Seo title tag

The first and most important part of your on-page SEO is the title tag (<title></title>). Many people who outsource or create a site in a WYSIWYG editor completely forget about the last of the meta tags that still gives some quality ranking love from search engines.

The benefits of using optimized title tags are three fold:

A user searching for your keyword will see your site's link highlighted in the search engines if your page's title is the same as the phrase they searched for. This drastically increases click through and can even give you more traffic than those who rank above you if their title tags are not optimized.
Increase your rankings on the search engines.
Help the engines distinguish between pages that might look similar.
higher clickthrough rates
Search engine optimization isn't just about showing up number one on search engines. Rather, it's about getting the all the traffic that you deserve from the search engines. If you rank #6 for "free hats" and you and your competitors forget to include that in the page's title tag, chances are, the person doing the search won't see much difference between your site and the others.

However, if you were to change your website's title text to target your most important keyword phrase "free hats", then when someone completes the search for "free hats", they'd see your site show up in bold. This technique will greatly increase the user's desire to view your site first, as your site looks much more relevant and targeted.

Better rankings
All too often, people believe that the title tag is a place to list the business and domain name of the website. This is wrong and is wasting one of the easiest ways you can tell the search engines what the a page is about and how they should categorize it. While humans might not notice the title tag, search engines certainly do.

Use this opportunity to choose the most important keyword that you want to go after and get the free ranking boost that so many websites are missing out on. If you still want to include your domain or name of the company, do it after your keyword, followed by a dash (e.g. "free hats - hatsemporium.com") to show that your keyword is the most important.

Help the engines distinguish your pages
It's not easy being a search engine. They crawl the web day and night, taking the information from the web and trying to categorize it in a useful manner so that users can find what they're looking for. Make their job easier. Post clearly what the topic of each page is, using title tags, and help the search engine to distinguish one page from another.

You may have two pages that are quite similar and it may require a little thought to point out how they different. Don't make the search engines figure out for themselves because they might make a mistake. Instead, make the decision for them. Spell the differences out for them and help your rankings in the process. This is just one strategy in avoiding the duplicate content penalty, which we'll be getting into greater depth later.

What is the pagerank?

Diagnosing a site's health
While any link is a good link, not all links are created equal. Here are a few of the key factors that go into deciding how healthy a site is, and in turn, how powerful a link from them will be for your SEO needs.

What is the pagerank?

What's the PageRank of the page that is linking to you? What are the PageRanks of some of its subpages that link to other sites? Install the Google Toolbar to find out. While some websites may have very high PageRanks for their homepage, the other pages on their site may have a much lower PageRank. Pay attention to the specific page that will be linking to you when considering how good a site's PageRank actually is.

Cache status

Does the site have an up-to-date entry inside of Google's cache? You can check by searching Google with the command "cache:example.com". A site that doesn't have an up-to-date cache is often a red flag that there is something wrong with a search engine's ability to crawl that site.

Link popularity

How many entries does the site have? What is its link popularity? Use Marketleap's Link Popularity Checker to get some quick and dirty facts about a site's web presence.

Number of outbound links

Does their links page already have a ton of links on it? The more links they have, the less link love your site will receive. Also, are there a lot of sponsored links to unrelated sites like sites about gambling, pharmacies, or adult content? These can also devalue a site's ability to pass on link value.

Age of site

How long has a site been registered for? Usually, it's best to get links from sites that have been around for more than two years, as search engines tend to be a little less trusting of brand new domains. You can check how long a website has been around by going to the WaybackMachine and seeing when the earliest entry for the domain was.

Targeting sites

Targeting sites

If you want to rank well for a specific keyword, especially a competitive keyword, you can go about it the old-fashioned way and try to get links from anyone you can and slowly move up the rankings ladder. Or, you can use these high-powered techniques to quickly gain authority in the eyes of Google.

Research your competitors, and get a link from the top 100 sites that link to them.
Search Google for your keywords, and do your best to secure links from those sites in the top 100 for your keywords.
Get links from your competitors!

Copy your competitors

When you do a search for your rival's website, competitor.com, you'll find out the most authoritative sites that mention your competitor. Visit these sites and decide if it would be possible for you to get a link from those site's. If it's a review site, it may be as easy as sending a free product for review to the owner. If it's a forum or wiki, it may be just as easy as adding your link.

Don't do this all at once! Make a note of all the sites you would like to get a link from, and slowly acquire links over an extended amount of time. There is no set time period, but try to spread it over at least a 6 month period.

Searching for seo

Often, the best way of finding a solid place to get links from is as simple as going over to Google and typing in your exact keyword. You may think this is crazy and that there's no way you'd be able to get a link from someone who is ranking well for your desired keyword, but you'd be surprised just how many website owners care nothing for SEO and will be more than happy to link to your site (as long as your site is valuable to their visitors).

Obviously, the higher a site ranks for the keyword, the better it is to get a link from them. And if you can somehow pull it off, getting a link from their page, the one that's ranking well on Google for that keyword, would be priceless.

Get a link from competitors

Get a link from a competitor using your nicest greeting and biggest smile! Many competitors will be up for a link exchange, but if you have some unique pieces of content that your competitors don't, you may be able to get one of those precious one-way links!

Researching competitors

The internet is a great place for someone to make their fortune, but the secret is out. It is now unlikely that you will be able to get to the top of the search engines without first clawing your way through a crowd of competitors. The trick to making this journey easier to educate yourself on your competitors and taking advantage of any opportunities you uncover.

Known competitors

If your website isn't a unique idea, you probably already know of a couple other companies that are doing what you're doing. For example, if you are starting a web design company, you can do a quick Google search and see that there are easily over a million sites, but that doesn't mean it's impossible for you to rank well. If you refine the search down to the city you live in, the number of sites is a great deal smaller and from there you can begin to develop a strategy. Write down your top competitors, and let's further research how you're going to beat them.

Who ranks well for your keywords?

Do a Google search for your most desired keywords, and pay attention to who is showing up in the top 10 results for each. Is there one company that is dominating the search listings? Are there certain sites that seem to rank well for one topic, but poorly for others? On your competitor list, make a note next to the companies that are the strongest. Just by attempting to compete with the big boys, you will find you will get a great deal of search engine traffic that you never had before.

What is the pagerank and alexa rank?

What PageRanks do your competitors homepage have? If your site is a PageRank 1 and your competitors' are a PageRank 9, there's no way in hell you're going to be ranking above them in the foreseeable future. However, if you're a PageRank 4 and they're a PageRank 6, with a little dedication, you'll be able to chip away at that gap and eventually pass them with a long-term plan.

Alexa ranks are a completely different beast. A site may rank 100,000, and yours may rank 800,000, but your site may very well receive more traffic that the other does. This is because Alexa gathers data from users who have decided to install the Alexa toolbar on their browser. So, if a site has a group of Alexa users that happen to frequent their site, their site will be artificially inflated. If the Alexa rank is in the top 100,000 there is a fair amount of data gathered and you can be more confident in Alexa's results.

How many links do they have?

Now that you know which of your competitors are strongest, you need to find out how they got so strong. Do a Google search for the website's name (make sure you do the search in the form "domain.com" and not just "domain," to eliminate a lot of false results). The results will show a rough number of how many links your competitor has. If it's a huge number, sit down, take a breath, and let's see how you're going to compete.

You can also use the link: command (search Google using the form "link: domain.com") and the link popularity checker to see how big a site is on the engines. None of these tools are exact, but if you use a few sources, you'll have a pretty good idea of a competitor's web presence.

decide to fight or flight
Now that you've seen some rough estimates of the strength of your key competitors, it's time to take a real look at the work ahead of you. Do you have a chance to compete with the big boys? Are there no big boys and all you need are just a few links to overpower your rivals with?

Consider the data and think about whether you're OK working long hours to slowly work your way up to your competitors, or if you'd rather do SEO as an afterthought and just continue to have fun making your website. You might also decide that you've chosen the wrong industry and start looking for a new industry to compete in!

If you want to run, then come back when you've got a new idea. However, if you're ready to fight, read on!

Aanchor Text

Simply getting links from many other websites is not enough for your website to rank well in the search engines. The quality of your anchor text will play a huge factor in ranking your pages for specific keywords, especially competitive ones.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text refers to the words that make up a link; they are the words that turn your mouse cursor into a finger-pointing hand. For example, in the sentence, "I really like to go to this store," "this store" is anchor text for the link.

Why is anchor text important?

Search engines gather data by traveling around the web via links, jumping from page to page. Links are the lifeblood of a search engine and are used as key indicators for identifying the topics of the pages they're about to go to. If 100 sites link to a site with the link "Texas Architect" or similar words, the search engine can be fairly confident that the site is about an architect in Texas.

Targeted keywords

If you want a page to rank for a keyword that is particularly difficult, be sure to focus on getting the keyword in your anchor text. Many newbies will request links to the page they're trying to boost and forget about the anchor text. While getting links to the page is most certainly going to help, you should try to get at least part of your keyword into the anchor text whenever you get the chance.

Varying anchor text slightly

Imagine this scenario: you know which keyword you want to target, and you're starting to get links with the desired keyword. That's great, but you should be careful about getting too many links that look exactly the same. If you have 99% of the links that are pointing to your page with "Rocky Mountain Oysters," that will send up a red flag at Google that these links probably are not normal links. This is bad! You don't want to make Google suspicious.

Instead, when you request other people to link to your page, ask for variations of that keyword, such as: "Rocky Mountain Oyster", "Alternative Oysters," "Rocky Mountain Festivals," "Rocky Mountain Foods," and so on. It is because people have exploited anchor text in the past that you have to be careful about the way you do it today.

Keywords and url alignment

When getting all of these links with the desired anchor text, make sure that you're linking to the correct page, as a very common mistake to simply link to the homepage (www.example.com) instead of the page that should be getting the link (www.example.com/rocky-mountains/oysters.php).

Seo Internal Linking Structure

The honest fact is, if company owners knew how important that the internal linking structure of a site was to a site's performance on the search engines, they'd have multiple dedicated staff working just to make sure they had it optimized 100%. This topic is a little advanced, but it's helpful to break the inner linking structure down into three parts:

Page depth

Quantity of Internal Links

Quality of Internal Links

page depth

Page depth refers to the number of required clicks to get to a page from the homepage. Pages that are available in one click are deemed more important than those that are nearly hidden and require more than 3 clicks to reach. It might seem a little strange, but if you can visualize your website in a tree graph, you will easily notice why certain pages are performing poorly in the search engines.

By organizing your site in this format, you can see which pages are getting a lot of page depth love and which are hurting. If you have a lot of worthless pages and few important product pages, you might take this opportunity to restructure your site.

quantity of internal links

This point is simple; the more internal links you have that point to a certain page, the more important search engines believe that page to be. A common page that ranks well on almost every site is the homepage. This point will continue to be true for many years because nearly every webmaster programs their site so that every page has a link back to the homepage.

So how do make your other pages benefit from this? Does that mean you should have every page on your site include a link to EVERY SINGLE PAGE in your site? No. That's an obvious red flag to search engines, and you'll be seen as a spammer if your site has a couple of paragraphs and then 500 links to every other page on your site.

A better strategy would to have a "Top Products" section that includes a link to pages you want to receive the most link love. Another strategy is to have a link for each of the major areas of your site. This will help give those areas a lot of link love, and in turn, they'll be able to get more link love to the pages contained within them.

quality of internal links

Just including a bunch of internal links to an important page is not enough; they also need to be high quality links. For your most important pages, make sure the links they receive have as many of the following criterion as possible:

Anchor Text - If you're targeting a certain keyword(or keywords) make sure the internal links have the keyword in the anchor text. Also, bonus points for using slightly altered anchor text throughout your site.

Link Position - The higher a link occurs in the HTML, the better. If you link to "cowboy hats" at the top of the page, but "sombreros" towards the bottom of the page, search engines are going to view the link to "cowboy hats" as more valuable than the link to "sombreros."

Link Zone - The best scenario for link love is to link from one page to a highly-related page. The closer the subjects of each are in topic, the higher the amount of link love that will be transferred. For example, it is better to link form a page about "cowboy boots" to a page about "cowboy hats" than it is to link from a page about "tacos" to a page about "cowboy hats." This doesn't mean you shouldn't include links on pages that are different, but just keep in mind that the link love will not be as strong as it could be.

Seo Keyword Use

So you've researched which keywords you want to target, but just putting the keywords in your <title> and <h1> tags is not enough. If you stop there, you're not going to be able to cover all the bases or pull in as much search traffic as you could. When doing on-page optimization for your selected keywords, there are three things to take into consideration:\

Keywords Density - How many times is your keyword mentioned on your site? If it's too much, you'll look like a spammer; if it's too little, you won't look like a relevant match and the search engines won't consider your site.
Keyword Variation - Altering versions of your keywords will help you capture hidden search engine traffic.
Similar Keywords - These are closely related topics to your keywords that will aide the search engines in correctly categorizing your traffic.
keyword density
Although some SEOs will talk about aiming for an exact proportion (e.g. the number of times your keyword appears divided by the total number of words on the page), it's a little too much work for something that will take care of itself as long as you know how to write well! Use your keyword frequently on your site, but not so much that it makes the page look weird or a sentence sound awkward. If you just use the keyword once at the top of the page and then reference the keyword as "it", for the rest of the article, you'll definitely be using it too little.

If you want some numbers, you should use your keyword at least three times on the page. This does not include keyword variations.

keyword variations
You may have found a couple of high traffic keywords using a keyword research tool, but those estimates often group similar keywords, alternate spellings, and plurals into a single word. Valuable traffic is hidden when using those tools. This hidden traffic lies in all the subtle variations of your keyword that someone may search for.

Plurals - The easiest way to optimize your site is to include the plural version of your keyword at least a couple of times on your page. Nearly every keyword can do this (instead of "free hat", try "free hats").
Misspellings - Although it may make your site look a little unprofessional, including a very common misspelling of your keywrod is one of the easiest ways to rank #1 for that exact spelling and get some free traffic. This is one of the fun things to experiment with after you've optimized the rest of your site.
Acronyms - If your keyword is an acronym like SEO, write out the words completely (Search Engine Optimization) so that you can target those people who do not know the acronym.
similar keywords
If you're making a page to target "big hats," consider changing up the adjective "big" to its synonyms, like "huge," "giant," "large," "humongous," or "oversized." You can also use the names of specific words that relate to "big hats," like "cowboy hat" and "sombrero." By using this tactic, you give yourself a chance to rank for those similar keywords, plus you let the search engines know more about your page and what it's about. The more a search engine knows about your page, the better off you're going to be!

seo header and bold tags

Although the internet has changed a great deal in the last ten years, one thing that has remained status quo is the way that webmasters designate topics and things of importance. Topics of a page are often set with header tags <h1> though <h6>, while important items are put in bold to make sure that the user noticed them. However, not just the user notices these attention-grabbing tags. Search engines also use these as primary indicators of what a page is about and what content its creator thought was most important.

header tags - <h1> through <h6>

Header tags are a great way to help boost your search engine rankings. If you're creating a page about "free hats" and would like to rank for it, there's nothing shady at all about including a nice big <h1>Free Hats</h1> at the top of the page to make sure your users and the search engines know what your page's subject is. However, as with other search engine strategies, it is important not to stuff too many keywords into these tags. A good rule of thumb is to include no more than 3 or 4 <h1> tags per page, and always have at least a paragraph or two of text between your header tags.

A page that consists entirely of header tags looks pretty spammy to search engines, and it isn't very useful to your visitors.

bold, italic, and emphasis

When you've used up your quota of header tags on the page, don't stress out. There are still plenty of tools to target your keywords with. When mentioning your keywords throughout the page, it's helpful to put them into italics, bold, or emphasis (<em>) to make sure the search engines know that these words are important.

Often people use a lot of flash animations and CSS <span> tags to format text, but search engines don't have an easy way of determining either of these. Why make the search engines work harder than they need to? Use these basic HTML tags and help yourself (and the engines) out!

Keyword Research

keyword research

Before you can start optimizing your site for the search engines, you must first know which terms you want to target. A good start would be to choose 3 or 4 keywords you would like your website to rank well for. With these keywords in your mind you can then set a goal to rank in the top 10 results on Google for each of them (we refer to Google because if you can rank well there, you'll rank well on the other search engines). These keywords can be either broad or specific, but you'll want to study our list of pros and cons of each before choosing.

broad keywords

A broad keyword is one that many people search for, because they may only have a vague idea of what they're looking for. Broad keywords tend to be very short and aren't very specific (e.g. "shoes" or "sports"). These keywords are difficult to rank #1 for because so many other websites might have an article or two that mention shoes. However, if you can rank well for a broad keyword, you will be receiving a great deal of traffic.

Summary: Hard to rank for, but worth it in the long run. We recommend that beginners only choose a broad keyword if their industries are not very competitive.

specific keywords

A specific keyword is something that contains many adjectives or words that make the search very targeted. The people doing these types of searches know exactly what they want (e.g. "used black high heel shoes"). These keywords are much less competitive and are easier to rank for on search engines. The downside is that they receive a great deal less volume of searches per month. In terms of traffic, you will need to have several #1 rankings for specific keywords to equal one #1 ranking broad keyword.

Summary: Easier to rank for and it's highly targeted traffic. The only downside is that the number of visitors you will receive is relatively low.

unique or branded keywords

These are the words that are specific to only your company. They are one of the most easiest ways to get traffic. However, some companies will release a new product, with a unique name, and then forget to optimize for that keyword on their website. Their SEO savvy competitors can then pick up the slack and take over the top rankings for these terms. If you have a popular brand or product, make sure that you have optimized for these freebie keywords.

keyword research tools

Keyword research tools are 2 parts voodoo magic and 1 part hard statistic. This is partly due to Google not releasing actual numbers and partly due to overeager SEO Tool developers trying to sell their products. Because there is such a sizable uncertainty in all keyword research tools, it is best to use as many different sources as you can,. Even with multiple sources, you should only take the information you gather as a recommendation, rather than a fact.

Yahoo has been releasing their keyword search information for years, and many tools are based off of this specific data. We've collected a wide variety of helpful tools that will give you a general idea of which keywords you should target when making and optimizing your websites.

picking a short list

To put the optimizing tactics that we teach to good use, we recommend that you try to target no more than 2 or 3 keyword phrases per page. A common mistake by many SEO beginners is to stuff 500 different keywords on one page and wait for the #1 rankings to roll in. That might have worked 10 years ago, but the algorithms that search engines use these days are much more sophisticated and are not tricked by this. That's why it's best to start small, and be concise with the keywords that you choose. New sites in particular will find it nearly impossible to rank well for many keyword phrases upon first starting out.

search engine optimization (seo) for beginners

what seo is

Search Engine Optimization refers to the collection of techniques and practices that allow a site to get more traffic from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). SEO can be divided into two main areas: off-page SEO (work that takes place separate from the website) and on-page SEO (website changes to make your website rank better). This tutorial will cover both areas in detail! Remember, a website is not fully optimized for search engines unless it employs both on and off-page SEO.

what seo is not

SEO is not purchasing the number #1 sponsored link through Google Adwords and proclaiming that you have a #1 ranking on Google. Purchasing paid placements on search engines is a type of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and is not covered in this tutorial.

SEO is not ranking #1 for your company's name. If you're reading this tutorial, you probably already know that ranking for popular terms is darn near impossible, but specific terms, such as a company name, is a freebie. The search engines usually are smart enough to award you that rank by default (unless you are being penalized).

who uses seo

If a website is currently ranked #10 on Google for the search phrase, "how to make egg rolls," but wants to rise to #1, this websites needs to consider SEO. Because search engines have become more and more popular on the web, nearly anyone trying to get seen on the web can benefit from a little SEO loving.

SEO Techniques Summary

We have covered almost all major concepts related to Search Engine Optimization. Now you are familiar with most frequently used SEO related terminologies as well.

You have learnt how to optimize keywords, title, alt, metatags, anchor, and other text from the viewpoint of SEO. You also have learnt the importance of having good content in your website. In the Miscellaneous Techniques chapter, we have suggested you other important points which will help you optimize your website.

In a nutshell, we can have the following points as the ethical strategies for achieving optimal ranking in the search engines:

• All pages must conform to W3C standards.
• Keyword density is never abusive.
• Always include: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and urllist.txt.
• Keywords are prominent in the Title, Metatags, and Headings.
• ALT tags and Title tags are not forgotten.
• Nomenclature is fundamental to being indexed.

SEO - Miscellaneous Techniques

There are various other tips related to SEO. We have not categorized them into any special category and hence, putting these in miscellaneous category. Go through these tips one by one.

To-Don't List

• Don't keep hidden text on your webpages.
• Don't create alternate image spamming by putting wrong keywords.
• Don't use meta tags stuffing.
• Don't use frames and flash on your site.
• Don't exchange your links with black listed sites.
• Don't try to fool your site visitors by using misspelled keyword.
• Don't send spam emails to thousands of email IDs.
• Don't use too much graphics on your site.
• Don't create too many doorway pages.
• Don't try to create duplicate content of pages.
• Don't submit your website many times in a single search engine.
• Don't use sub-directory depth more than 1-2.
• Don't create too many dynamic pages. Try to convert them into static pages.
• Don't bloat your pages with code.
• Don't nest your pages.

To-Do List

There are various other tips which can help you to optimize your website for many search engines.

• Create logs of pages and each page should however contain a minimum of about 200 visible words of text to maximize relevance with Google.
• Create a Sitemap, Help, FAQ, About Us, Link to Us, Copyright, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy pages on mandatory basis.
• Create a homepage link to each and every webpage and provide easy navigation through all the pages.
• Pay attention to your dynamic page URLs. Google can crawl and index dynamic pages as long as you don't have more than 2 parameters in the URL.
• Check your complete site for broken links. Broken links will reduce your other pages rank as well.

Mobile SEO Techniques

Millions of users these days access the web using smartphones running on Android, iOS, or Windows. Hence, it has become imperative that websites adapt themselves to this changing environment and make suitable changes in their website design to attract more viewership.

The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. The version that is not mobile-friendly requires the user to pinch or zoom in order to read the content. Users find this a frustrating experience and are likely to abandon the site. In contrast, a mobile-friendly version is readable and immediately usable.

A recent Google update makes it mandatory that a website should be mobile-friendly to be effective on Mobile Search Engines. Note that a website that is not mobile-friendly will not have any impact on regular search engines either.

In this chapter, we will see how to make a website mobile-friendly in order to ensure the visitors who access the website from mobile devices have an optimized experience.

What is Mobile SEO?

Mobile Search Engine Optimization is the process of designing a website to make it suitable for viewing on mobile devices of different screen sizes having low bandwidth. Apart from following all the SEO rules which are applicable to a desktop website, we need to take additional care while designing a website for mobile devices. A website is mobile friendly if it has the following attributes −

• A good mobile website has a responsive design which performs well on desktops as well as mobile devices. It not only reduces the maintenance of the website but also makes the content consistent for the search engines.
• The contents of a good mobile website are easy to read on a mobile device without having to zoom the screen. It has appropriate fonts, colors, and layouts.
• It is easy to navigate through a good mobile website on a small screen. It provides links and buttons that can be easily maneuvered using a finger.
• A good mobile website is lightweight such that it takes less bandwidth and time to load on mobile networks.
• The Home Page of a mobile website plays the most important role in connecting users to the content they are looking for. Therefore, good mobile websites make sure the most important links are displayed on the Home Page so that they get enough visibility.

The ranking of a website depends heavily on how user friendly it is. You can follow the guidelines given below to design a great mobile-friendly website.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile

If your site is already optimized for search engines, then it should not be too difficult to optimize it for mobile devices. First, let us understand what it takes to go mobile. We can categorize the steps into three broad categories −

Step 1 − Select a Mobile Configuration

Step 2 − Inform Search Engines

Step 3 − Avoid Common Mistakes

Select a Mobile Configuration

There are three different mobile configurations that you can choose from −

Step 1 − Responsive Web Design

Step 2 − Dynamic Serving

Step 3 − Separate URLs

Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Google recommends responsive design, however it supports all three configurations. The following table shows how the mobile configuration affects your URL and HTML code −

Mobile Configuration	URL	HTML
Responsive Web Design	Stays the same	Stays the same
Dynamic Serving	Stays the same	Different HTMLs
Separate URLs	Different URLs	Different HTMLs

Responsive Web Design

Google recommends responsive web design become it is the simplest mobile configuration and very easy to implement. It serves the same HTML code on the same URL, however it adjusts the display based on the screen size of the mobile device.

Dynamic Serving

Dynamic serving is a type of mobile configuration where the URL of your website remains unchanged, but it serves different HTML content when accessed from a mobile device.

When your content is dynamically served from the server, make sure you inform Google that the content it is crawling may look different on mobile devices. A major drawback of this approach is that you will have to do additional processing on your content at the server level before severing it to the user. This approach puts unnecessary load on your server and makes it slow.

Separate URLs

When you maintain two different URLs — one for mobile users and another for desktop users – make sure you inform Google explicitly when to serve which version. Google does not recommend separate URLs because it can detect automatically that your mobile pages are different from your desktop pages.

This approach is not practical when you have a big website because maintaining two versions of the same website will require double the effort and money. At the same time, you cannot avoid various discrepancies in your content while maintaining two versions.

From the viewpoint of SEO, each URL performs separately. Hence your desktop ranking will never be added to the mobile ranking and they will always be assumed as separate websites. We don’t recommend maintaining different URLs for mobile and desktop versions if you want to draw the benefits of SEO.

Inform Search Engines

Make sure Google and other search engines understand your mobile configuration. Most important of all, Google must understand your page so that it can rank your website properly. How you inform Google depends on which mobile configuration — responsive web design, dynamic serving, or separate URLs — you have opted for.

In case your site has a responsive design, Google’s algorithms can understand it automatically without you having to inform Google. When you have a responsive design, just make sure you have the following meta-tag in your webpage header −

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

The viewport decides how your webpage will be displayed on a device. A site with responsive design varies its size based on the size of the device screen. Declare a viewport so that your webpage displays correctly on any device.

If your website is dynamically served, make sure you allow Google detect your configuration using the Vary HTTP header −

Vary: User-Agent

The Vary header is important to tell the search engines that different content will be served on desktops and mobile devices. This header is really important when your content is served by any cache system like a Content Delivery Network and those systems will make use of this header while serving content on different devices.

In case you maintain separate URLs, e.g., example.com andm.example.com, then you can inform Google by adding a special link rel=alternate tag in your desktop version and vice versa as follows.

Desktop page should have following in its header:
<link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)"
href="http://m.example.com" >
Mobile page should have following in its header:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" >

Avoid Common Mistakes

In order to optimize your website for mobile devices, make sure you avoid committing the following mistakes −

• Slow Mobile Pages − Mobile networks are slower as compared to wired Internet networks, so it is important to pay attention to how fast your mobile pages load. It is a critical Google ranking factor. Use a mobile SEO tool to find out your mobile page speed. Google provides a number of good tools that you can use. Browse the following link −https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
• Don't Block CSS and JavaScript − Google recommends to use inline CSS and Javascripts for mobile friendly websites so that they can be downloaded along with the content. So if you don’t have much CSS, then try to adjust it within the tag itself; but if you are using a lot of CSS in separate files, then try to include it at the bottom which will stop blocking the other content being downloaded. The same rule applies to Javascript, which can be kept inside the page itself or included at the bottom of the page. If you can avoid including the file at the top of the page, then make use of async attribute while including them.

<script async type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script>

• Mobile Redirects − Since mobile networks are normally slow, too many redirects can hurt your page speed. If you are maintaining multiple URLs, make sure all your links point to the relevant pages. In case you maintain multiple URLs and you recognize a user is visiting a desktop page from a mobile device and you have an equivalent mobile page at a different URL, then redirect the user to that URL instead of displaying a 404 error.
• Heavy Images − Heavy images reduce the load time, however we cannot completely get rid of them since they are useful and effective. Therefore you should maintain a good balance between text and heavy images. Use a good tool to optimize your images and save them at low resolution to avoid heavy downloads.
• Avoid plug-ins and pop-ups − Plug-ins like Flash and Java may not be available on user’s mobile device. Always ensure you don’t have any unplayable content on your mobile page. Avoid using pop-ups on mobile pages because it becomes quite clumsy to close these pop-ups on a mobile device.

While creating a mobile page, always keep in mind that the user has limited space to work on. So, you need to be as concise as possible while creating titles, URLs, and meta-descriptions – of course without compromising the essence or quality of information.

Useful Tools

Here is a list of some useful tools that you can use to find out how mobile friendly your site is −

• Google Webmaster Tools − Use the available Google tools and techniques to understand what should be used and what should be avoided while designing desktop as well as mobile websites.
• Mobile Emulator − It lets you see how your site appears on a wide variety of mobile devices.
• Moz Local − Use this tool to ensure that your local SEO is in order.
• Responsive Web Design Testing Tool − Use this tool to see how your responsive site looks like on a variety of mobile devices with different standard screen sizes.
• Screaming Frog − This is a useful tool that allows you to analyze your site and double-check all the redirects.
• User Agent Switcher − This is a Firefox add-on that you can use to find out how your site looks like when accessed from a different user agent.

SEO - Link Building

Link building is the SEO practice of obtaining links from external websites to your own to improve both direct referrals (i.e., people clicking on the links), and search engine ranking. Link building is all about increasing your site link popularity.

Website Crawler goes to a site again and again whose ranking in a search engine is high. You can verify this fact by putting your site on a high-rank site. If your site link is available on a high-rank website, then you have 99.99% chances that your site is indexed within 24Hrs.

How to Increase Link Popularity?

There are various ways of increasing your website link popularity. You can follow the tips given below, which are easily doable.

• Submit your site in popular search engines manually. Do not go for automated submission.
• Get your site listed in Open Directory Projects like dmog.org, yahoo.com. Getting listed in these directories gives a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.
• Provide high quality content so that anyone would naturally link to your site if you are featuring what they want, and that is not available anywhere else.
• Leverage your personal relations with other webmasters. Put your site link on their sites. One-way links often count for more than reciprocal links.
• Participate in Link Exchange Programs. Find top 20 sites doing the same business and contact them for reciprocal links. Link exchange between unrelated sites might affect the ranking of websites in the search engine.
• If you are subscribed in a forum and the forum does not have any restriction to keep your site link as your signature, then it can help you to increase your site popularity.
• Submit your site to bookmark sites like DIGG and Slashdot. Before submitting, please go through their spam policy.
• Write good articles in blogging sites and give a few references of your links within that article.
• Keep providing good content to your site visitors. Try to keep them busy on your site. If possible create forums, newsletters, blogs, etc.

There are other ways, but you need to spend some dollars to go for such alternatives.

• Buy a place on high-rank website where you can put your link.
• Subscribe for Google's AdWords program to drive traffic towards your site.
• You can go for alternative advertising option to increase the number of hits on your site, which can result in your site link popularity.

SEO - Hiring an Expert

Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. If you are really serious about SEO and you are not getting expected result, then it would be better to hire an SEO expert.

SEO experts perform the are following tasks:

• Code validation and clean up - Ensure that the code is search engine friendly and standards compliant.
• Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure URLs are spider friendly.
• On-Page optimization - Page Title, copy writing, Call-to-action, etc.
• Quality link building - Securing one way links from relevant sites.
• Keyword research - Building a list of key phrases relevant to your business.
• Creating Quality Content - Building optimized pages around terms discovered through keyword research.
• Off-Page Optimization - Managing Blogs, Press Releases, Article Submissions.

If you are confident that you have the required skills, then you can take care of all the above activities; otherwise it is worth taking help from SEO Companies or to hire any SEO specialist.

Choosing an SEO Expert or Company

It is very difficult to choose a correct SEO expert or SEO company. However the following guidelines can help you in this activity:

• Start searching through your friends and business partners.
• Post your queries in SEO Forums to get feedback from the community.
• Check other sites rank which they already have optimized.
• Do not go for SEO companies doing automated submission.
• Do not go for SEO companies doing Black Hat tricks.
• Do not look for cheap SEO. But take care, high price also does not guarantee high quality.
• Take guarantee if possible for a particular rank and any particular search engine.
• User SEO Expert or Company name in Google to find more information about them.
• Do not go just because of their fancy site and availability of good articles on their site.
• Do not get fascinated by the testimonials available on their sites.

We can not list out all the factors here because there may be different situations and different views. You should be smart enough to think what's bad and what's good.