7 Tips, How to Keep SEO on Track in 2012

It’s just few days before we have entered into a new year 2012. Many of us find our self re-evaluating our performance throughout many of life’s facets, to continually yearn to better ourselves. We all have to a moment and re-evaluate what we’re doing to continually achieve within organic search visibility.

Now it’s time to look at your overall SEO strategy, from time to time; this is a perfect time to slow down and see if you’re still on track for SEO success. Always any long- standing effort in life deserves an evaluation from time to time. It’s very important to continually compare progress to past date to assess improvement.

I think, this New Year will provide you great time to review year over year data to bring you SEO success, without their rigors of seasonality and other factors that can mere short term analysis. Beyond assessing number and percentages you should also access overall strategy assess where SEO is going and adjust accordingly.

Review SEO Campaign:

In last year you would have spent your time in building ‘cookery special’ page for a site. But when you go back and take a look; you will see that we have added link, page, content snippet etc…

For Example: When you take a big picture, it will have, multiple links to the same page on a given site page over-usage of keywords, or even worse lack of intended keyword focus on site page. While we’re busy monitoring the day to day worries of ranking, traffic, etc…

Now it’s time to review our SEO strategy and ensure that we stay on the track correctly. Below seven tips will help you with it.

1. Revisiting & KPI:

Revisit the mission of the company/site as well as the KPI’s for the site. We should know where we want to go inside the site, only then we can stick on the track.

2. Review Annotations in Google:

It you’re extremely organized and have notated all changes and implemented dates for SEO initiatives, then you don’t have to go through email for hours.

3. Utilize Tools:

Have you ever gone wild in last year with non-branded keyword anchor text and have you forgotten about branded linking? No problem from this New Year begin utilizing tool such as ‘open site explorer’ and review your over all anchor text count from this year.

4. Top Key Words:

Keep on reviewing Google web master, tools and assess the keywords and their variations found on your site. This helps to provide a holistic view of what Google understand about your site content representation.

5. Internal Page Links may give Surprise:

Stay with Google webmaster tools and review your most heavily linked internal pages. You might be surprised to know that you have unknowingly added certain page link across the site in navigation etc… at last year and now they may be more important than other key site pages in our site

6. Ranking:

Review your targeted keywords, the intended pages for which you want to rank for, and the pages that actually rank for the terms. That is if it does continue to rank, in your site.

Ensure that if you’ve added additional content, whether it’s text or images, that it still helps to support the keyword theme of the page. Have you added internal links into the copy whose anchor text may be too similar to the respective page’s keyword theme, confusing search engines?  Avoid it.

7.W3C Validation:

Run a W3C validation code and check is it still clean as well as check with page load test to access any page elements dragging down load time. Because complete last year designers/developers would have made continues changes to the sites.

Summary:

This quick spot check of your SEO strategy ensures that SEO domination in this New Year. Now, hopefully you’ve cleared your head off any SEO insecurities and you have more time to get back to your other New Year resolutions!

How to Get Citations for Local SEO

As more people are starting to find out, local SEO is taking over the world of search engines: over 20 percent of all Google searches are for a local business. More important, that number doubles when users are searching with mobile devices. This trend is showing itself in SERPs. Gone are the days of merely receiving 10 organic listings. Now, SERPs are infiltrated by images, videos and other media. But most important, local listings are now more than ever making their way into SERPs. Newly-captured data for Google searches show that users are tending to use Google Places listings over organic listings. Just look at the heat map below: It is obvious that local businesses need to get involved in Google Places in order to survive and thrive online. But Google does not make this terribly easy. The first step is to launch a Google Places page. You cannot get ranked in local listings without one. The next step is getting citations, which are essentially what links are for organic listings. To this, the more locations your business information is listed, the better off you are for search engines to find your business and place you in their local rankings. So, how do you get these citations, you ask?

1) Join the Aggregators Search engines are not the only means to find local businesses. There are also tons of local directories that people use. It’d be a good idea to set up a page on each. It will not only help your local SEO, but it will also establish multiple new ways for people to find you. Here are some of the bigger names that you’d do well to get involved with: Superpages, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angie’s List, City Search, Urban Spoon, Open Table, Trip Advisor, Merchant Circle, Yahoo! Local, Dex Knows, Express Update USA, Judy’s Book, Kudzo, Yellow Bot, Insider Pages, Localeze, Shop City.

2) Search for Your Competitors You know the old saying: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Well, that’s the case with local SEO. You should definitely search for your competitors to see what they’re doing. For local SEO, you’re trying to see where they’re listed.

3) Social Media and Blogs With social cues becoming a huge factor in determining rankings, you should have your complete contact information on each of your social networks, i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. As well, local bloggers usually have a local businesses page that lists places in the area. Searching with your city name + blog is a good place to start. You can narrow this field down by adding your industry: city name + food blogs. Also, be sure to check out blogs.com.

4) Local Directories and Newspapers Remember newspapers? They still exist. In fact, some people even use them instead of search engines. Thus, if you’re using local SEO, these are resources you must tap. If you are hosting an event or something of that nature, let your local paper know so they can list it.

If you have any comments or questions, please let us know. Click to contact an Online Marketing, SEO Los Angeles.