Search engine optimization tips for beginners

Getting a website in top is a thing that every webmaster would love to achieve. Achieving top rankings for your favorable keywords is not a very difficult task but its hard to decide from where to start with and it may land you it totally different part of the globe if you doesn’t follow the webmaster guidelines set by major search engines for webmasters and search engines optimization experts or companies. In this article I am posting few search engine optimization tips for beginners but these tips are equally beneficial for any SEO professional.

1. Don’t purchase new domains: If you are trying to get your website ranked in engines and so far you don’t have any substantial success, then don’t try to go and try your luck in new domain. Reason here is that search engine give value to the age of the domain and hence it’s recommended to try figuring out things that may be hurting your website’s reputation over search engines. However there may be circumstances when you may need to start new domain under such situation using permanent redirect to your new domain is recommended to minimize the loss of traffic from search engines.

2. Do extensive keyword research: Spend good amount of time in keyword research and go in as much detail as you can while researching keywords. Don’t select keywords that can bring traffic but brainstorm keywords that can bring you sales. Over years of experience in search engine marketing I have seen that lots of keywords bring you traffic but there are couple of keywords that can bring business, revenue for you. Thus analyze your website traffic to shortlist the keywords that bring you business. Ranking at the top of search engines for these keywords make the actual difference.

3. Use different title and meta tags: Each page of your website needs to have unique title and meta description tags. Your title tag should contain important keywords included in the content of your web pages. One more important point to be taken care is that it’s the title tag of a webpage that will prompt any visitors to click your website at search engine result pages.

4. Don’t over optimize: Never optimize your website rather optimize for your targeted audience. This is one of the common instructions by all major search engines for webmasters.

5. Write Search engine friendly code: Make you website code search engine friendly by preventing excessive use of images, flash, java script menus or links. Use alt and title attributes and images and links. Validate your website HTML, XML and CSS.

6. Use webmaster tools: Evaluate your SEO campaign by using tools like google analytics, webmaster central, yahoo site explorer etc. These tools are very much helpful for webmasters in their SEO campaigns.

7. Get quality links: All of us know off-page optimization is very crucial part of any SEO campaign however only quality links count and contribute to your website’s PR and search engine rankings. Any off-page activity, be it link building, social media marketing, directory submission etc. take care of quality always.

Duplicate Content Penalty & Recovering from the penalization

All you you must have heard of this duplicate content penality before also. In every FAQ on SEO, Forum on SEO, Internet Marketing Forums, article and newsletter there is a regular repition of this topic. Just today as I came back from my SEO Marketing company, I logged in to my gmail account and I once again found an interesting email, here a webmaster is talking about how his site was penalized by google due to duplicate content. He accidentaly use some non search engine friendly wordpress template that caused more than 100 copies of index page of his site.

You can read more about this on the forum discussion goin at Web Pro World.

Selection of keywords

Keywords play an important role in the seo marketing campaign of a website be it organic search engine optimization or pay per click campaign. Until and unless you are using the right keywords you are wasting your efforts in organic SEO and both efforts and money in PPC campaigns. So keywords research or selection of keywords is very much important task of any search engine marketing campaign. Its not the search count of the keywords that will help you compile the list of keywords however there are certain more things that need to be taken care for shortlisting keywords i.e. keyword popularity, keyword ROI factor, keyword proximity etc. Also you should keep on changing your website keywords according your business requirements.

Once initial keyword research is done try to add other keywords around those keywords like synonyms, long trail keywords, singular or plural combination etc. Targets these keywords carefully in your page meta and title tags and in your ad copies. With the progress of your camapign you would be able to further shortlist converting keywords by analyzing your web stats.

Reason for traffic drops

Google official blog made an interesting post on the possible reasons fro drop in the traffic of a website. There were some interesting things mentioned which most search engine marketing experts may think be the cause for traffic dip.

First issue discussed is duplicate content, the post says unless the duplicate content is being used to manipulate search engine rankings its not be flagged as violation of google terms and webmaster guidelines. Using affiliate links be the reason for traffic drop was also completely denied.

However interesting post was made regarding the site publishing malicious software code, code injection and reported attack website message. If your website contain such malicious code then be prepared for a sudden and huge dip in your website traffic. But no need to worry you may grt rid of such situation easily by following instructions at google webmaster central