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Quick SEO Guide For New Websites

Quick SEO guideA volume of online content is available for owners of new websites. Most advice is targeted at business owners deciding how much to spend on their new online presence. Paying a professional web design firm enables these owners to deploy a fancy website without spending in-house resources.

However, once a new site is live, businesses must move on to the next phase of online competition. Improving the search engine rankings of a new website is just as important as creating the site itself. Thankfully, a basic search engine optimization (SEO) effort can be described in a single article.

The following is a quick SEO guide for new websites:

Check On-Site Issues

Look for broken links. Even brand-new websites can suffer from broken internal links. As pages are moved or additional content is added, site administrators can miss an occasional broken link.These errors, though small, can magnify over time and reduce site credibility and performance.

Make the site accessible to search engines. Search engines are computers that “read” your site in a different way than humans. Technical files like the robot.txt are critical to search engines even as they are invisible to end users.

Test site speed. Faster websites rank better in Google and Bing. Faster websites are more popular with users as well. Check for speed-related problems such as caching, image size, or excessive redirects to ensure you have a fast website. The webmaster of a sports site saw a 12% increase in search rankings across 115 keywords just by reducing image sizes on the photo-heavy website.

Delete bloated code. Websites consist of content directed at humans and code directed at computers. While this back-end code is required for all sites, try to achieve a 1:1 ratio of content readable to humans and code intended just for computers.

Create More Content

New content is the lifeblood of the internet. Search engines reward sites with useful, timely, and relevant content that is updated regularly. Unfortunately new sites have very little content and are trying to compete with established sites with years of content.

According to Hawaii SEO company, Argon Marketing, new website owners should incorporate a simple rule when it comes to developing content:

Match the quality of content on your competition’s site, then beat them on volume.

Different industries have different guidelines. The quality of content on the website for a physician’s group will be quite different than the content used for a take-out restaurant. But within a specific industry, it is easy to identify the level of quality required by simply looking at the websites that rank for relevant key words.

New site owners should determine the quality of content necessary to rank in their industry, then spend resources generating more content than their competition. When performed properly, this method of content generation ensures long-term success for a business and its website.

Develop a Strategy For Links

Google has a public set of guidelines for new webmasters. Bing’s guidelines are quite similar. In both cases, search engines try to reward sites that do certain things and punish sites that do other things. The distinction between these types of sites, though murky, is called “white-hat” and “black-hat” in the online community.

Moralistic and legal arguments aside, each new website owner should develop an overall strategy for the method by which they intend to get new links. At one extreme, an owner can do absolutely nothing and hope to generate free, organic links over time. At the other, an owner can actively advertise to pay prominent websites cash in exchange for links. The former will result in terrible rankings for years. The latter will result in search engine penalties within weeks.

All site owners need to determine where they want to fall between the two extremes. Before considering specific tactics or working on keywords, the website owner should settle on a long-term plan for the method of acquiring links. Their level of risk-tolerance, industry, and purpose for the site should affect the link strategy. Then, in turn, the link strategy will determine which particular link tactics the site should utilize.

These three, basic steps, are the first actions a new website owner should take when trying to begin an SEO strategy. Whether working on SEO in-house or paying for a professional, online marketing company, the owners of new websites need to invest resources to compete with their established competition.

This article has been written by Nolan Kido. Nolan works in the technology industry in Honolulu, Hawaii.

How to Find The Best Online Directories To List Your Website

Online directories

If you own a local business, then local search gives you major advantage over bloggers, online retailers, and other websites trying to rank well in Google. Local businesses are always advised to focus their energy and efforts to beat local competitors’ sites. The best way to ensure success in local search is to get your website listed with right web directory and review site.

Listing your website with a right web directory can substantially increase the online visibility of your business and attract more traffic. However, it is worth noting that not all web directories are as efficient and effective as others. Even though web directories are designed with regards to Google’s search algorithms, there can be many aspects that might have negative impact on your website’s rank.

So What Does Google Really Trust?

Needless to say, the trend of SEO has brought a revolution in the online industry. Webmasters incorporate SEO techniques and principles to attract visitors on their website. However, many still try to cheat the game by using right set of keywords and when visitors click on the website’s link they have to face disappointments and waste more time in finding the right resource.

In order to curb the efforts of visitors and to prevent them from scams, Google keeps on changing its search algorithm and deduct the ones that do not meet their standards. Since SEO is more focused on getting website results, it does not guarantee quality and relevance of the content provided.

Google controls a monopoly when it comes to search engine business. Also, the page rank or Alexa provided by Google is highly accepted by industry and local people as well. So when it comes to web directories, Google makes sure that they abide by the policies and regulations to ensure that end users get relevant results. Google has the tendency and authority to exclude any web directory or directories that failed to toe the line.

In clear words, it means that if you are planning to build a directory you would need to watch out for certain subject that you build it around. For example, a directory that is general in nature has more chance of getting dropped by Google than the ones who are niche specific. Low quality links, broken links, algorithms, spam filed content and so on are some major reason why some web directories do not show up in search results.

Finding the Right Directories

Listing your business on web directories can be profitable in numerous ways. However, you should make sure that you are choosing the right directory or directories while doing so. Apart from cost, there are many other important factors that you should take into consideration when making decision. These factors include:

Quality Of Existing Links

This is one of the most common and quick way to determine whether the directory listing will be beneficial for you or not. You should begin with elaborating the potential of existing links. What do you see?

Do you see maximum links that look like spam or have spun content? If you see such things, then the directory has more chances to negatively impact your search ranking. So, make sure you do a thorough research on this aspect before taking any decision.

Regular Maintenance

Make sure that the site you choose is updated regularly. It should have an efficient team of technological experts to maintain the speed, content quality and links of the site. Dead or outdated links should not be the part of directory you are choosing to list your business. Your prime focus should be on the time and date the site was last updated, and not the length of time of its existence.

Another way to judge the stability of the site is to see whether the site is well edited or not. Are the businesses and new companies listed under relevant categories? All these things will help you make the right decision.

Check For Editorial Policy

Do some research and look for pages on the site that clearly understates the editorial guidelines of the directory. If it doesn’t define any standards for accepting the sites to be listed, then this is definitely not the place to be. Good web directories will always have certain criteria to check new sites and their relevancy for the category applied.

Compliance With Google’s Terms of Service

Since Google hold the monopoly when it comes to online search, your focus should be to avail the benefits of directories that go well with Google’s terms of service. This will ensure that you get better results on Google search listings as well.

The chosen web directory should be well regarded by the terms of service provided by Google. It is the best way to ensure that your chosen directory is genuine and do not carry any kind of unnatural links.

Most Trustworthy Web Directories

If you have already decided to pay to get listed on an online directory, then you should be aware of all the options that you can consider for your business. There are millions of online web directories that you may explore, but not all can provide you with equal results. Some are definitely better than others, while some might be just average.

The final pick would majorly depend upon the annual fee or cost of getting listed, but the above mentioned factors cannot be overlooked too. To make the task simpler for you, we have listed some of the most common and preferable web directories that you may consider to choose.

These are the top directories that comply with Google’s TOS (check out this video – yes, will open in a new window – in which Matt Cutts explains why the below directories can be trusted – the editorial discretion):

Despite of your ability and freedom to choose any of the listed directories, you still might not get the chance to write your description or choose the category you would like to get listed under.

All these decisions are made by the directories editor. If the editor exists, he knows how to do his job well. So you don’t need to worry about your search ranking on the internet. There are certain algorithms followed while making such discretion.

Robert Gombos writes for several online business and marketing related websites. He believes that connection and involvement are keys to success even in today’s technological world.

How to Use Google+ to it’s Fullest Capacity

g+Here are Google’s top 27 videos for learning how to use Google+.

1. Google+: Set Up Your Profile
2. Google+: Sharing
3. Google+: There’s more to explore
4. Google+: About Circles
5. Google+: Reading and Responding
6. Google+: Broadcast Your Hangout To The World
7. Google+: Getting Started With Hangouts On Air
8. Google+ Events: Introducing a new way to get together
9. Introducing Google+ Events
10. Google+: Organize your photos
11. Google+: See who a post is shared with
12. Google+: Edit your Photos
13. Google+: Manage the content in your stream
14. Google+: Switching between your profile and page
15. Google+: Search and trending topics
16. Google+: Photo tagging
17. Google+: Mention someone in a post
18. Google+: +1 across the web
19. Google+: Visibility of content
20. Google+: Sharebox and Notifications
21. Google+: Start a Hangout
22. Google+: Find People You Know
23. Google+: Customize Your Settings
24. Google+ Events: Share event photos instantly with Party Mode
25. Google+ Events: Make your invitations stand out
26. Google+ Events: See everyone’s event photos in one place
27. Google+ Events: Creating an event with Google+