Strategy, Process & Life Cycle - Grassroots SEO!

Below you'll find the basic layout of your 6-12 month campaign, starting with what's in your SEO strategy. Let's start with milestones. You can put your milestones into a Google Spreadsheet in bold, font 24. Paste items in between milestones respectively, as you grow in your understanding of SEO best practices and techniques.

You can also use project management tools, such as TeamWorkLive.com or Basecamp, both of which allow you to calendar your milestones and create assignable task lists beneath them.

Milestone 1 - Your SEO Strategic Plan (1 Month)

You are going to get to hundreds of ideas and tools thrown at you for keyword research, spying on competitors, finding link opportunities and elements to consider when planning your SEO campaign. Problem is, most presenters don't actually say "okay, add these line items to your research to-do list, phase 1 of 5 in your holistic SEO strategy", they just say "here's some stuff you can do".

What's in Your SEO Plan?

Below is a list of reports and actionable lists to carry over to your project management system (or spreadsheet). The planning phase can take up to a month, but will save you a lot of time and frustration later in the campaign. Remember, this is boilerplate, so you can squeeze in new research and data-mining tasks you pick up from events. Isn't it nice to have a place to start putting the "stuff"?

1. Obstacle Analysis Report (OAR) - This report will help you discover potential crawl and indexing issues. It has little to do with content, and is mostly focused on how search engine-friendly a website is. Criteria might include: checking for broken links and duplicate content, analyzing HTML and XML sitemaps, optimizing robots.txt and .htaccess files, to help crawlers get to the content you want indexed and away from the content you don't. The OAR might also include a review of Webmaster Tools, an audit from your seomoz.org campaign, and possibly data from similar online tools. Basically, your on-page "stuff" goes here.
2. Competitor Analysis Report (CAR) - This is your baseline report, your Day 1, your "aha" moment, where you get to discover some exciting things about your competition, and some occasionally depressing things about your current SEO performance. Having access to Hitwise is the most ideal starting point (if you can afford it). If not, tools such as Compete.com, SEMRush, KeywordCompetitor, and OpenSiteExplorer.org can give you really nice insight into where your competitors are earning links, what keywords they are getting traffic from (AdWords and natural search), and even tell you how much more money they spent on specific keywords last month versus the month prior (a keyword performance indicator). For local businesses, WhiteSpark's Local Citation Finder does a darn good job of finding competitor business citations and sorting them by seomoz.org's own Domain Authority for easy prioritizing.
3. Link Analysis Report (LAR) - This report is fun. Using tools like those in the seomoz.org arsenal, or possibly giving Ontolo a spin, you'll be seeking out and creating an organized inventory of link opportunities. Categorize your opportunities by classifications such as: Web Directory, Business Directory, Industry Blog, Regional Blog, Industry Portal, Industry Forum, Industry Experts, Niche Social Networks, and so forth. From here you have a few choices of how to store the information. I prefer Buzzstream, an Eric Ward-approved link tracking software, but Google Docs will do the job as well. If you do use a Google spreadsheet, break your classifications into their own tabs or link building becomes unmanageable.
4. Keyword Discovery Report (KDR) - You'll already have a boatload of data from the first three reports to help with this, possibly the most important, report. You can also explore a number of other tools to help tally up all the keyword opportunities. WordTracker and Google AdWords will provide some excellent ideas, but nothing will beat what you'll find in your own web analytics and Webmaster Tools (provided you are actually tracking conversions and/or sales). With competitor data, you can run pivot tables in Excel to learn about the frequency of keywords the major competitors appear to be receiving traffic from. Purge out the terms that are too broad or not searched enough to be bothered with, sort by relevancy and search volume and you've got yourself a list of keywords to optimize for.

Now that you have all this terrific data, what the heck do you do with it? Here's where actionable items or deliverables come into play.

1. Put your OAR items into a To-Do List within your project management system (under the milestone of On-Page SEO)
2. Put your CAR items into a Google spreadsheet so you can track and monitor changes over time
3. Put your LAR classifications into one or more To-Do List within your project management system (under the Off-Page SEO milestone), put the opportunities into a spreadsheet or Buzzstream
4. Put your KDR into a Google Docs spreadsheet, create a new tab called Content Tracking Spreadsheet with a column for just the top 100 or so keywords, and create columns to track Page Name, Title, Meta Description, Has Video?, Image Name, Image Attributes, Has 450+ words of Content? Matt Cutts Didn't Throw Up, Is Engaging? etc. In your PM system, your content writing tasks can be assigned (put the list under the On-Page SEO milestone)

Now that the technical stuff is done, you get to start the creative and social media campaign planning. Pull a group of super smart people into a room for a full day and come out with awesome link bait, widget, tools/giveaways, and other creative link building strategies to add under your respective milestones.

Milestone 2 - On-Page SEO (2 Months)

There are thousands of smart (and sometimes silly) things you can do to optimize your website. You already have a To-Do List assigned in your project management system to square away OAR findings, and a To-Do List for your content team based on the keyword themes you want to optimize for. This initial phase of your SEO shouldn't take more than 60-90 days and typically isn't rocket science.

You're going to get all sorts of new ideas from the seomoz.org blog, Search Engine Land, SEO Roundtable, and thousands of Tweets if you follow #seo in Twitter. Therefore, if you're using a project management system, your template will be growing and growing over time.

Local and Ecommerce websites will have a few special To-Do Lists for data feed optimization, location-based landing pages, and a few other things you might extract from David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors or elsewhere.

Milestone 3 - Off-Page SEO (3 Months for the Basic Tasks, 6 for Moderate)

Mike Essex wrote an excellent post awhile back on 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away. I also like to use my Meetup.com group to have everyone provide 1-3 creative link building ideas to everyone who requests ideas, along with some crowd-sourcing tools, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and similar services. Choose the top ideas based on the business and industry and add them to an Advanced SEO To-Do List in your project management system. You will definitely need to create several project briefs for each idea so it makes sense to the tech and marketing teams.

I keep a Google spreadsheet going that has nearly 400 link building opportunities now (thank you Eric Ward).

You'll also have a list for Basic Link Building (industry destinations and directories), Moderate Link Building (outreach, and slightly more technical than submission-based linking). Advanced link building tasks are really more of an initiative and can be tracked outside of the the project management system as ongoing marketing innovation.

Milestone 4 - Social Media Optimization (1 Month for Setup)

This milestone gets a bit tricky and requires getting in bed with those crazy socialmedia people we all love. Perform an audit of all the current destinations our SMM teams are working with and insure they all contain relevant keywords, profile links, and (if location-based) business name, address, and phone number.

Next, seek out new social media opportunities, such as niche social destinations, popular social networks that have not been claimed yet (Google+ might be a good start). You might even buy lunch for the social team, and then try to give them training on how to blog with keyword-rich links every so often. If their eyes start going crazy as if you fed them after midnight, run away and try again another day. If not, train your social team, in distributing content, video, and micro-blogging to give you a serious lift in ranking. The trick is to make them think it was all their idea.

Milestone 5 - Video & Mobile (2 Months for Setup)

Technically, you can break video and mobile into two different milestones. But for the sake of the novel this post has become, let's bundle them together. For video, I recommend having a quick chat or consult with a pro, such as Mark Robertson of ReelSEO on campaign, channel and distribution ideas. Get ready to setup some video XML sitemaps and to start distributing video to relevant sharing networks. Also be prepared to start using video ads (PPC), which may help long term placement on key YouTube videos.

For mobile, you'll want to slip ONE task in for Milestone 2, insuring your mobile users have a custom experience that's mind-blowing and award winning. The rest will revolve around the creation of mobile apps for your products, mobile search optimization, and possibly even a few short code campaigns. We love Vegas, so I'm always excited to get my MB SMS offers from Mandalay Bay).

I've Completed My Milestones, Now What?

If you get through all the milestones (6-12 months on average - some might overlap, but they don't have to), your project management system should be empty of tasks. If so, you're no longer in Production Mode, you're now in Operations Mode and need only use your link and campaign tracking tools (here's a sample) for your day-to-day SEO initiative. However, you may elect to start over and repeat the entire process annually, depending on the results from the first round.

Now you have 5-6 vehicles of SEO in an organized form. You may decide to create a page for each milestone on your yellow notepad when you attend SEO conferences and events. If a presenter gives you some cool "stuff" to do, you should be able to easily classify the task into one of these buckets, so later you can update your project management template, as though you were putting another piece into a seemingly endless puzzle; which beats the heck out of creating scribble for your crumble ball with beautiful coffee rings on it.

Article First Posted on  - seomoz

Your Party in the Clouds: Google+ announces its cool new events feature!

Google announces its cool new feature Google+ Events for make your life more Joyful with friends & family in the clouds, As Google promised Changing the Way We Share and Connect.

As like Google+ Others tools, It's completely free & works before, during, and after a party, unlike other event organisation toolkits, which "bail when you need them the most. As Usual Google's efforts to make our life more easier & much better.




New Google+ Events integrates with Google+, has support for beautiful themes and it's not just about creating events. The most interesting feature is called "party mode" and it automatically brings together all the photos taken by the guests. "Once you've enabled Party Mode on your mobile device, all of your new photos get added to the event in real-time. And as more guests turn on Party Mode, more pictures will instantly appear to fellow invitees. In this way Google+ Events gives your party a visual pulse; we've even added a 'live slideshow' you can proudly project during the event," explains Google.

If you aren't already familiar with Google+ Events I’m inviting you start with me.

Welcome For You: 

The is the snapshot of what you’ll see after visiting your Google+ account, where Google inviting you to use their cool new feature Google+ Events. Click on anywhere you want, focused by Google for redirect you to Google+ Events Dashboard.

Easy To Manage Events Dashborad:

Picture: D

 After click New Google+ Events Feature, Google will take you to their events dashboard (Picture: D). Google+ Events Dashboard is the places from where you can see your events that's you been created or invited, Create Events. You Right Top have a Settings icon for click you, where you will find settings, help, send feedback & take a tour.

What are waiting there for you?

1.1 This page has a Google+ Schedule hangouts links & icon for Plan your next hangout Find a time to video chat with your friends.

1.2 More events: For Find more events Search and browse public events.

1.3 Google calendar: For View your calendar All your events appear on Google Calendar.

1.4 Special "Party Mode": For Share instantly with Party Mode Snap and share pictures to the event in real time with Party Mode.

Also you can: You can also attach a personalized YouTube video greeting and a selection of animations to an invitation, according to the official Google blog & Official Google YouTube Video.

Google+ Events invites are sent via email and can be fully viewed even if the recipient doesn't have a Google+ account. There's even more eye candy with the receiving mechanism—invitations "unfold" like a physical invitation sent via snail mail.

The social planner is tightly integrated with Google Calendar, so invitations plug directly into a user's schedule and can be viewed in full in the Calendar by hovering over the event.

Google also introduced its first optimized version of Google+ for tablets, which leverages the larger screen size of such devices for a richer, fuller presentation of the Google+ stream, face-to-face video chatting, and media playback.

Not Conclusion: I found A article written that Google+ Event & facebook eventpage is very similar. In his word

At first glance, Google+ Events looks very similar to a Facebook event page offering space to share event information, attendee lists, and photos – there’s even room to write on “the wall”.
Your basic event page?
Far from it.

Below is the screenshot of Facebook event:

Facebook Event Page

I can’t understand what and probably how he/she found similarities between Google+ Events & facebook Event page. In My opinion, Google+ Event is thousand time cool & fine From Facebook Event app. What You Think?

Google Panda Official Update Version 3.8 On June 25th

Yesterday Google has announced they pushed out a new refresh to the Panda algorithm recently.
This update “noticeably affects only ~1% of queries worldwide,” said Google on Twitter.

There were earlier rumors of an update over the weekend but Google said the rollout started today and not over the weekend.

The previous Panda update was on June 8th and before that on April 26th. Typically, Google pushes out algorithm updates for Panda and Penguin every month or so. While the last Panda update was just over 2 weeks ago, Google felt they wanted to push out a new refresh.

Here is the tweet:

A Google

✔

Heads up: we're pushing a new Panda data refresh that noticeably affects only ~1% of queries worldwide. More context: goo.gl/HNvCt
— A Googler (@google) June 25, 2012

Google said there were no updates to the algorithm or changes in the signals. This was simply a basic data refresh where they ran the algorithm again.
For more on Panda update, see this article.

Webmaster Academy: A Primer on Search Engine Optimization

If you have a website, you probably want it to be easy to find. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is “the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines” (Wikipedia). While the most important thing to do is to always focus on providing your users with a great experience, here are some great optimization tips to get you started:

Optimizing Content
If there’s one thing to remember, it’s to make sure your website has high-quality content. Your content should be concise, relevant, and unique. Remember to use words that users would search for, which you can find more data on in Webmaster Tools.

Improving HTML
Make sure that your website contains all the proper HTML tags necessary for search engine crawlers to understand each page. Each web page should have a relevant title (created with the <title> element in HTML) that concisely describes that page’s content. Images should have alternate text (the alt HTML attribute) because Google is much better at understanding text than looking at pictures.

Relevant Publicity
While Google pays attention to everything on your website, it can also learn a lot about your site from other websites. Consider sharing your website with other communities online. Don’t know where to start? See if your local chamber of commerce website lists local businesses. Google uses external signals like these when evaluating your website.

Because doing all of this can be a daunting task, many businesses hire search engine optimizers (also called SEOs). Just like with anyone you hire, before bringing on an SEO make sure to complete your due diligence - here are some tips to make sure you are bringing on a great fit that abides by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

While search engine optimization can seem overwhelming at first, remember that it’s all about creating the best website for your users. A comprehensive list of SEO best practices can be found in Google’s SEO Starter Guide. For more information about how to build a great website that performs well in search, make sure to visit the Webmaster Academy.

Posted by Garen Checkley, Search Quality Team

Meta Tags, Meta Robots, and Robots.txt

 

What is Meta Tag?

Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in website head element.

The meta tag has two uses: either to emulate the use of the HTTP response header, or to embed additional metadata within the HTML document.

Example of the use of the Meta Tag

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html" >

<meta name="keywords" content="Your Website Keywords" >

<meta name="Description" content="Your Website Description" > 

How Meta  Robots used in search engine optimization?

Meta tag provide information about a given Web page, most often to help search engines spider categorize them correctly. They are embed into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.

They have been the focus of a field of search engine optimization, where different methods are explored to provide a user's site with a higher ranking on search engines organic ranking. In the mid to late 1990s, search engines bot were reliant on meta tag to correctly classify a Web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines — and thus, high traffic to the website.

As search engine organic traffic achieved greater significance in internet marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in search engine behavior for seo. These consultants used a variety of techniques to improve ranking for their clients websites.

While search engine optimization can improve search engine organic ranking, consumers of such services should be careful to employ only reputable providers. Given the extraordinary competition and man who practices a craft with great skills required for top search engine organic placement, the implication of the term "search engine optimization" has Become progressively worse over the last decade. Where it once implied bringing a website to the top of a search engine's organic results page, for some consumers it now implies a relationship with keyword spamming or optimizing a site's internal search engine for improved performance.

Major search engine crawler are more likely to quantify such extant factors as the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits, click-through, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness, geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.

Useful Meta  Robots for SEO

• author
  Who wrote this Web page? You can include a list of authors if multiple people wrote the content and it typically refers to the content authors rather than the designers of the HTML or CSS.

  <meta name="author" content="author name" />

• copyright
  Set the copyright date on the document. Note, you shouldn't use this instead of a copyright notice that is visible on the Web page, but it's a good place to store the copyright in the code as well.

  <meta name="copyright" content="© 2008 Jennifer Kyrnin and About.com" />

• contact
  This is a contact email address for the author of the page (generally). Be aware that if you put an email address in this tag, it can be read by spammers, so be sure to protect your email address.

  <meta name="contact" content="email address" />

• last-modified
  When was this document last edited?

  <meta http-equiv="last-modified" content="YYYY-MM-DD@hh:mm:ss TMZ" />

Meta  Robots for Communicating with the Web Browser or Server

These meta tags provide information to the Web server and any Web browsers that visit the page. In many cases, the browsers and servers can take action based on these meta tags.

• cache-control
  Control how your pages are cached. The options you have are: public (default) - allows the page to be cached; private - the page may only be cached in private caches; no-cache - the page should never be cached; no-store - the page may be cached but not archived.

  <meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />

• content-language
  Define the natural language(s) used on the Web page. Use the ISO 639-1 language codes. Separate multiple languages with commas.

  <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en,fr" />

• content-type
  This meta tag defines the character set that is used on this Web page. Unless you know that you're using a different charset, I recommend you set your Web pages to use UTF-8.

  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

• expires
  If the content of your page has an expiration date, you can specify this in your meta data. This is most often used by servers and browsers that cache content. If the content is expired, they will load the page from the server rather than the cache. To force this, you should set the value to "0", otherwise use the format YYYY-MM-DD@hh:mm:ss TMZ.

  <meta http-equiv="expires" content="0" />

• pragma
  The pragma meta tag is the other cache control tag you should use if you don't want your Web page cached. You should use both meta tags to prevent your Web page being cached.

  <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />

Control Robots with Meta  Robots

There are two meta tags that can help you control how Web robots access your Web page.

• robots
  This tag tells the Web robots whether they are allowed to index and archive this Web page. You can include any or all of the following keywords (separated by commas) to control what the robots do: all (default) - the robots can do anything on the page; none - robots can do nothing; index - robots should include this page in the index; noindex - robots should not include this page in the index; follow - robots should follow the links on this page; nofollow - robots should not follow links on this page; noarchive - Google uses this to prevent the page from being archived.

  <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

• googlebot
  Google has their own robot - GoogleBot, and they would prefer that you use the googlebot meta tag to control the Googlebot. You can use the following keywords to control the Googlebot: noarchive - Google will not display cached content; nosnippet - Google will not display excerpts or cached content; noindex - Google will not index the page; nofollow - Google will not follow the links on the page.

  <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet,nofollow" />

What is Robots.txt?

Web site owners use the robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots/crawler/bot; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol(REP).

It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and finds:

Handy Robots.txt Cheat Sheet

This example tells all robots to visit all files because the wildcard * specifies all robots:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This example tells all robots to stay out of a website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The next is an example that tells all robots not to enter four directories of a website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

Example that tells a specific robot not to enter one specific directory:

User-agent: BadBot # replace 'BadBot' with the actual user-agent of the bot
Disallow: /private/

Example that tells all robots not to enter one specific file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/file.html

Note that all other files in the specified directory will be processed.

Example demonstrating how comments can be used:

# Comments appear after the "#" symbol at the start of a line, or after a directive User-agent: * # match all bots
Disallow: / # keep them out

Example demonstrating how to add the parameter to tell bots where the Sitemap is located
User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml  # tell the bots where your sitemap is located

Nonstandard extensions
Crawl-delay directive

Several major crawlers support a Crawl-delay parameter, set to the number of seconds to wait between successive requests to the same server:[4][5][6]

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
Allow directive

Some major crawlers support an Allow directive which can counteract a following Disallow directive. This is useful when one tells robots to avoid an entire directory but still wants some HTML documents in that directory crawled and indexed. While by standard implementation the first matching robots.txt pattern always wins, Google's implementation differs in that Allow patterns with equal or more characters in the directive path win over a matching Disallow pattern. Bing uses the Allow or Disallow directive which is the most specific.

In order to be compatible to all robots, if one wants to allow single files inside an otherwise disallowed directory, it is necessary to place the Allow directive(s) first, followed by the Disallow, for example:

Allow: /folder1/myfile.html
Disallow: /folder1/

This example will Disallow anything in /folder1/ except /folder1/myfile.html, since the latter will match first. In case of Google, though, the order is not important.



Sitemap

Some crawlers support a Sitemap directive, allowing multiple Sitemaps in the same robots.txt in the form:

Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.google.com/hostednews/sitemap_index.xml



Universal "*" match

The Robot Exclusion Standard does not mention anything about the "*" character in the Disallow: statement. Some crawlers like Googlebot and Slurp recognize strings containing "*", while MSNbot and Teoma interpret it in different ways.