SEO For Beginners – Free SEO Tools Online

The Internet not only offers website owners ways to reach millions of prospective clients around the world, but it also gives the tools necessary to generate the type of content that those prospective customers will enjoy. If you are new to SEO, then it helps to have free tools you can use to get the most out of your search engine results. To help SEO beginners out, we offer a list of the types of tools you can find online that will assist you in maximizing your SEO potential.

Plagiarism Checkers

If you post content that appeared on another website without permission, then that is plagiarism. You can also commit plagiarism if you copy parts of published content for your own articles. If there is one thing every search engine frowns on, it is plagiarism. There are plenty of free online plagiarism checkers you can use to make sure that every piece of content you are posting online is original.

Even if you buy your content from professional writers, you should still run everything through a plagiarism checker. While many of the more reputable content sites check content for you, there could be issues if you buy content directly from writers or if you use those content websites that do not check content before selling it to you.

SEO Score

Many marketing sites offer a free SEO score checker that can give you great advice on what you need to do to improve the reach of your website. You will find that each marketing company has its own way of computing an SEO score, so be sure that you become familiar with the meaning of the score and how it is calculated for the website you are using before you take action based on your score.

Grammar Checker

The Internet used to be filled with writing from people who could not really speak English, but they could copy and paste a keyword into an article several times over to improve the search engine results. These days, Google and the other search engines frown on keyword stuffing and bad grammar.

Even if you speak English as a native language, you may not have the best grammar when it comes to writing content. That is why every piece of content you put on your site should be run through a grammar checker first.

Keyword Checker

While keywords are not quite as important as they used to be, you can still get better SEO results if you use popular keywords in your industry. Google and a few other search engines offer comprehensive tools that will help you to either find the best keywords for your content, or tell you if the keywords you want to use will be effective.

The Internet content industry and rules change constantly, but the effectiveness of good SEO practices never go out of style. The biggest issue that website owners who are new to SEO have is developing content practices that deliver the very best results and put their websites as high as possible on the first page of search results. With the free tools that are available online, any SEO newcomer can make sure that their content is ready to reach their target audience and generate plenty of traffic.

SEO for Beginners – Four Tips to Get You Started

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very important part to any online marketing program that will help to establish your website as a prime destination for your target audience. To get the best SEO results, you should hire a professional marketing firm because good SEO requires persistent monitoring and updating to be effective. For those business owners who want to get their own SEO program started, we have few tips to help you out. Once you start your SEO program, you will see why it is a task best left to professionals.

Update and Monitor Your Website Links

When you website has broken links for any period of time, that makes all of the search engines angry. The longer you leave those broken links in place, the worse the damage is to your SEO results. There is software you can use to monitor the internal and external links on your website, and you will need to keep an eye on those links constantly.

Use Only Relevant Content

The content on your website is a huge part of your SEO results, so you need to make sure that it fits what the search engines want. It used to be that you could strategically place keywords in your content and that would generate results, but those days are gone.

These days, you need to have content that offers your visitors value and deals in subjects within your industry. This can sound like a time-consuming process, and it is. But if you want to get premium SEO results, then your content has to meet the criteria of the search engines and add value to your website.

Develop a Link Swapping Program

Link swapping is another part of SEO that has changed over the years. Website owners used to be able to buy links and use those links to help bring in traffic. But since 2012, Google has outlawed purchased links and slap any website that uses them with a penalty that affects their search results.

The best approach is to contact website owners who have sites that are complimentary to yours and then agree to swap links. You can use those links naturally in your content, and then monitor the other site to make sure that your site is getting return traffic.

Evaluate the Titles on All of Your Pages

Website titles used to be a quick way for online marketing people to grab some extra traffic by either loading the titles with keywords, or creating page titles that had nothing to do with the content. Page and content titles need to describe the page or content accurately, be brief, and avoid too many keywords. If you want good SEO results, then you need to go through all of your page and content titles to make sure they fit the new SEO criteria.

Maintaining a good SEO program is a full-time job. You can use these four tips as starting points for your SEO program, but there is much more to developing a strong presence on all of the major search engines. Now that you know the basics, you can talk to your online marketing expert and help plan your own website marketing.

The Panda, The Penguin and The Hummingbird

Each time Google releases a new algorithm change it sounds like the company is unleashing a new Batman villain. First it was the Panda, then it was the Penguin, and then we saw the Hummingbird. But these were not one-time upgrades, nor are these terms used to describe the same algorithm. These terms refer to three different algorithms that Google updates on a regular basis. In order to understand the changes in the world of SEO marketing, you must understand these algorithms.

Why Change The Algorithms?

Before we discuss the three primary Google algorithms, we should quickly discuss why Google introduced them in the first place. These algorithms did not replace the existing Google search algorithms, but rather they enhanced what Google already had in place.

When users complain about the quality of results they get with Google’s search engine, Google responds with algorithm changes. To get the changes Google wanted, it had to start adding new algorithms to the ones it already had. That is where these new ones came from and why we can probably expect new Batman supervillain names in the coming years.

The Panda

The Panda was the first new Google algorithm and it was released in 2011. Panda looks for the overall quality of the site and determines if the site is safe and useful to web traffic. If you are keyword stuffing just to bring in traffic, Panda will find you and punish your website. If you do not offer quality content on your website, then Panda will knock your website down in the search engine results. Panda looks for quality content and rewards websites that go out of their way to bring value to each user.

The Penguin

The Penguin appeared almost exactly one year after the Panda and the Penguin deals almost exclusively with links on websites. Prior to the appearance of the Penguin, website owners would buy links that were unrelated to their website content, but could still drive a lot of traffic. The Penguin can determine if the links on your website are purchased or organic (placed as a result of a relationship with the destination site) and if they are related to your content. If you used paid links or your links are unrelated to your content, then the Penguin punishes your website severely.

The Hummingbird

The Hummingbird is a complete renovation of the Google algorithm and affects the way that Google looks at content and resolves user queries. Hummingbird looks for quality content and long-tail keywords that will help to get the user the exact result they are looking for. If the user wants information about a specific type of business in a specific geographic area, then Hummingbird will search website content to filter out any site that does not match the business or geographic needs of the user. Hummingbird is an intuitive upgrade to the Google search process and it is the algorithm that currently gets the most attention from Google.

The Panda, the Penguin, and the Hummingbird have caused businesses to close, while launching other businesses to great success. They are constantly being altered by Google who wants to tweak these algorithms to bring more value to the users. Are these really Internet supervillains? According to Google, they are only villains if your website is trying to cheat the public. Does that make Google Batman? Holy ironic twist.

10 Quick Tips for Killer SEO Results

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of updating and developing your website so that it shows up at the top of search result pages for the keywords in your industry. But what many people do not realize is that there is much more to good SEO than just a couple of well-placed keywords in a piece of content. With all of the changes Google has made to its search algorithms, it is now more important than ever that website owners utilize great SEO techniques to make their websites stand out.

Stop Using Paid Links

If you are not an Internet marketing expert, then you may have missed it when Google made putting paid links on your website a bad thing. Google wants all link building to be organic and have relevance to the website that is hosting the links. If your site still has links you paid for, then your site is being punished by Google and you need to remove those links immediately.

Clean Up Your Coding

If you have old coding on your website that references pages and materials that are no longer offered on the site, then you need to clean up that coding. Clean coding speeds up your load times and makes Google happy, so spend some time cleaning up your coding if you want to improve your search results.

Update Your Content

That content you bought four years ago is filled with SEO tactics that were good back in the day, but those tactics no longer work. It is now time to invest in new content for your site that will improve your SEO results.

Clean Up Your Index Page

If you have a movie clip or audio file that automatically starts when your page is loading, then remove it. Google will drop your page in the results rankings if your index page takes longer than two or three seconds to load, so clean up your index page and improve your SEO status.

Fix Those Broken Links

Truth be known, Google hates broken internal and external links. Invest in a piece of software that checks your site for broken links and make sure you run a link check at least once a week.

Make Your Images Smaller

Unless you need high definition images on your website, then reducing the size of your images down to anywhere between 40K and 80K will speed up how fast your site loads and improve your standing with the search engines.

Include A Site Map

Google loves site maps because they make it easier for Google’s crawlers to index websites. If you want to get your site moved up in the search results, then create a map for your website.

Make A Long-Term Commitment

Websites that renew their domains year to year tend to have a difficult time moving up in the search engine results pages. Google wants to see a commitment to your website, which means that you should get at least a three-year package on your domain each time you renew. The more years you renew for at once, the better it is for your site.

Get Rid Of Excess Content

If you have content on your site that has nothing to do with the business your website conducts, then it is time to get rid of that content. Don’t even archive the excess content. Just delete it and your website will feel much better.

Use Google+ Verified Authors

While it is not absolutely necessary to use authors for your content that are verified through Google+, it doesn’t hurt. As you hire writers for your content, be sure to ask if the writers are Google+ verified and always post their Google+ link to improve your content’s standing.

The Four Pillars Of SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, marketing is a process where our SEO experts put your Internet presence in a position to bring in more web traffic. When most people talk about SEO marketing programs, they usually talk about keywords and a few other small elements. The reality is that a good SEO marketing plan requires comprehensive attention to several elements of your website and each element has its own strategic purpose.

Website Content

The keywords you hear talked about when you discuss SEO processes with a marketing expert are utilized in the website content. Whether it is the title of a website page, the title of a piece of content or the article itself; strategically placed keywords are critical to your website’s success.

We have years of experience in creating website content that uses primary and secondary keywords that will get your website the kind of search engine results you are looking for. Our content experts can create relevant content that will bring in new traffic and keep your existing customer base coming back for more.

Website Coding

If there is one thing that Internet search engines know, it is how difficult it is to load a website that has sloppy or unnecessary coding. One of the first tasks we undertake during an SEO audit for your website is to review your coding to see if it is clean and efficient. Website coding that is disorganized and poorly written will drop your website to the bottom of the Internet search results and cause you to miss out on a lot of traffic.

It can help to convert your old Internet coding to the newest form because old coding can cause your site to load slowly. But the most important thing is to have coding that is efficient and complete.

Website Links

Every good website has internal and external links for various reasons. Sometimes links are added to offer resource materials to readers and other links are there to help readers find official company information. Well-placed links to pertinent web pages, whether they are internal or external, add significant value to your website in the eyes of the Internet search engines. Broken links will cause you problems with the search engines and that is why we do a comprehensive link audit with each SEO program.

Website Layout

Have you ever heard of the “Three Click Rule” with websites? It is an unwritten rule that states that if it takes a user more than three mouse clicks to find a piece of information, then that user will bounce to another website. That is why your site’s layout is so critical to your website’s success.

We will review your website layout and make recommendations on how to make your website more user friendly. We will also make suggestions on which fonts should be changed and any background colors that may be distracting to your content.

An SEO audit of a website is much more than just making sure that your site has the proper keywords in place. When we do an SEO audit of your website, we learn everything about your website that the search engines consider to be important and put together a plan that will improve your website’s Internet search engine results.