I have always been telling you guys what to do with SEO of your website. I finally decided to go on and explain the things that can actually hurt your website’s Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs). And how you can avoid those to make your ranking stable. I will be targetting the solutions toward most of the bloggers, but other website owners can benefit from it also.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is like a infection on your site that starts out slowly, but it can literally kill the search engine ranking position of the entire site. What is duplicate content. Basically when you have the same content on two or more pages of your website. The common example, I gave with blogs was the Archive Pages. Most people fall in the habit of keeping archive pages on the site, but they don’t deindex those pages through your robot.txt. Alot of people like to keep the archive pages for the resource of their users, if you are one of those people you should do the following:

Open your Robot.txt and add Disallow: /archives/, and that should fix your problem.

Another suggestion I gave away a few weeks back was to use summaries instead of posting your entire posts on the main page, and write custom summaries. I do that often, but not always. Read the 3 common ways to avoid duplicate content with Blogs here.

Non-Search Engine Friendly URLs

Dynamic URLs while work [Read the full Post]

An organized website tends to rank higher than others. What makes a website organized other than the designing aspects, and quality content? Title and alt tags are another thing that is needed in the website for it to be an organized website.

I am sure most of you know what alt tags are. Alt tags are attribute tags which are mostly used with images. The essential of these tags are so important, that even w3 requires them for your website to be XHTML valid. While many designers, don’t use alt tags, and if they do they leave it blank. It is your responsiblity to go in your design and add the alt tags. Personally when I design, I add alt tags to all my images just so the design is xhtml valid, but I leave majority of them blank other than the navigation buttons because I don’t know which keywords the owner wants to target. Therefore, I would seriously recommend you guys to check the attribute tags in your website and give your images an attribute. This tag is also the one to replace the image when it is broken, so if your image is broken then this tag would take over, so the user knows what was suppose to load there.

Title tags are another essential element of your website which is used to rank high for your targetted keywords. Basically in each hyperlink that you enter in the website, It is eligible for the title tag. A good example of this would be, when I write Balkhis in a place where I am really counting on my backlink, I make the hyperlink small, but the title tag would be Balkhis – Vision for Success. You can’t abuse the url by keep linking really long keywords, but this way you can actually target a wider range of audience. These long keywords can often rank. I have seen some people even use sentences in their title tag. Such as Uzzz Productions is your web solution provider instead of Uzzz Productions – Your perfect Web Solutions. These techniques often get you rank higher in search engines which means that you are getting traffic indirectly by following these methods.

I know I am using these tags in my website, and I try to use it in most of my images. I am getting alot of traffic from long-tailed keywords. I think this is definately worth a shot.

Google has gone on a road trip of banning paid links. Which is causing users to either stay away from buying links or getting their site banned when they are trying to buy links. I believe it is a time to get Organic links. Organic links are genuine links that are gained when some site like your services and link to you. Such as your blog posts being quoted on other websites. But it does become a really hard task to get tons of organic backlinks. Is it possible to trick Google and make the paid link looks like that it is organic?

This is just a theory which has not been 100% tested, though I am trying it just to increase my knowledge.

I never really buy alot of links, but now a days many users are claiming that template sponsorship and sponsorship of these kinds are also being considered Paid Links, but I believe that is only if you use the same keyword to redirect the link to your homepage with no rel tags. Recently, I have started adding rel=”" tags in the links. I have been adding rel=”friend”, rel=”partner” and such type of tags in the links that I have been adding on Balkhis. Another trick that I am thinking about is mainly concernced with templates, but I believe it can be used in other areas also. When I am releasing the template, instead of linking to my homepage, but if I make the links more relative such as Linking to the template page, I believe it would work.

So try to buy links in your own industry and don’t try to be too obvious. Start linking to your inner pages which will make your website more stronger on all pages. Another thing, I have been thinking that now from paid links, alot of people will be switching to Blog Post Reviews because people are paying for a blog review by the writer. Therefore they are going to get organic links and a (honest) review. Sometimes the credibility of the author comes in question, but mostly smart bloggers give honest reviews rather than just writing positive reviews.

I would like to hear the thoughts of my users and other Search Engine Marketers. What do you think about these techniques? What other techniques if any you have.

My title basically explains the subject of the post. What should you do in regards with SEO of your website. I will answer one of the most common questions asked related to SEO. These questions include, What is the first step you should take with SEO when you are starting a website?, Should you do your SEO by yourself, or hire a professional?, and How much is enough, When should you stop?.

So fellas, What should be the first step you take with SEO when you are starting a website?

Your first SEO step starts with a design. A good design is the basis of the SEO of your website. Insufficient use of heading tags (h1, h2, h3) can do serious damage to your SEO Rankings. Basically your designer needs to know where to use h1 tags and what not. Just a little overview if you want to check your site. You should not use the h1 tag more than once in the site. h2 tags are suppose to highlight important titles, categories etc. h3 tags are subtitles etc. Don’t abuse h2 tags and keep them minimum as well. Another big think with SEO is the structure of the design whether the content comes first or not. More about this issue in this post. Once this step is fulfilled you need to look at your options in advertising methods. I have shared multiple ones on this blog which you can look up.

Next Question is “Whether I should hire a professional, or do the SEO myself?”

There is a pro and con side to both. You have to evaluate your options because I can’t make the decision without knowing the criterias.

By Hiring a …[Read the entire post]

As promised in my last post, I will now teach you guys how to actually rank for the long-tailed keywords using wordpress. As we all know that Google actually looks at the url for the keyword as well as the page-title. So it is very possible that the site with the url that has the keyword will rank higher.

To show you that google does count the url

Now having that said you definately need to get your blogs url to show keywords in it to rank high and pick up some good long-tail keywords.

By Default your wordpress blog comes with

< http://example.com/?p=N > This sort of structure where N is the number specified to the item in mysql. This is completely non-seo friendly because it is not static. Whatever you do you need to get rid of this one.

/%category%/%postname%/

Balkhis is running on the above permalink structure. What does that do? Well for instance when i posted about the Ultimate Promotion Technique the url was something like this

www.balkhis.com/advertising/ultimate-promotion-technique/

It have the category name and the post title. Which resutled me to rank first for the keyword in google.

Ultimate promotion technique

Now this is just one way to get SEO Friendly Permanlink structure in wordpress and my favorite way by the way.

There are multiple other ways you can do it. Another good technique I used was when i was making a more static content site with wordpress. My designing firm Uzzz Productions, Yes even though it doesn’t look like it … It is powered by Wordpress.

I used the same structure as Balkhis, but just added …………[Read the Full Post]