You have tried your best! And yet, you realize that it is not still showing up in the top five Google search results for relevant keywords. Where is it lacking? There is no need to scratch your head, too much. If you inspect the sit closely, you will see it for yourself. If my guess is not wrong, what it lacks is quality links.

Let me explain to you why your SEO exercise remains incomplete sans link building. Here are a few basic things to keep in mind for you to grasp the vital role a well-planned link building program can play in your site’s visibility, popularity and credibility:

• For your site to be noticed by your prospects, they must come across it not only through search engine optimization but also through link building. When they visit some other industry specific site, they should invariably notice a link pointing to yours (termed backlink).
• Backlinks are important components of a comprehensive search engine optimization plan drawn keeping in mind the interests of any small business. A link back to a trustworthy online resource from your webpage or vice versa is perceived by the search engines as a vote of trust by other top sites for yours.
• It goes without saying that the more authoritative and trusted the sites linking up to yours, and the more relevant is the context and content of that link is to that of your webpage, obviously the more that particular backlink will help your site climb up the search results’ ladder.
• Quality links to and fro means a lot not only for search engines but also for readers, in effect, your target audience, thus increasing the chances of conversion, and boosting your business margins. There is a directly proportionate co-relation between the number of quality inbound links and webpage rank. In essence, hyperlinks greatly enhance your site’s SEO friendliness and conversion rate.

On one hand, the change has badly hurt many E-Commerce sites and online businesses. On the other hand, it harbors the potential to improve overall search quality over time apart from evolving a better information retrieval mechanism. But that’s something for the future!

The Panda enigma

For now, it has impacted the search spectrum. Here’s how!

• It simultaneously hurts SEO-reliant websites that have so far successfully leveraged certain vulnerabilities of Google, even as it raises the entry to organic search elements as a marketing channel.
• Panda algorithm change has literally left many sites starved for traffic that has dramatically depleted in its wake.
• On the plus side, the development has brought out the best of determined SEOs experts making efforts to find solutions and answers to the Panda riddle.

In my own assessment, it has improved search quality for some queries, while for a few others, led to an odd retrograde. So it has been a mixed bag, if you ask me? Does anyone out there remember the Vince update? Well, brand bias now appears to be back, and in a big way…

While brands tend to gain from authority signals, Vince, to put it in simpler terms, was technically not a ‘brand bias’, per se; rather a ‘weighting to authority metrics’ for the head terms, within which brands naturally gained the most. This particular aspect is also crucial in the context of Panda.

There is a valid reason to lean on brands when it comes to relevance in search on the web; actually much of what we are witnessing is the ‘real world’ lining up, so to say, with the internet. Big business names and brands rule, both on and off the web, though many would argue that it wasn’t always true! Well, there was a phase when the Web alluded to a level playing field. May be, that’s changing, or that probably is vision of Google for local search?

So, how to solve the Panda riddle and protect a site from complete SEO disaster? That’s what we are going to consider…

A section of them wrongly believe that each marketing campaign, by its very definition, has a specific start, and, a logical end point. That’s not the case…

Well, we shall try to see how E-commerce businesses can transform Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing into an ongoing cycle. Unfortunately, in my experience, many people fall for wrong advices and leave out the gamut of ‘analysis’ and ‘refinement’ which is extremely vital.

Measure and analyze the results of a campaign

It is critical that you meticulously measure and analyze the results of a marketing initiative undertaken by you, and check exactly how your business site or blog is performing over a period of time.

You might, for instance, be able to attract good traffic volume, but not succeed when it comes to converting or monetizing on the same. What does this imply? It probably indicates your website is not properly ‘optimized to convert”.

So how really to make this happen! In my opinion, you just need to take a few simple steps and that help you understand where visitors across the Web arrive from and what they did while they were at your site. There are ways of knowing this with tools and techniques readily available.

Why do you need a customized plan of action for SEO?

• A generic SEO process may not fit one and all. By understanding the profile of your site visitors and target audience, we can provide you with a plan of action. It will aim at refining your marketing campaign cycle before it you run it again.
• Again, this is an ongoing process. Each time it’s refined and repeated, you add that much more value to your content by squeezing a bit more focused traffic out of it. Obviously, this is going to increase your conversion rate gradually and steadily.
• There is no point in chasing dramatic results that will only confuse search engines. Instead, the cumulative effect of small marketing iterations will have a greater impact. They will ultimately fetch you higher revenue and increased profit margins.

In the next post, shall be discussing a few of the techniques just to give you an idea of the whole process.

• One of the key features of schema.org is its inherent simplicity. It incorporates schemas for more than 100 categories like movies, popular music, TV soap operas, travel, products, places, organizations etc. The partnering search sites are going to work together with the broader web community to expand the categories. They see this as a step forward to simplify things for webmasters and more valuable for consumers to arrive at the right search results.
• On-page markup allows search engine systems to grasp the data webpages and provide more accurate results. They use on-page markup in various ways—for instance, Google utilizes it for creating rich snippets in relevant search results. You can expect usage of more data in more ways over time. Also since publicly accessible from your pages, other compatible organizations may find different new ways to use it as well.
• Instead of having webmasters opt for competing formats, they have now gone for a single format. This will ensure consistency. microdata strikes a better balance between the simplicity of microformats and the extensibility of RDFa, so the engines have gone with it. If you have marked up the content for rich snippets making use of microformats/ microdata/ RDFa, you are already tuned to the process. schema.org functions the same way, employing the microdata markup format plus a vocabulary shared by the top search engines.
• The search engines will still support the current rich snippets markup formats with microformats or RDFa. Though it is perfectly fine to make use of the new schema.org markup or existing microformats/ RDFa markup, avoid mixing the formats on the same webpage together. This may ‘confuse’ their parsers. It is advisable to test the webpages with markup to ensure that search engines can parse the data properly. The rich snippets testing tool can be used for this.
• It is important to know how schema.org relates to Facebook Open Graph that does serves its purpose well, though it doesn’t offer detailed data that search engines require for enhancing the overall user experience. A single webpage may include several components, and may refer to one or more elements.schema.org gives another option for providing additional detail about specific entities on the webpage even if the content for Facebook Open Graph is marked up by you. Each bit of data can easily be represented or denoted as a schema.org type for a better understanding of your content.

Hello Matt, a recent article of Danny Sullivan suggests that Google uses Twitter and Facebook links as a ranking signal. Can you confirm this? Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? –WebSEOAnalytics

• Create clear and concise copy. The copy should be clear, concise and absolutely to the point. Apart from being free of jargon, it must be recent relevant, and timely.
• The title must be eye catching or attention grabbing, or else it won’t encourage your audience to click through to the page. Sub-titles add substance to the copy and make it reader-friendly, as they can grasp the key points in one glance.
• Link baiting can be achieved through new, innovative tools that are useful to the readers. A basic feature like checklist can prove to be handy for visitor, making them to link to your site. Even a ‘tool review’ feature can work well, as it creates a buzz, and helps generate incoming links.
• Grab the reader’s interest with debates around a controversy. A controversy is bound to spark interest among the people. Any issue currently in spotlight can be used to initiate a discussion and thus gaining exposure.
• If you have an informed comment to make, webmasters are quite likely to link back. From an SEO’s angle, stirring up heated exchanges, debates and discussions will prove to be effective link bait.
• Enjoy the process of content creation. Last but not the least, the key is to enjoy the entire process of content creation based on research, one-to-one interviews, research, analysis, and fieldwork, if required. Once you manage to do that, you will get a due reward for all your efforts in the form of quality links.

The ideas above sure will help your site climb the search engine success ladder fast, boost its online visibility and ultimately, make your business a success!

The best part of good link bait content is that it’s generally well supported by search engines that want to serve quality content. And as you would agree, the more relevant links your site has, the higher it should be ranked in the search. All the best!

This is where SEO analysts come into play. They study your existing site structure. They do proper research and then take appropriate measures to make sure that your site is able to attract prospective customers. They help you draw all the inherent benefits of a well defined search engine optimization (SEO) process.

I shall provide you with useful pointers that will serve as key parameters while selecting SEO agency to do the job for you.

• Check the SEO expert’s track record. Ask for examples or samples of work done earlier, Look for previous success stories that will make you feel confident.
• If possible, seek feedback from the clients the expert has earlier worked with to check credentials.
• Enquire about the kind of results the expert expects to see, and also in roughly what timeframe. You may ask about the parameters or yardsticks to measure success.
• Discuss with the SEO experts to understand the strategy and timeline for its implementation. This can help you set realistic targets. Of course, you must also be practical in your approach and not get overambitious.

It is equally vital to avoid wrongful or ill-informed SEO techniques. If you do not refrain from them, the unethical practice will cause an irreversible potential damage to your site’s credibility. In this context, the choice of a competent SEO expert is extremely important. In the upcoming post, I shall discuss other aspects to consider while selecting SEO experts.

Title: As you would agree, it is among the most important on-page keyword elements. The page title preferably should employ the key terms or bits of phrases as the introductory terms. It has been established that the practice can play a significant role in improving overall site rankings.

Title Tag: Add your select keyword/s right to the front of the title tag. This will make sure that search engine spiders can know what a particular webpage is about. The guesswork will thus be out, and a clear idea will emerge about its contents. Do not make use of the precisely same or similar looking title tag on each site page. Instead try to make each title tag for different pages on your website look unique.

Now we shall take a look at some of the most recommended practices to write title tags:•

• Choose a title tag, which depicts the webpage content correctly in a correct manner.
• Create a unique title tag, as mentioned above, for each of your site pages to assist a search engine follow how they are different from each other.
• Use your brand or site name at the end of title tag, wherever possible. This will lead to enhanced brand awareness.
• Avoid stuffing title tag with unnecessary keywords.• Use only relevant keyword or phrases in title tags.
• Make use of short, albeit succinctly descriptive titles. Remember, search engines can show only a limited or permissible number of characters of your title.

There are few other key aspects to keep in mind for creating search friendly HTML head tags and meta description tags.

Here is your checklist!

As part of the consultancy, a quality ‘search engine optimizer’ is expected to provide:

• Comprehensive review of your site structure, layout, or navigation
• A complete study of content and its search engine friendliness
• Proper technical advice on a plan for holistic site development
• A fool-proof exercise: for example, use of JavaScript, precise hosting, relevant redirects and error pages, if any
• User-friendly as well as search engine friendly copy.
• A holistic content development plan
• An end-to-end management of your business development campaign on the Web
• Perfect keyword research
• Other SEO maintenance tasks
• In-house training

The most important thing while looking for an SEO expert is reliability. The task must be conducted in a professional and ethical manner. Needless to say, for any optimization exercise to be successful, it must be based on a thorough knowledge and expertise that is relevant to specific markets and geographies.

Generally speaking, the most appropriate time to consult an expert is while you are planning to redesign a site, or are contemplating a new website launch. By choosing the launch or redesign phase to initiate SEO, duplication of work is saved. It also minimizes errors since the experts can work on a fresh set of pages instead of wasting their energy on poorly designed pages. Overhauling these pages in itself can be a cumbersome task.

On the other hand, by opting for SEO during redesign or new launch of a site, you can ensure that it is so conceptualized, structured and designed, as to be absolutely search engine friendly. Starting right from the scratch is advisable. Of course, a competent SEO expert can certainly assist enhance an existing site, as well.

The need to hire an SEO expert You might be under an impression that you are well familiar and conversant with most SEO techniques, but that may not actually be the case.

There are several nuances of search engine optimization that you still may not be aware of even at this stage.It may also be the case that you are not being able to make the most out of all the essential ingredients of SEO owing to lack of time and energy.

Worse, if you try to effect needless optimization changes on your own, you may cause damage to your site structure and brand reputation. This is why many smart smaller companies and even bigger brands decide to hire an SEO expert. The questions to be asked are:

• Are you one of the smart market players who already use SEO or are you implementing SEO in-house?
• Is your ‘budget’ SEO delivering the results you desire?
• Are you missing out on new business opportunities to your competitors because of not following correct search engine optimization techniques?

Answer the questions above and you will realize why it is important to approach a responsible and credible SEO expert.

A correct SEO approach allows to:

1. Enhance your website’s search engine rankings
2. Bring targeted traffic to your site
3. Keep users engaged
4. Prompt them to revisit your site, which is dynamic
5. Converts regular visitors into potential customers
6. Brings more business and improves profit margins

This is how a search engine optimization expert can help your website and your business a great deal. If you are looking to improve your website’s performance, you should not delay hiring an SEO expert. In fact, the earlier the better! This is a wise decision, which can greatly enhance your site.

Of course, there is no need to worry on this count, since you have arrived at the correct platform. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and reap the SEO rewards…