SEO Optimization Top Tips!

I've been in the art of SEO for quite a while now, and I've had success, when I first started though, I just hit brick wall after brick wall and just decided to create a new website each time I hit these problems. SEO can be a real pain for the first-timer. And it can put you off it for life! But don't despair, these tips I have outlined below will help you to increase your site's visibility to search engines and increase that all important Google PageRank!

First you need to decide what keywords you want your site to be related to, this is important and is where most people fall at their first hurdle. You can use good keywords to help you with this, follow the easy steps on the website on how to use and you can find out which keywords would be best to target your site with.

What you need to do now is to include your new keywords into your site! Use H1 tags near the top of the page to emphasize your keywords and to show search engines that these are important. It is also best to place your keywords at the very top and very bottom of your website. Emphasizing texts with bold and italics also goes a long way in SEO, this also tells the search engine that this keyword is important. Wherever you have spare ALT tags for your images, try and place your keywords in there, and also in the body of your website's content. Be careful though, do not overcrowd your website with your favoured keywords as this will NOT help your search engine rankings at all, try to keep them at a level like 5 instances of your keywords maximum on your page.

Include your main keyword in the TITLE tag of your webpage, for example a website about weight loss, my website title would be "Weigh Loss Tips | Examplesite.com" this is a good idea to do, it shows both search engines and users what your website is about and should hopefully boost your rankings.

When you have figured out your keywords and done the above, you need to start getting backlinks for your sire. Backlinks, these are links from other sites that are linking to yours, effectively telling search engines that other sites like your site and it is important and so it needs to be ranked higher in the search engine results. You can accomplish this by finding websites with a high PR and asking them to link to your site, this is easy if you are polite, and especially if you offer a backlink to them! When someone places a link to your site, ask them to make the anchor text the same as your main keyword, this will further increase your keyword's importance and boost your rankings.

When you have a high enough page rank and have placed your keywords well throughout your site, you will start to get higher and higher results on search engines and increased traffic
I hope this short little guide has helped people, and if it has I will be sure to post more in-depth article on this subject-matter and others!

An article by Scotts Digital - Best branding agency Singapore and best search engine optimization company in Singapore.

SEO Hijacking

There have always been rogue SEO companies who give the industry a bad name but since the economic downturn began I have noticed increased activity within the UK.

An increasing number of businesses are being cold called and email spammed with promises of first place search positions. Some of these cold callers are pushy to the point of bullying. The email spams say pretty much the same and often use disposable email addresses.

This has all started on the back of the economic recession which has seen many UK companies look to the Internet as another source of business leads. Rogue companies and individuals are using the crisis to persuade many small businesses to use their services.

On the surface this may appear to be healthy competition but underneath lies an emerging underworld of 'make a quick buck' scams.

There are many legitimate SEO companies out there who get their business either from the Internet itself or through client recommendation. These are the people who employ white hat SEO and put in the hours for their clients.

The rogue SEO's have another way of doing things. I have seen first hand evidence that they target knowingly optimised sites already ranking well and then somehow convince the client that their site cannot be found.

This tactic does not always work as thankfully many clients know when they are being hoodwinked. Unfortunately the recession has made it easier for the rogues to be more convincing. The economic crisis is affecting many UK businesses, one in particular being the building industry. As business enquiries dry up many clients assume it is because they are not doing well in the search engines.
Cue the rogues who promise more enquiries by getting the client first position in the search engines. This is where it becomes amusing as some of these companies actually quote to get the client on a high position for a keyword they already have at the top. I know of one client who was actually quoted a couple of hundred pounds to be put on the first page for a keyword that was already there. It would seem that the sheer greed of these people is making them not even bother to check if their target is already ranking.

I have taken a look at a few of these companies and their background says a lot. Tell tale signs can be spotted if you know what to look for. Sometimes a rogues website may provide very little information and contradict what the sales person would have told you. Other clues may be boasts such as 'we have been here a long time'. If the company was only incorporated around the time that the recession started to bite and the domain name is new then they most certainly have not been trading for long.

What amazed me was that when I really started to look into this I actually found other hijacked sites that still had the previous SEO companies web link on the site. I checked out the previous optimisers and they were genuinely white hat with a good reputation. I am not sure if they are even aware that this has happened yet. Basically these rogue SEO's are taking sites already optimised, charging the client all over again and then claiming the bulk of the work as their own. Many of them will tie the client down to a contract making it difficult for them to back out if they get suspicious.

My advice to those businesses with existing optimisation companies. If you have been with your company for a long term and are concerned about your optimisation then contact them first. Do not be tempted by high pressured cold call sales. If you do then you risk paying for something you already have and most likely at a higher cost.

For all the good SEO companies out there. Watch your backs. If you have many clients then it may well be worth emailing them to warn them about rogue SEO's. You may well save them a lot of money and keep their business at the same time.

An article by Scotts Digital - Best branding agency Singapore and the top search engine optimization companies in Singapore.

6 Simply Strategy Tips How to Make SEO Works

One way of improving your page rank is by using SEO or search engine optimization. While it's not a simple mission, it's also not unworkable to find your way to the top page of search results of search engines. You just need to make time to research and read about SEO in order to know more about it and how to make use of it.

On the other hand, if you want a quick knowledge about how to make SEO work for you, go through the tips below, which are some pointers about how to go about it.

1. Be careful in picking your keywords. Make sure they are appropriate

2. Register your domain name and insert a relevant keyword on that domain name, web address, and file name.

3. Familiarize yourself with the correct keyword placement. They should be found in the Meta description tags, title tags, and address of the website.

4. When you're linking, ensure that you do it in the right way. The links to pages in your website as well as your internal links should be official and useful. The incoming and external links should be related to the content of your website and its excellence should be upgraded at all times. Furthermore, the websites that chose to link to you must also be secured and can be trusted.

5. Do not copy anything from the web for your content. Avoid spamming, too.

6. Keep your page up to date, regularly do this and take out all the dead links. Ensure that your web server is dependable.

A SEO article by Scotts Digital -  Best SEO branding and best search engine optimization company in Singapore.

How Hire SEO Staff With Little or No Experience

If you want to expand your in-house team or build a team of digital marketers, it is always best to hire people who have no experience in the field of digital marketing but a whole lot of potential and train them.

However, this doesn't mean that just anyone can fit into an SEO role. There are certain unique skills and personality traits that can significantly contribute to success in digital marketing. If you are an SEO agency, here are a few things that you need to look for in a potential candidate:

1. To be successful in SEO, the prospective candidate should devote a considerable amount of time on continued learning such as attending conferences, reading blogs, and discussing and testing new methods and strategies. The ideal candidate should be someone who is an aggressive, independent learner. Ask the candidate about how they picked up a new skill and how far did they succeed in it. You can also ask him/her about the interview preparation as it shows if they're really keen about the job.

2. If your SEO outsourcing company has decided on hiring a candidate, there is a crucial factor that needs to be given due consideration - The candidate should have a fundamental knowledge of what SEO is. Go for people who have a clear and precise idea of how the Internet could be used as a tool to connect businesses with their customers. Empathy with the client, his fears or concerns and his goals is yet another factor that needs to be taken into account.

3. The potential candidate should be someone who can write well and should have attention to detail. He/she should be adept in communicating ideas.

4. Although the prospective candidate may not have any experience with analytics tools like Google Analytics and can build those skills through continuous learning, he/she must have the ability to think critically and to make use of the data to drive decisions.

5. A fresh employee might find it easier to learn SEO if he/she is net savvy. If the candidate has an active web presence, through social media networks, blogging etc, it basically suggests a general interest in the Internet. This is extremely important when it comes to learning SEO.

6. An ideal applicant for SEO should be some one who has experience in one or more of these areas -Marketing, Advertising, Public relations, APIs, Web development and design or copywriting. Hire for a smart, ambitious person who wants to pursue digital marketing as a career opportunity, rather than a route to make money.

A SEO article by Scotts Digital - Best digital branding agency and best search engine optimization company in Singapore.

5 SEO Best Practices to Get Better Rankings

The biggest need of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to make get your own website rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This can help you to get found by potential customers and your target audience. However, this is easier said than done. Millions of webmasters are competing with each other on the virtual sphere to edge out one another. Even search engines have grown more complex, with advanced algorithms and state of the art technologies. Here are some excellent SEO best practices that can aid you in boosting your website rankings and get your business at the top of the heap.

Take Care While Using Java Script Menus
As you probably know, Java Script is a special programming language that is used in order to make pages of websites interactive in nature. These run on the computer of visitors and are used for creating online quizzes and opinion polls. But Java Scripts are not recognized by search engines. Naturally, you need to use these only meagerly. You should develop a site map if some areas of your site consist of Java Scripts.

Use Relevant SEO

It is important for you to use SEO with care. Although the right keywords will pull the search engines to your content and make your website rank higher, you should use only those that are relevant. Do not use keywords or meta-tags that do not have any relation with your page content. Otherwise, your site may end up getting penalized. On the other hand, you can underline or bold up relevant keywords to highlight them well for search engine crawlers.

Update your website regularly

This is one of the SEO best practices that are often ignored. You should regularly update your website content if you wish to get your website achieve high rankings on SERPs. You should also keep watch of your competitors and change the keywords in an according manner.

Place tags on images on your website

Many people tend to ignore the high amount of traffic that they can get from the images on their website, if only they can optimize the image alt tags with the most suitable keywords. With the right keywords, you can give an accurate description of your images and make them readable for search engine robots.

Use the right keywords

One of the most important and cardinal rules of SEO is to make use of the best keywords and optimize the content of your website in a way that makes it easily crawl-able for search engines. You can make use of tools like Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Eye, SEO Book Keyword Tool, Semrush and Wordtracker - most of which can be used for free. You can use these to find out keywords related to the niche that your website deals with and get the most appropriate keywords that people look for. You have to integrate these into the content of your web pages in an organic manner, so that they are not treated as spam by the search engine robots. With proper usage of keywords, you can achieve high rankings on SERPs and boost your business.

An SEO article by Dougles Chan, The Search Engine Guru.

What is Search Engine Optimization and How it Can Benefit Your Business

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, which is also known as SEO, is the process of increasing the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via organic or search results. The higher your company's website ranks on Search Engine Result Page (SERP), the more searchers will visit your site.

As a marketing strategy for increasing site's relevance, SEO consultants consider how search algorithms work and what people search for. A SEO process may involve a site's coding and structure, content and copywriting, site presentation, as well as fixing other problems that will prevent search engines from indexing your company website. If your company's website is not indexed by search engines, there will be no chance at all for your site to get high visibility rankings on search engines. Therefore, it is extremely important for businesses to take note of SEO and make sure that their websites are properly indexed by search engines.

The term "SEO" can also refer to "Search Engine Optimizer". This is an industry term that refers to agencies and consultants that carry out search engine optimization process on behalf of their clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Every agency and consultant has their own SEO methodology; therefore they may use different methods to achieve high organic rankings for websites. In most cases, in order to have effective SEO, it may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics will be incorporated into website development and design. That is why almost all credible SEO agencies and consultants will first look at the design and back-end architecture of a website before starting any SEO process. This will ensure that SEO is carried out effectively.

Search Engine Optimization as a Marketing Strategy for Businesses

So how should businesses use SEO as a marketing strategy? The primary objective of implementing SEO to a company's website is to drive targeted traffic to it. Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search result from top to bottom and left to right, looking for relevant results. Therefore, if your site is near the top of organic listings rankings (organic listings refer to the web results that are listed on the left hand side of the SERP), it will most likely increases the number of searchers who will visit your site.

A successful online marketing campaign may usually involve SEO, but it also consists of the use of paid advertising on search engines, building high quality websites to engage and persuade site visitors take action either through enquiries or online sales, setting up analytic programs to allow site owners to measure their successes and improving a site's conversion rate.

Benefits of SEO for Businesses
Businesses can benefit from SEO in a lot of ways, be it to increase brand awareness, get sales leads or increase sales revenue. The following is a list of benefits that businesses can get from SEO:

o Get more targeted traffic. SEO can increase the number of visitors to your site who are actively searching for your product or service.

o Increase brand awareness. SEO can give your brand a high international profile. You can also use SEO to create brand awareness for any new service or product by optimizing related product/service key phrases to rank higher on search engines.

o Marketing your brand 24/7. With SEO, your website will get exposure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - without stopping.

o Higher sales. As SEO brings you targeted traffic, it can mean increased sales of your product or service.

o Long term positioning. Once a properly optimized & designed site is in place, rankings on organic listings should be consistent whereas the cost for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising is ongoing.

o More value for dollars. Once your company's website has achieved high organic rankings for various key phrases, you will not have to pay for each visit. Whereas for PPC Advertising, to enjoy high ranking visibility on search engines, you need to pay for each click or visit to your site.

However, to make sure that you have a successful SEO implementation, you need to make sure that your dedicated SEO agency abides to the guidelines of search engine when optimizing your site...

White Hat SEO VS Black Hat SEO

When it comes to SEO, there are 2 schools of thoughts - White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO. White hat SEO is techniques that search engines recommend as good practice and black hat SEO is those techniques that search engines do not approve of. For SEO consultants who practise white hat SEO, they tend to produce results that last a long time. Black hat SEO techniques may get a website to rank well initially, but the site will eventually be banned either temporary or permanently once search engines discover what they are doing.

So it is very important for you to know the best practices in the SEO industry and make sure that the SEO agency that is handling your account uses techniques that conform to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception.

White hat technique is generally summed up as creating content for users, not the search engines. The content that is created should be easily accessible to search engine spiders, rather than intending to trick the algorithms from its intended purpose. So, the general rule of thumb is to stay on the safe side by creating content that is relevant to your target audience. Search engines value relevancy - they will definitely want to rank a site higher their organic listings if the content on the site is what searchers are looking for.

Black hat technique usually involves techniques that attempt to improve rankings that are disapproved by search engines, or involve deception. One common black hat technique is to use hidden text, either as text coloured similar to the background of the website, or positioned off-screen. Another common technique known as cloaking is to load a different page depending on whether the page is accessed by a human or a search engine spider.

Search engines will penalize sites which use black hat techniques, either by reducing their organic rankings or even eliminating them from their database completely. This is a very costly mistake on the business point of view as you will lose out a lot of grounds as your competitors are enjoying free organic traffic from search engines due to their high rankings for major key phrases. One infamous example was in February 2006, whereby Google removed BMW Germany from its database for use of black hat methods. However, the company has quickly apologised and cleaned up the offending pages and were eventually restored to Google's database.

Therefore, it is very important to make sure that your SEO agency is moving away from black hat methods. You will not want to be blacklisted by search engines which will translate into loss in sales and profits.

Keyword Research - The Key Factor to Successful SEO Implementation

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and AOL get a lot of searches every day. Before you implement SEO to your website, you must know what key phrases or keywords your target audience is using to search for the product or service that you offer.

Whether you like it or not, there is a good chance that many people have never heard of your company. These people might be your customers, if only they can find you on search engines and buying from you. It is well accepted that building awareness is the first step to land a new customer. For example, when someone sees a TV advertisement about that new car, you hope that he or she is in the market for a car at the moment. However, relatively few people are in that situation at any one time. Majority of people who saw the TV advertisement have no interest in buying a car at the moment. But someday they will. So advertisers know that the messages - the model of the car and company name in their commercials will stick in viewers' minds, who might remember the message later when they are ready to buy a car. It is the same for SEO.

Searchers might not know that your company offers a particular product or service unless they see your site listed on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Unless they see your listings, they will not think of you. Most of the time, searchers looking for a product or service for the first time might not be aware of any specific company or brand name as they are just gathering information. However, according to a research done by search marketing consultancy iProspect, more than 55 percent of searchers expect to see big brands listed at the top of search results.

The same study also shows that over 66 percent of searchers believe that sites that are listed at the top of search results are the top companies in their field. So can you imagine how this affects your company's brand awareness? If your company's website is not listed at the top of search results, they will not see your company as a "big brand" in their mind. Therefore, it is extremely important for you to optimize keywords or key phrases that your target prospects will use to find the product or service that you are offering.

So what types of keywords or key phrases should you choose? Businesses should target keywords that are relevant to the content of their websites. Basically, keywords can be categorized into 3 types, which are: "Too Hot Keywords", "Just Right Keywords", and "Too Cold Keywords". Too Hot keywords are single word search terms like "Aircon" and "Translation" which do not seem to be targeted enough to get conversions. These keywords usually bring in high search volume (which is naturally tempting to optimize) but the conversion may not be as ideal as targeting keywords which falls into the "Just Right" category. (For examples: Aircon Servicing, Translation Agency Singapore") By optimizing those "Just Right" keywords, businesses can get more targeted traffic to their websites and increase the chance of conversions.

Choosing the right keywords is the real beginning of any SEO effort. After you have determined the right set of keywords to target, you can start the work of search engine optimization.

Why do you need to outsource SEO?
SEO is a very time-consuming process as continual fine-tuning and monitoring need to be done. Therefore, it is advisable for you to hire a search engine optimization agency to plan out the optimization plan for your company.

A professional SEO agency will look at your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. Once they start to optimize your website, they will provide recommendations and monitoring reports for you to know the progress of it.

Last but not least, in order to achieve successful optimization results, it is very important for your SEO agency to work closely with your website designer if you have your own IT department. This is because your company website needs to be both visually appealing and search engine friendly in order to achieve high organic rankings, as well as conversions.

An article by Search Engine Guru - Dougles Chan

SEO Changes in 2015

SEO, also known as the concept of Search Engine Optimisation is an ever-changing process and the year 2015 is slowly and gradually shaping up to become a year that has a lot to promise for upcoming entrepreneurs. The last one year had been an incredible one which boasted the revolution of the local search process. But now, the year 2015 looks like it has a lot to promise. It is for this reason the several savvy marketers are already in the process of offering SEO based content.

Thus, it is important to note that in order to stay ahead in the competition, one must keep an eye on the five changes that are likely to come up with the coming of the New Year.

• Specification of the local signals: Good SEO based content helps in improving the search capabilities and also with more proximity based searches. Also, other gadgets such as wearable technologies just like smart watches tend to increase the entire propensity towards the strategy. The exact and specific key words help in more accurate searches and hence make the entire process less cumbersome.

• Keywords will take a backseat: Over the years, it has been realised that merely following keywords and devising strategy has been a useless process. It is important to rather study the reason behind such search and carefully analyse the intent instead of focussing upon keywords being searched. Searches are gradually becoming more semantic and hence it is understood that now the intent is being monitored instead of the keywords.

• Social signals: It is mysterious as to how social signals play a role in ranking the page, but in the year 2015 these parameters are expected to change. A massive change is expected to happen that will eventually target the social optimizers and hence improve the process.

• Voice search: The concept of voice searching has been introduced however it has not yet been giving its due. With the year 2015, smart watches and other such devices are likely to gain immense popularity and hence semantic search shall become more efficient than ever. It is estimated that voice based searching shall become quite a rage very soon. People want to explore more of it and hence should be tried more often.

• Apps likely to supersede web pages: Within the year 2015, it is predicted that Google is likely to index as much information over an application as it does on a web page. With time passing by, apps and usability of a mobile has enhanced significantly. Due to easy handling and mobility, it is often preferred widely and more and more people are resorting to it.

An article by Dougles Chan - Search Engine Guru.