And I have very good reason for that. On-page SEO, in a matter of speaking, focuses on developing and improving the product – your website, or your webpage to be more precise. If you do not have a very good product, no matter how much you try to promote it, people will simply not buy it.

Off Page SEO Is Promoting Your Website

Which brings us now to off page SEO backlinks – the science of promoting the product, I mean your webpage.

Backlinks are, simply put, links from other webpages to your webpage.

And in a sense, it is really very similar to promoting your product – your webpage – for the rest of the world wide web to see.

Off page SEO backlinks have often been described as votes to your site as viewed by Google. When Google spiders the different webpages of the Internet, it tracks these backlinks that are directed towards your webpages and counts them as votes for your webpage.

So, effectively, the more backlinks you have, the more votes your webpage has.

And the more popular your webpage is, the higher you shall rank in the SERPs.

Therefore, the more backlinks you have, the higher you shall rank in Google searches, right?

Not necessarily.

What?!

Coz there is such a thing as the quality of backlinks.

Quality SEO Backlinks Carry More Weight

Let me explain that in the form of an analogy.

If you were sick and you need medication for you to get well, which medication would you take? The one recommended by both your plumber and your electrician? Or the one your most trusted doctor prescribes to you?

The keyword that we are driving at here is authority.

Quality backlinks come from websites that have authority. And one vote from an authority website carries more weight than a combined multiple votes from websites with lesser authority.

Generally, .edu and .gov websites carry much authority that a backlink from any of these sites is a major plus for any webpage.

Additionally, if you get a backlink from a website like CNN.com, aside from the traffic that would obviously generated by that link coming from CNN visitors, the link gives your webpage a very authoritative vote.

So, to sum it all up in this primer about off page SEO backlinks, although you need a very good website that is fully optimized with its on page factors, backlinks may be the determining factor that can catapult it high in Google rankings. And the quality of your SEO backlinks can be determined by the authority of the webpages that your backlinks come from.

Off Page SEO: Backlinks is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

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What Is PLR Content?

First, let us define what PLR content is. PLR is short for Private Label Rights. Some writers compose articles on a variety of topics and bundle them to be sold to people who want prepared content. The PLR content, as the name states, comes with the rights for the buyer to do whatever he wants to do with the articles. He may choose to edit or spin it to produce a unique article. He may combine it with his own writing or chop portions of them in different combinations to produce a new article. Or he may also simply post them in his blog as is – with no changes whatsoever.

And all this he can do while claiming that he is the creator of the resulting work.

That is PLR content.

How can it be considered good?

PLR Content As A Springboard

For bloggers who have been running out of topics to blog about, those PLR content can be a good springboard for them. They can use PLR content to get an idea for an article. They can even imitate the flow of the idea for the whole article while writing one in their own words. But the main idea is to be able to create unique content.

And now, for the bad aspect of PLR content.

Some bloggers, or should I say many bloggers, post PLR content as is. They do not even make an effort to spin the article to make it unique. Their main purpose is to have content on their blogs.

Duplicate Content When Using PLR

The problem is that the same PLR content is bought by hundreds of other bloggers with the purpose of posting them in their blogs as is.

And so, the result is that a number of copies of that same PLR content are now posted in many websites of the Internet. And with that kind of duplicate content with other webpages, how can the website owner expect to rank for certain keywords when the next blog is offering the exact same content that he has.

Backlinks, you might say. Maybe, for some very uncompetitive keywords it might work. But what’s the point when you can get more organic traffic if you simply write original content?

I guess for some, simply having content to fill up the space in their blogs is enough. And that’s where PLR content is good at – to fill up the empty space.

Nothing more, nothing less.

PLR Content For Your Posts? is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

Function 1: For The Search Engines

The first is to tell the search engines what your web page or blog post is all about. It gives the search engines some help in identifying the topic of your article. Of course, this can be valuable for your Search Engine Optimization purposes. So, better make sure that you include the keyword that you are targeting for in the description.

But SEO description does not end with that.

Function 2: For The Human Readers

The second, and equally important function of the description is to give the reader a summary of what your content is all about.

“But the description does not appear in the webpage or blog post that I made”, you may complain.

True, the SEO description is part of the metadata which is not visible in the page content. Only the search engine can read it, right?

Well, partly right.

Yes, it is only the search engine that can read the description metadata. But search engines like Google post that very same description when they return results for the keyword that you are targeting. So, in effect, the human web searcher also gets to read the description that is posted as metadata for the web page when the results of his search are returned.

And how exactly is this important?

Description As Marketing Pitch

That description that appears in the search result following the title of your web page or blog post becomes your initial marketing pitch for the human web searcher to choose your entry and click on your link instead of the others.

Ask yourself. Based on your personal experience in Google search, whenever you search for a term in Google, do you always click on the number 1 result?

Chances are that you first take a scan of the top ten results in the first page and quickly browse the descriptions to see which would most probably give you the best information that you are looking for. And in some cases, you may choose a result lower than the top three simply because the description seems to fit your search more aptly.

Do you now realize the power of having a very good and interesting SEO description for your web pages?

Importance Of Writing Catchy Descriptions For Your Web Pages is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

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But how often is often? And how lengthy is lengthy?

Length And Frequency Of Posts

The short answer is IT DEPENDS.

The long answer is that different bloggers have different niches and different styles of writing. If you have an entertainment gossip blog, it would only make sense if you post frequently updated posts about gossips in the entertainment industry. They may be short and direct. But the more important thing is that it is fresh and frequently updated.

If you have a blog about book reviews, it naturally makes sense that you would not be able to make posts every single day – unless, of course, you can devour one whole book every single day, and even have the time to write the review that you would also post in your blog. But the posts that you would write would naturally be lengthy enough for your readers to find value in your writings.

In terms of frequency, I guess the matter of consistency is the more important concern. If your readers expect you to post every single day, then make an effort to produce a post everyday. If it’s once a week, then post one article every week. If your posting schedule becomes erratic, you may begin to lose some loyal readers.

Targeting The Longtail

Okay, so you say that you are not exactly targeting loyal readers, but more of the visitors from search engines. For you to drive more traffic from the search engine, not only must you rank highly for the keywords that you are targeting with your blog posts. But you should also rank for many longtail keywords. And the only way for you to rank for many longtails is to produce more content for the search engine spiders to index.

The more content your website has, the more keywords it would rank for, even if you do not exactly aim for them. In fact, if you have a pretty large website, more than half of your organic traffic would probably come from longtail searches that did not even cross your mind while you were writing those posts.

So, how often is often? And how lengthy is lengthy? It depends. As long as you keep the search engine spiders happy with your content.

Length Of Blog Posts and Frequency Of Updates is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

Contrary to what many SEO experts believe and what many SEO companies claim to be their expertise to improve your search engine rankings, Latent Semantic Indexing is not being used by Google in ranking webpages for keywords.

The Myth Of Latent Semantic Indexing

With that said, how did LSI, SEO and Google become tangled in this misconception?

Before we try to answer that question, let us first define what Latent Semantic Indexing is.

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI is a mathematical system that produces a database with similarity values for the words and content of the documents that it has indexed.

If there is a search query on an LSI database, the system would return the document or pages that it computes to have the best fit for the search term.

So far, everything seems logical and right on target for Google to be employing LSI in its algorithm, right?

So where does the problem or the misconception begin?

Humongous Database Required for LSI

Without going into the details of the mathematical formula that goes on in LSI, it would be sufficient to explain, relative to our purposes of understanding, that the database that needs to be created to accommodate all the webpages that needs to be indexed would be impossibly huge. In other words, even with today’s latest technology, it would be technically impossible to index all of the webpages existing in cyberspace and use it in Google’s algorithm, or any other search engine’s algorithm for that matter.

So where did all these rumor that Google uses LSI in its algorithm?

My guess is that it was a result of people trying to pass on knowledge that they are not really sure about just for the sake of marketing.

Many SEO companies take advantage of LSI and incorporate it in their marketing pitch, saying that they are experts in analyzing and utilizing LSI technologies to help you rank your webpages in Google. But the truth is – they just heard about LSI in their research about SEO, but do not exactly know what it means or how it functions.

LSI Is Different From Semantic Analysis

And it may have all started with the concept of semantic analysis, which I believe is the proper term to describe the process utilized by Google, and other search engines in their searches.

Semantic analysis, in layman’s terms, is simply the process of evaluating, comparing and qualifying of words, phrases and sentences to extract their meaning.

If you have a webpage entitled “Spanish Recipes”, your content should contain words related to Spanish recipes like food, cook, rice, salsa, dish, tortilla, among others.

In other words, the other terms used in the entire article support and strengthen the title used for the article. Search engines give weight to the words and phrases that are used in the totality of the article to evaluate what the whole webpage is all about. Coz it simply doesn’t make sense that your title is “Spanish recipes” but the entire article talks about cars and race car drivers.

Now, back to Latent Semantic Indexing.

It must have been this type of analysis that SEO practitioners were referring to when someone discovered the term Latent Semantic Indexing, and thought that it sounded technically intimidating and perfect to be used to introduce a new concept of technique to be used in SEO.

Another clueless SEO wannabe picked it up in his research and used it in hos blog post. One thing leads to another, and the rumor had its own life.

So, the next time a self-proclaimed SEO expert tells you that he can further optimize your webpages so that it can pass Google’s LSI-based algorithm, do not even bother to ask him what LSI is and how it is done. Chances are that he doesn’t know squat what he is talking about.

And chances are, also, that he won’t be able to deliver on that SEO job that he hopes to get from you because he does not even know where to start in Latent Semantic Indexing.

Latent Semantic Indexing And SEO is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

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Bold And Italics As Scan-Stoppers

More than the visual appeal that this can add to your article, using bold and italics can easily increase the chances of your webpage visitor to have a quick idea of what the content of your article is by simply scanning the bold and italicized words.

They are natural scan-stoppers.

And you can take advantage of this by using your keywords and other related keywords in these bold and italicized content.

But do not overdo it. Or else, it would lose its effectiveness.

Generally, bold words are used to emphasize the key ideas presented in the article. And italics are often used, or should I say traditionally used, when stating proper titles of things like books and movies. Although in today’s modern usage, the two are often used interchangeably.

In SEO, it is commonly accepted that the use of bold and italics also help in putting emphasis on certain keywords. Why else would a writer bolden or italicize certain words if they are not especially important in conveying their idea. Therefore, it is commonly thought that search engine give these emphasized words some weight in evaluating the content of the entire webpage.

Emphasizing Keywords For SEO

So, if you want to optimize your webpage for certain keywords, be sure to include at least one instance of the keyword in the article in bold or italics. But be sure that you choose the proper placement of that bold or italicized keyword in the document. Usually, if the purpose is for emphasis, writers generally bold or italicize the first mention of the keyword in the article.

But as I said, it is up to your discretion and creativity. And again, just do not overdo it. Not only will it lose its effectiveness in bringing focus on certain ideas. It might also lead the search engines to evaluate such things as keyword stuffing and penalize your site.

Using Bold And Italics In Your Articles is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

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Power Of The H1 Tag

What many of these website owners, or even SEO practitioners, do not realize is the power of the H1 tag in improving your web page’s search engine rankings.

The H1 tag is actually one of the major factors that would tell the search engine about the subject of what the web page is all about. These headings are there for a purpose – and that is to describe the content that follows it. Therefore, it is important that it should contain the keyword that you are targeting.

Headings, depending on the level, have different sizes which are relatively bigger that the common text to be found in the webpage. H1, as expected, should have the largest font size, followed by the H2 tag, and so on and so forth.

These headings can visually subdivide an article into sections so that it can be a lot easier for the human reader to understand the ideas. Having some texts that are bigger than the others in terms of size gives a visual divider among the different sections of the article. And aside from this, they also give the search engine extra help by telling them what the content is all about.

But what is the difference between an H1 tag a Title tag?

Difference Between H1 Tag And Title Tag

Since the H1 tag is the highest level of heading in the article, isn’t it synonymous to the title?

There may be some debate on this, but to make things simpler (at least, according to my understanding), the Title tag is considered to be part of the document’s metadata, while the H1 tag is part of the document’s content.

And in many cases, the two are actually the same since they describe the content of the blog post of article as a whole.

So, is there no other purpose that we can get from them?

Fortunately, there are other purposes which very few are actually applying into their webpages.

Headings As Tools Of Organization

Using other levels of headings tags, like the H2 and H3 (I find it hard to imagine that a single blog post can have the use of an H6 tag), can make the whole appearance of the article or post more visually organized.

Imagine comparing an article that contains just one size of font to an article that has subtitles that divide. Which one would be easier to read? The one with the subtitles or heading, of course.

And which part of the article would you be reading first? There is no doubt that your eyes would naturally gravitate towards the bigger fonts of the subtitles. Maybe your eyes would scan these subtitles and see which part of the article would interest you the most.

And this is where the power of the heading tags lie in terms of user experience. You can use these heading to draw the readers’ attention into the sections of the article that you want them to read and understand the most.

Now, from the perspective of SEO, I would also suggest that the other levels of headings, like the H2 tag and H3 tag, be used to incorporate the secondary keywords that you are targeting in your blog post. This way, you have many keywords covered, regardless of whether H2 and H3 tags have weight in SEO. Although I would really like to believe that it is not only the H1 tag which matters in SEO. They may just differ in the weight that they carry in terms of effect.

So use your H1 tag, and even the lower level tags wisely. They do not only help the search engines evaluate the content of your webpage, but they are also a very useful and powerful tool in presenting your content.

Role Of The H1 Tag In SEO is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

SEO and URL

For those who do not know it, URL is the acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, just to get that out of the way. It is the web address that is used to identify your web page from the billions of other pages in the Internet.

A URL may be as simple as the web address of my blog:

http://arnoldmartinez.com

Or it can be as complicated as this:

http://unoptimizedurl.com/long-titles/with-a-lot-of-seemingly-random-characters-like-this/hsdb?fgeja21j36hswnswp/canyoutryrememberingthisurl.html

If you are using a blogging platform like WordPress, then your work is cut out for you. Whenever you would make a blog post, WordPress already takes care of creating your URL for your post.

However, that does not necessarily mean that you should just accept what WordPress is assigning to you as your post’s URL.

Optimized SEO URL

For starters, you can edit the structure of your URL to be more SEO friendly.

1.) In your WordPress Dashboard, go to “Settings”
2.) Click on “Permalinks”
3.) Among the different options, choose wither “Day and Name” or “Month and Name”
4.) Or you may also choose “Custom Structure” and type in “%postname%” without the quotes.

The reason for this is for your URL’s to reflect the actual titles of your blog posts. The other options in the Permalink section would just assign numbers to identify the different pages and posts in your blog.

In terms of functionality, there is practically no difference between the different URL structures. All of them assign a unique URL to your blog post or webpage. But in terms of readability and contextual identity, the URL where the title of the post can be easily read and identified has the advantage.

Short URL For Better SEO

It must also be pointed out that it is possible to edit the URL of every blogpost that you make to make it more keyword-friendly. Some SEO experts advise on removing “stop words” in your URL. Stop words are usually articles or short words that do not give any added value to the keyword weight of the URL.. Matt Cutts, himself, said it in one of his interviews. The shorter the URL, the better. You may be better off sticking to 3-5 words in your blog post titles. And manually editing your titles may be the key to this.

Remember that in search engine results, the URL of the webpages are included in the individual results. It is actually the last line colored green in every Google result.

Isn’t it a lot easier to confirm that the results of your Google search are actually what you are searching if you can read the keywords that you are looking for in the webpage’s URL? Or, at least, the URL gives you an idea that the webpage that you would be clicking on is related to the topic that you are researching.

And more importantly, from an SEO standpoint, the keywords that are contained in the URL of your webpage add to the relevance of the webpage to the keyword that you are targeting. Of course, this is from the search engine algorithm’s point of view.

So, the next time you time you think about SEO URL or URL SEO optimization, remember that the structure of the URL has its purposes – both for simplicity and functionality.

SEO URL: The Alphabet Of Making Your URL Search Engine Friendly is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

I just discovered while checking my search engine rankings for various keywords that I got the #1 position in Yahoo! for the keyword “search engine optimization consultant” – the main keyword that I have set to target for this blog.

I know that this is not yet the goal that I want to achieve since it is Google that I am ultimately targeting. But, hey, Yahoo! is still the second most used search engine today.

And a number 1 ranking in Yahoo! is still better than a second-page ranking in Google. Traffic-wise, that is.

So, again, just to show you that search engine optimization is a science where you can see results if you just follow certain methods to rank for the keywords that you are targeting.

Yahoo! Top Spot Belongs To Me is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

Arrangement Of Post Title

One factor to consider when using blogs is that different blog themes post titles in different ways. Go to your blog and click on one blog entry. Take a look at the title that appears at the top-most part of the web browser. That is the blog title that search engines see when the spiders crawl your blog.

Notice that aside from the post title, the blog title also appears in there. So, using our earlier example in our previous post, the title may read like this: “Bulldog Breeds And Their Different Characteristics | French Bulldog”, with “French Bulldog” being the name of the blog. The Blog Title follows the Post Title and is separated by a vertical bar.

Now, the problem is when the Blog Title appears before the Post Title like this: “French Bulldog | Bulldog Breeds And Their Different Characteristics”. Note that Blogger blogs are quite notorious for this. When your blog post appears in search engine results, that title would be the one posted. Wouldn’t it make more sense that since the web searcher is probably searching toe “bulldog breeds” (that’s the keyword that you are targeting, right?), it would be more enticing for the searcher to click on your link since your title suggests that it is the main focus of your blog post?

Simple Solution On Blog Title Problem

The solution would be to edit the html code in your blog theme. Edit the html code of your blogger template.

1.) Log into your blogger account
2.) In you Dashboard, click on “Design”
3.) Click “Edit HTML”
4.) Search for this line:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

5.) Replace it with the following:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

<b:else/>

<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>

</b:if>

Or, if you do not want to be bothered with editing the html, or simply afraid to tinker with html coding, just choose a theme that satisfies this factor.

Basically, the above advice assumes that you have already done your homework in composing an interesting title for your blog post. Remember that your post title is the very first line that would appear in the search engine results for your link. So, better be clear, concise and enticing with your post title.

Post Title Vs Blog Title: Which Comes First? is a post from: Search Engine Optimization Consultant

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