GPWA Times Magaine - Issue 23 - February 2013

services. These pages need to be indexed ASAP (Pingdom). Each post has many SEO elements and links, both internal and external. Word- Press, Magento, Drupal and most CMS’s have built-in sitemap generators. If you do not have access to a built-in program you can use Inspyder. All of the above options will crawl and cre- ate the sitemap. Upload it using FTP to your site, and then ping it so it is found. Tip 12 » Do a health check on your site Run a comprehensive site analysis on the same day of every month. This MUST become a habit. Even if you are the only person with access you may still need updates for widgets, the CMS or something else. If there are multiple people in the site admin it is common to find broken links and duplicated pages. I have seen websites with six versions of a homepage because they switched plat- forms and were testing. Google saw these as duplicate content and did not index the intended page. The correct one was de- indexed and did not show in the SERPs. The health check includes: 1. Run Screaming Frog crawler. Easy to identify duplicate titles, keywords and descriptions. Will show canonicaliza- tion, all errors and image properties, displaying them in a spreadsheet for- mat. Allows you to identify problems very quickly. 2. Check to make sure your back links are still in place. Use LinkAssistant, Majestic SEO, Webmaster Central, etc. Also make sure there are no back links going to a 404 or a bad URL. Add the page or do a 301 redirect. Also check for bad links to send to Google to disavow. 3. Run competitor monitor tools. Run programs like SEO Spyglass, SEOMoz, Link Research Tools, Majestic SEO, TweetDeck, HootSuite, Ahrefs and many other free and for-sale programs. All of these are great programs. You need to evaluate them to see which is/ are best for you. I use a combination of most of them. I run rank reports and if I see any signifi- cant change in a competitor’s rankings I will go to other tools and try to identify what they did. If you did the analysis of competitors I mentioned earlier you will have their rank results as a base to compare fresh rankings. This is the starting point when analyzing the competition. From this point I start looking at historical back link comparisons, I compare on-page SEO elements and I also search for any- thing off-site such as promotions or press releases. Google Alerts is the tool I use for every topic or subject I am tracking. Twenty-four Bonus SEO Tips Twelve (12) Quick ON-Site General SEO Tips 1. Put keyword in the page title. 2. Put keyword in the first paragraph of content. 3. Use keywords as internal links that point back to the page from other pages. 4. Avoid using single words as navigation. 5. Use keywords as file names and direc- tories accessed by the website. 6. Use keywords as alt image tags. ( Hint – Use Pinterest.com for a SERP boost!) 7. Use keyword header tags (H1-H5). 8. Use bold, italics and superscript/sub- script keyword phrases – but not exact. 9. Always use images that have keyword file name, keyword alt tag and descrip- tion. And add a link to any other page. 10. Use your keywords as the base of your LSA. I do this on a piece of paper or an Excel spreadsheet. This is very important. 11. Add social media plug-ins like Facebook, G+, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. 12. Add an RSS feed (widget/plug-in) that sends additional content to your site. Identify relative sites with RSS feeds and paste them into the widget and you’re done. This is as easy as attach- ing an image to an e-mail. Twelve (12) Quick OFF-Site General SEO Tips 1. Set Geotargeting in Webmaster Tools (Settings). 2. Use and install several Onlywire accounts. 3. Submit official press releases every two weeks (PRWeb, SEnuke and Mar- ketwire) – massive authority back links from news organizations. 4. Buy and use SEnukeCr – only use se- lect modules and customize them. 5. Use Majestic SEO, Link Research Tools, SEOMoz or Ahrefs and target your competitors’ good links. 6. If you have more than one significant country or language, create subdomains and treat them as separate websites. 7. If you are going to buy links you must buy links from sites that your competi- tor sites link from and also through Link Brokers, but only if there are relevant links to the site you are buying the link on. Links in existing content and sidebars are preferred in this data- set/algorithm update: ▪ 10 percent of the winners had a 10 percent share of footer links. ▪ 4 percent had header links. ▪ Site-wide links perform 10x better. 8. Spend a small amount of money on Yandex, Facebook or Google PPC. You get real traffic, real data, conversion metrics, and social network benefits (e.g., followers, friends or group mem- bers). Note – FB generates twice the traffic but 50 percent fewer conver- sions. FB does not have day parting, so use Qwaya. 9. Avoid these types of links (for now): • Blogrolls, unless they are on your site. Use for video and audio links such as GrindTV.com. • Forum signatures. • Comment links. Site-wide. 10. For a link profile that appears normal, target 15-20 percent of your links from low-value sites as long as they are relevant. But do not over-link. 11. Tweets and retweets are a factor in traffic and SEO and so is Facebook. Both programs also have highly used “Industrialize your Twitter and Facebook promotions with TweetAttacks, Tweet Adder and Facebook FriendAdder. These tools even allow you to scrape your competitors’ followers.” 34 Top 12 SEO tips for 2013