure, quality links. To be relevant and reputable takes time, effort and luck, just like anything else in the real world, and that is the way Google want it.

If a company is promising you guaranteed rankings, and has a magic bullet strategy, watch out. I’d check it didn’t contravene Google’s guidelines.

How long does it take to see results?

Some results can be gained within weeks and you need to expect some strategies to take months to see the benefit. Google WANTS these efforts to take time. Critics of the search engine giant would point to Google wanting fast effective rankings to be a feature of Googles own Adwords sponsored listings.

Optimisation is not a quick process, and a successful campaign can be judged on months if not years. Most successful, fast ranking website optimisation techniques end up finding their way into Google Webmaster Guidelines – so be wary.

It takes time to build quality, and it’s this quality that Google aims to reward.

It takes time to generate the data needed to begin to formulate a campaign, and time to deploy that campaign. Progress also depends on many factors

• How old is your site compared to the top 10 sites?
• How many back-links do you have compared to them?
• How is their quality of back-links compared to yours?
• What the history of people linking to you (what words have people been using to link to your site?)
• How good of a resource is your site?
• Can your site attract natural back-links (e.g. you have good content or a great service) or are you 100% relying on your agency for back-links (which is very risky in 2015)?
• How much unique content do you have?
• Do you have to pay everyone to link to you (which is risky), or do you have a “natural” reason why people might link to you?

Google wants to return quality pages in it’s organic listings, and it takes time to build this quality and for that quality to be recognised.

It takes time too to balance your content, generate quality backlinks and manage your disavowed links.

Google knows how valuable organic traffic is – and they want webmasters investing a LOT of effort in ranking pages.

Critics will point out the higher the cost of expert SEO, the better looking Adwords becomes, but Adwords will only get more expensive, too. At some point, if you want to compete online, your going to HAVE to build a quality website, with a unique offering to satisfy returning visitors – the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll start to see results.

If you start NOW, and are determined to build an online brand, a website rich in content with a satisfying user experience  – Google will reward you in organic listings.

ROI

Web optimisation, is a marketing channel just like any other and there are no guarantees of success in any, for what should be obvious reasons. There are no guarantees in Google Adwords either, except that costs to compete will go up, of course.

That’s why it is so attractive – but like all marketing – it is still a gamble.

At the moment, I don’t know you, your business, your website, it’s resources, your competition or your product. Even with all that knowledge, calculating ROI is extremely difficult because ultimately Google decides on who ranks where in it’s it’s results – sometimes that’s ranking better sites, and sometimes (often) it is ranking sites breaking the rules above yours.

Nothing is absolute in search. There are no guarantees – despite claims from some companies. What you make from this investment is dependant on many things, not least, how suited your website is to actually convert into the sales the extra visitors you get.

Every site is different.

Big Brand campaigns are far, far different from small business seo campaigns who don’t have any links to begin with, to give you but one example.

It’s certainly easier, if the brand in question has a lot of domain authority just waiting to be awoken – but of course that’s a generalisation as big brands have big brand competition too. It depends entirely on the quality of the site in question and the level and quality of the competition, but smaller businesses should probably look to own their niche, even if limited to their location, at first.

Local SEO is always a good place to start for small businesses.

There ARE some things that are evident, with a bit of experience on your side:

Page Title Tag Best Practice

<title>What Is The Best Title Tag For Google?</title>

The page title tag (or HTML Title Element) is arguably the most important on page ranking factor (with regards to web page optimisation). Keywords in page titles can HELP your pages rank higher in Google results pages (SERPS). The page title is also often used by Google as the title of a search snippet link in search engine results pages.

For me, a perfect title tag in Google is dependant on a number of factors and I will lay down a couple below but I have since expanded page title advice on another page (link below);

1. A page title that is highly relevant to the page it refers to will maximise it’s usability, search engine ranking performance and click through satisfaction rate. It will probably be displayed in a web browsers window title bar, and in clickable search snippet links used by Google, Bing & other search engines. The title element is the “crown” of a web page with important keyword phrase featuring AT LEAST ONCE within it.
2. Most modern search engines have traditionally placed a lot of importance in the words contained within this html element. A good page title is made up of keyword phrases of value and/or high search volumes.
3. The last time I looked Google displayed as many characters as it can fit into  “a block element that’s 512px wide and doesn’t exceed 1 line of text”. So – THERE BECAME NO AMOUNT OF CHARACTERS any optimiser could lay down as exact best practice to GUARANTEE a title will display, in full in Google, at least, as the search snippet title. Ultimately – only the characters and words you use will determine if your entire page title will be seen in a Google search snippet. Recently Google displayed 70 characters in a title – but that changed in 2011/2012.
4. If you want to ENSURE your FULL title tag shows in the desktop UK version of Google SERPS, stick to a shorter title of about 55 characters but that does not mean your title tag MUST end at 55 characters and remember your mobile visitors see a longer title (in the UK, in March 2015 at least). I have seen ‘up-to’ 69 characters (back in 2012) – but as I said – what you see displayed in SERPS depends on the characters you use. In 2015 – I just expect what Google displays to change – so I don’t obsess about what Google is doing in terms of display.
5. Google is all about ‘user experience’ and ‘visitor satisfaction’ in 2015 so it’s worth remembering that usability studies have shown that a good page title length is about seven or eight words long and fewer than 64 total characters. Longer titles are less scannable in bookmark lists, and might not display correctly in many browsers (and of course probably will be truncated in SERPS).
6. Google will INDEX perhaps 1000s of characters in a title… but I don’t think no-one knows exactly how many characters or words Google will actually count AS a TITLE when determining relevance for ranking purposes. It is a very hard thing to try to isolate accurately with all the testing and obfuscation Google uses to hide it’s ‘secret sauce’. I have had ranking success with longer titles – much longer titles. Google certainly reads ALL the words in your page title (unless you are spamming it silly, of course).
7. You can probably include up to 12 words that will be counted as part of a page title, and consider using your important keywords in the first 8 words. The rest of your page title will be counted as normal text on the page.
8. NOTE, in 2015, the html title element you choose for your page, may not be what Google chooses to include in your SERP snippet. The search snippet title and description is very much QUERY dependant these days. Google often chooses what itthinks is the most relevant title for your search snippet, and it can use information from your page, or in links to that page, to create a very different SERP snippet title.
9. When optimising a title, you are looking to rank for as many terms as possible, without keyword stuffing your title. Often, the best bet is to optimise for a particular phrase (or phrases) – and take a more long-tail approach. Note that too many page titles and not enough actual page text per page could lead to Google Panda or other ‘user experience’ performance issues. A highly relevant unique page title is no longer enough to float a page with thin content. Google cares WAY too much about the page text content these days to let a good title hold up a thin page on most sites.
10. Some page titles do better with a call to action – a call to action which reflects exactly a searcher’s intent (e.g. to learn something, or buy something, or hire something. Remember this is your hook in search engines, if Google chooses to use your page title in its search snippet, and there is a lot of competing pages out there in 2015.
11. The perfect title tag on a page is unique to other pages on the site. In light of Google Panda, an algorithm that looks for a ‘quality’ in sites, you REALLY need to make your page titles UNIQUE, and minimise any duplication, especially on larger sites.
12. I like to make sure my keywords feature as early as possible in a title tag but the important thing is to have important keywords and key phrases in your page title tag SOMEWHERE.
13. For me, when improved search engine visibility is more important than branding, the company name goes at the end of the tag, and I use a variety of dividers to separate as no one way performs best. If you have a recognisable brand – then there is an argument for putting this at the front of titles – although Google often will change your title dynamically – sometimes putting your brand at the front of your snippet link title itself.
14. Note that Google is pretty good these days at removing any special characters you have in your page title – and I would be wary of trying to make your title or Meta Description STAND OUT using special characters. That is not what Google wants, evidently, and they do give you a further chance to make your search snippet stand out with RICH SNIPPETS and SCHEMA markup.
15. I like to think I write titles for search engines AND humans.
16. Know that Google tweaks everything regularly – why not what the perfect title keys off? So MIX it up…
17. Don’t obsess. Natural is probably better, and will only get better as engines evolve. I optimise for key-phrases, rather than just keywords.
18. I prefer mixed case page titles as I find them more scannable than titles with ALL CAPS or all lowercase.
19. Generally speaking, the more domain trust/authority your SITE has in Google, the easier it is for a new page to rank for something. So bear that in mind. There is only so much you can do with your page titles – your websites rankings in Google are a LOT more to do with OFFSITE factors than ONSITE ones – negative and positive.
20. Click through rate is something that is likely measured by Google when ranking pages (Bing say they use it too, and they now power Yahoo), so it is really worth considering whether you are best optimising your page titles for click-through rate or optimising for more search engine rankings.
21. I would imagine keyword stuffing your page titles could be one area Google look at (although I see little evidence of it).
22. Remember….think ‘keyword phrase‘ rather than ‘keyword‘, ‘keyword‘ ,’keyword‘… think Long Tail.
23. Google will select the best title it wants for your search snippet – and it will take that information from multiple sources, NOT just your page title element. A small title is often appended with more information about the domain. Sometimes, if Google is confident in the BRAND name, it will replace it with that (often adding it to the beginning of your title with a colon, or sometimes appending the end of your snippet title with the actual domain address the page belongs to).

A Note About Title Tags;

When you write a page title, you have a chance right at the beginning of the page to tell Google (and other search engines) if this is a spam site or a quality site – such as – have you repeated the keyword 4 times or only once? I think title tags, like everything else, should probably be as simple as possible, with the keyword once and perhaps a related term if possible.

I always aim to keep my html page title elements things as simple, and looking as human-generated and unique, as possible.