Everyone wants their site to receive a lot of traffic, but when it comes to search engine optimization, sometimes it’s tough to know where to begin. Below are five tips to get you started with SEO and help make sure your site is search engine friendly.

Understand Keywords for Maximum SEO

Keywords are one of the most important parts of SEO. They are the words or phrases that your users submit as a query to one of the search engines.  So how do you make the most of keywords on your site?

1. Place keywords in the title. Search engines pay a lot of attention to the words and phrases placed in the <title> tag.
2. Make sure your <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags contain keywords.
3. Place keywords at the top of your content. Words and phrases that are near the top of your content carry more weight than those lower on the page.
4. Place keywords in your last paragraph. Search engines understand that important terms are often included in a closing summary paragraph.
5. Avoid keyword stuffing! This is very important! It will adversely affect your ranking if Google thinks you’re intentionally over-using keywords in an attempt to boost your results. A general rule of thumb is to keep your keyword density to less than 5%.
6. Write naturally. If your writing sounds awkward because you’re trying to sprinkle too many keywords into the content, you’re taking the wrong approach.
7. Use the right keywords. This may seem obvious, but many sites are often surprised by the keywords their users are searching on. If you need help researching which keywords your audience is searching for, there are commercial services like Wordtracker that can help.
8. Avoid using the wrong keywords. This is often a matter of careful writing. Imagine if you repeatedly spelled ‘whether’ as ‘weather’. Besides leaving a bad impression with your readers, you can imagine the search results may not be what you had expected. Using the wrong keywords can also be a problem if you are prone to repeatedly using pet phrases or slang in your writing. The important point is to be mindful of the words you are using when creating your content.

Create Linkworthy Content

Having inbound links to your website from established, reputable sites that have content similar to your own can really help your search rankings. The important point here is that quality matters. A lot of people who are new to SEO will engage in link exchanges with just about anyone. Search engines are pretty good at identifying a link from a reputable site vs. one from a link farm.

Provide Quality Content

You may have heard about Google’s recent update to its search algorithm called Panda. Overnight, thousands of sites saw their rankings plummet. Google sent a clear message with this latest change – quality matters.

To rank well with search engines, provide well-written, authoritative information. One way to ensure you’re creating good content is to simply ask yourself, “Is this content helping my users solve a real problem?”.

Another point to keep in mind about content is that size matters. I’m not suggesting you need to write epically long posts, but they should be at least 300 words.

And for the record, spelling, grammar and punctuation are indeed a mark of quality content! Of course, it’s not necessary to be a grammar expert, but you should at least run spellcheck and thoroughly proofread anything you publish.

Optimize Your Images

Most web designers know to include an ALT attribute for accessibility reasons, but it can also help your SEO. Place keywords in the ALT and TITLE attributes of your images to optimize their search potential.

Another tip with regard to images is giving them descriptive, keyword-filled file names. For example, if you have an image of a flat screen television you offer for sale on your site, don’t simply name it product.jpg. Instead try something more descriptive like, flat-screen-tv.jpg.  A good file name can be as important as the ALT attribute.

Optimize Internal Links

Having links to other pages on your site helps search engines notice them. For example, say you’ve written a series of posts on typography. You should make sure you create links between the posts to help point search engines in the right direction.

An important point to keep in mind with regard to all links is the anchor text. Instead of “click here”, use a descriptive term to increase the relevance of the link.

Wrapping It Up
Creating content that ranks well with search engines takes time and practice. But SEO is a tool everyone who publishes a website should have in their kit. Do you have a favorite search engine optimization tip I left off my list?

Do you want to see your website at the top of Google rankings with a map to your office or store?

Dream System Solutions SEO offers Google Local Optimization which gets your local business listing ranked in the first page of Google search results when a future customers searches online in your area.  Called Google Local or Local Business Center, Google now allows local businesses to compete online within your local city area.  With Google Local Optimization Packages you can get instant online exposure and new business within days.

Have online searchers see a map to your office and phone number when they search online

The key to success is more than just creating a profile.  Dream System Solutions SEO packages uses a complete process to maximize the keywords people are using to search for your business correlated to the keywords your website already features.  You don’t have to have a high ranking website to instantly see your website and business at the top of Google Local results.

Google Local Optimization Features:

1. Ranking for Best Keywords in Your Local Area
2. Boost Your Current Business Listing with More Traffic
3. Map to Your Office or Store Online
4. Phone Number Available without Clicking into Website
5. Drives Local Online Traffic to Your Website
6. Increase Your Brand with Videos, Photos, and More
7. Maximize Reviews of your Business

Rank at the Top of Google without even having a Website

With Google Local Optimization you don’t even need to have a website for your business to have online customers find your company and give you a call.  Google Local Optimization creates the most productive online profile that will allow your company to be seen online for the most competitive terms for your industry when a person searchers in your area.

How Does Google Know Where a Person is Located

When you log on to the web you create what is called at IP address.  This is like your address to your house only it is your online house.  Through you IP address, Google is able to know where you are located.

Google Local has multiple features that allow you business to have maximum exposure online and Authority SEO knows how to utilize each one for the greatest return on investment.

The best part of Google Local Optimization is that it is one of the best uses of your marketing budget you will ever spend.  If you have heard that SEO can take a long time to see results that is not the case with Google Local Optimization.  You will see your local business listing and map featured within days.

• 54% of Americans have substituted the Internet and local search for phone books
• 90% of online commercial searches result in a local offline purchase
• 61% of all local searches will result in a transaction
• Google Local (or Maps) are displayed in 1 out of every 13 searches on average (or roughly 9% of page-one search results)

So how do companies get listed in Google Places results? They can be listed from a number of sources pulled by Google™ places and/or submitted to Google Places manually by you or an SEO consultant. The great part about Google places is you don’t even need to have a website to be listed in the results – but it will certainly help with customer research and conversion if you do. Another point to consider if are currently listed or submit to be listed is HOW you are listed in these results. Google Places allows you to create and/or edit your listing and content - so don’t waste the opportunity to optimize your listing by including your keywords and phrases into your listing results. 

Along with a number of ever changing factors used to determine Google Places (local) results is where your company is listed in relation to the city center (or centroid). The closer your company is listed to the center of the city, the more likelihood you will display prominently in the results. This of course can lead to abuse but it is certainly to your advantage if you have a physical address close to the centroid if you wish to score well on these results.

It is not uncommon to see companies show up prominently in the places results and mistakenly think that because of this; their website is optimized well for the search engines. In most cases, this is simply not the case. As discussed in our section on keyword SEO, just because you might show-up prominently in Google Places for a commonly searched term doesn’t mean you are also showing up in other searches as well. Moreover, around 40% of all searches are unique “long-tail” type searches that are far less in volume but much higher in quality and results. Most long-tail searches are referred to as “money” searches because they tend to be highly focused and come from people who are actually looking for something specific. So don’t be confused by the results provided in Google Places – yes they provide prominence with certain searches but they should not be considered a replacement for a good local search engine optimization strategy.

The Growth of Mobile Browsing

As of 2008, there are around 228 million mobile subscribers in the United States, a 6% growth year over year. What is more startling is the 45% growth over the same period of time in mobile browsing – or people who are searching the web from their mobile phones and PDA’s. A recent study by comScore also shows that 1 in 5 online business searchers with an internet-accessible cell phone have conducted a local search through their phone.  So if you are a local company, you need to ask yourself what the growing use of mobile browsing means for your business.

Many local companies have poor website design SEO and therefore do not show up optimally in mobile web-browsers. If you have a website now, take a moment to look at your website through a cell phone or PDA and see how it looks. Part of an optimal website design process is to understand the desired customer journey through your website. Once this is determined, you can now take that journey yourself through your cell phone or PDA and see how easy or hard this now becomes for your website users. Often times a local search through a PDA may be as simple as people trying to find your phone number, email, and/or physical address through these searches. So when in doubt, a minimal approach is to make sure that these journeys are easily accessible to mobile users and your website is not too choppy and unnavigable in these type of browsers.

Google Places Optimization Strategies

Here are a few ways in which you can improve your local search engine optimization:

• As discussed above in “Understanding Google Places,” it is a good idea to add and/or modify your Google Places listing and make sure that your listing is fully optimized to include your SEO keywords and phrases.
• In order to build more citations for your listings, it is a good idea to claim and optimize ALL of your key directory listings on the web. The best place to start is to go to Get Listed and claim all of your key listings on the web. It is also a good idea to add your listing to Localeze as well.
• Create multiple listings for additional cities and locations where you do business. For example, if you provide services in multiple states and/or cities, it doesn’t hurt to setup mailing addresses (near each city center of course) so your services will be displayed in the maps results for each location.
• Create and/or modify your listing to include your most prominent SEO keywordsin your listing details. You will also need to add an image/s, any videos, promotional items, etc.
• Since customer ratings are one criteria in Google Places results, encourage customers to provide positive reviews for your company in local search results. For example, look at each Google Places results for a business and notice the “More” link to the far-right of their listing. When you click on this link, you will notice a number of tabs below the listing, one of which is the “Reviews” tab. Ask your customers to write a positive review for your business and provide you with the highest rating possible.
• Add a geography section (or geo block) to your web pages that include all of the states, cities, counties and boroughs that you serve. Make sure to also include any additional ways in which people also search for these same areas by name such as DFW (Dallas Fort Worth), NYC (New York City), etc.
• Include your primary geographic area/s of service along with your primary SEO keywords so they come up on a regional basis. For example, you have far less web page competition on the search engines for “Omaha bankruptcy lawyer” than you do by targeting the term “bankruptcy lawyer” alone. Besides, this allows you to geo-target your searches to begin with while trying to avoid traffic from areas you will not serve. It is also important to include these geo keywords into other website design SEO areas of your website as well since many of these sections receive more prominence than others.

Mobile search engines have different bots and algorithms than those used for traditional web search. They evaluate your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone, and they rank results partially based on how well the page will render on the type of phone that submitted the query. If you look in your log files, you can even see that Googlebot-Mobile has different user agents that spoof different phones, like a Samsung phone, an iPhone or an Erickson phone. In some cases, different handsets will have different search results based on the evaluations that Google makes with the different user agents. The best thing you can do to improve your mobile SEO is to ensure that the mobile crawlers and user agents determine that your content will render well and load quickly on any mobile phone.

Since the mobile search engines are not as finely tuned as the traditional engines, they are still placing a heavy weight on a website’s mobile bounce rate, using the mobile visitors as barometers for how the website renders on their phone. This, again should reinforce the need for good mobile rendering. Here’s how you can improve mobile rankings and mobile rending of your website.

Basic mobile SEO & site architecture

One of the best things you can do to improve your mobile search results is follow traditional SEO best practices as closely as possible. While mobile bots and indexes are different from web search, things like title tags, heading tags and alt tags are still very important.

If you have done a good job on your traditional SEO, the first step is to create a secondary mobile style sheet for your traditional site, and call it “handheld.css.” This will allow you to format your existing pages for viewing on a mobile phone without having to create separate mobile content. It allows you to leverage the SEO value that you already have on your existing site without creating new pages. You can use the mobile style sheet to block things from being rendered using a “display:none” attribute in the stylesheet. Mobile phones (except iPhones) will automatically pull the “handheld” style sheet.

iPhones are bit different, and do not look for mobile “handheld” style sheets. To address this problem, you should duplicate your handheld sheet to create one that is specifically for the iPhone, and call it “iPhone.css.” Even though the iPhone is meant to render full web pages, research has shown that people still prefer mobile-formatted content on iPhones.

In some cases, mobile search engines will want to rank a traditional page, but deem it ill-suited for rendering on a mobile phone—sometimes even if it has a mobile-specific style sheet. In these cases, the mobile search engines will rank your traditional content, but “transcode” it for viewing on a mobile phone.

The transcoded version of the site is hosted on a temporary subdomain of on the search engine’s domain. In many cases, this provides an under-optimized user experience, because navigation is sometimes misplaced or broken, and single pages are broken into multiple pages for faster download. It can also be problematic for tracking the activity on your mobile site, and if anyone links to the content, the actual website may not get credit for the links. To address this concern, you must include a “no-transform” cache-control in the header for your traditional content. The no-transform designation in the cache control of the header should prevent the page from being transcoded.

The next step is to include a mobile site map. Google has a tool that can help you build a mobile sitemap. If you are using multiple markup languages, for instance XHTML and WML you should submit a separate mobile sitemap for each language that exists on the site, and include only the pages that will render in browsers that can read that type of code. Be sure to link to the mobile site map in your robots.txt file, just like you would for a traditional site map.

Submitting a mobile site map, adding the mobile style sheet and the no-transform tag should be enough to get the mobile search engines to start crawling and ranking your content. Mobile browsers are unsophisticated and networks can be slow. Another best practice to ensure that your traditional content will work on a mobile phone is to code in strict XHTML. This will give you the best chance of rendering well across the highest number of phones and browsers.

Sloppy HTML, or bad JavaScript can really cause problems on some mobile browsers and can also impact download and rendering time of pages. Making sure you have pristine code will create an efficient crawl for the mobile bots, ensuring that they index as much as possible with each visit. If the content on your traditional website is very streamlined, with small file sizes and minimal complex code like JavaScript, AJAX and Flash, this could be enough. If not, you will have to move on to the next steps.

Advanced mobile SEO and site architecture

If the pages on your traditional site don’t use external style sheets, have a large file size, sloppy code or lots of multi-media content that could have trouble rendering on mobile phones, you might need to create mobile-specific content on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory (such as www.m.yoursite.com or www.yousite.com/m). This can be problematic for SEO, because it can split your links and traffic between two sets of similar pages. In terms of usability though, it may be worth the effort.

In your mobile-specific pages, you should also use a “handheld” style sheet and the no-transform designation, but you can also re-arrange the code so that it is more suited for mobile rendering and crawling. If you have extensive top navigation, the best practice is to move it to the bottom of the page, and include jump-links to it at the top of the page. The jump-links should link to major sections of the page, or could just link to your “main content,” “main navigation,” and “contact information.” These jump links will allow people to see more of the unique content above the fold, and will also minimize the amount of scrolling a user will have to do to find information on the page.

Ideally, mobile search engines would be able to see that you have both mobile and traditional content, and would choose to rank your mobile content above your traditional content in mobile search. Unfortunately that is not the case yet. In most cases, your mobile content is competing algorithmically against your traditional content in mobile search results, even when it is on a mobile subdirectory or mobile subdomain of your existing site. The mobile content is newer, has fewer links and sometimes, less content so it may be at an algorithmic disadvantage. That said, the next step is to link between the two versions of the site.

“Browser-detection and redirection, then self selection” is the mnemonic device that I like to use to describe how mobile and traditional websites should interact. Browser detection and re-direction is a process that looks to see what browser the web visitor is using to access the site; if a mobile browser is requesting the traditional site, a PHP script seamlessly redirects the user to the mobile site. If a traditional browser is requesting the mobile site, it seamlessly redirects them to the traditional site. This is especially handy if your traditional website out-ranks your mobile website in mobile search, but it can also be handy if your mobile site happens to our rank your traditional site in traditional search—which can happen.

The self-selection part of the rhyme simply refers to the idea that you should be linking between the traditional site and the mobile site with a text link. It is important that the link goes page-to-page rather than from any page on the traditional site to the home page of the mobile site, or vice versa. The link should be on the word “mobile” or “iPhone” if you have an iPhone-specific site. This is another great signal to give the search engines that the mobile content is optimized for mobile viewing, and should rank well in mobile search results. Links should always go from the traditional site to the mobile site and vice versa, to ensure that users are able to find exactly what they are looking for.

There are important notes about placing the self-selection link on your traditional sites. I highly recommend placing it in the very upper left hand corner of the traditional page. It should be a text link with appropriate anchor text that indicates mobility, but it should also include an image of a phone with good anchor text. This is because when traditional pages render on mobile phones, in some case the right site of the page is cut off or not displayed without side-to-side scrolling. If the button is placed in the upper right hand corner of the page or at the bottom of the page, it could be totally missed.

The phone image is necessary because in many cases, mobile phones with true-web-browsers will display traditional pages that are zoomed out to such a degree that normal size text-links become too small to read; the image helps catch the users eye. When people click the link, it is best to set a cookie, so that it tells the browser to always automatically redirect to the mobile version of the site. Not all mobile phones support cookies 100% but enough do that it is worth your time to do it.

Mobile platforms and software

If you are using a platform to “mobileize” your site, there are a couple things you need to look out for, as they can have a dramatic effect on mobile SEO. Most mobile platforms simply take the existing content on your traditional page and remove all complex code and media, leaving simply text and a minimal amount of images. This is basically the same as the “transcoding” that the search engines do, though with a proprietary platform it is more customizable. The first problem with these kinds of software is that if they are web based, they may include the mobile content on a subdomain of their main domain, rather than including it on your domain. This generally looks something like: www.yourdomain.theirdomain.com. In terms of SEO, that means that you are building up their domain rather than yours, and they have all control of the hosting. Any links, traffic or rankings that your mobile content accumulates are actually accredited to their domain rather than your own.

The next problem with mobilezing software is that frequently they will create temporary or poorly optimized file names, removing any SEO value from your site architecture or from links that use your URLs as anchor text. Even if the mobile content is on your own domain, the bad file names make it highly under-optimized. When your mobile content is on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory the best bet is to always mirror your traditional site architecture. This lets you take advantage of your previous efforts, including keywords in your file structure. It also makes it much easier for developers to link between the mobile and the traditional content, and to understand what is going on.

Again, you will need to submit a mobile site map and link it from your robots.txt file. If you are putting content on a mobile subdomain, you actually need to create a separate robots.txt file and place it and the mobile site map at the root directory of your mobile subdomain. It is fine to also link from the site map in root folder of the primary domain, but it is best to do both. With this strategy your mobile-specific content should be pared-down and optimized enough that it will out-rank the traditional site in searches on less sophisticated phones. In searches on smart phones, your traditional site is more likely to rank, but the browser detection and redirection should ensure that mobile users still get to the correct content. If you use this strategy, you actually provide a good user experience and the best chance of ranking well on the largest number of phones.

The reason I like this strategy so much is because it provides a lot of fall-back options, if something goes wrong. There are so many different mobile handsets and mobile browsers that it is hard to know that your web content will perform flawlessly. If browser-detection and redirection fails, you still have the self selection option. If that fails or is missed, you still have the handheld style sheet on the traditional content to improve its rendering on the mobile phone. This strategy works because it gives the mobile search engines lots of clues that your content is appropriate for ranking in mobile search. It also allows you to leverage the existing SEO power of your primary domain and still provide separate mobile experience when necessary.

Risks associated with mobile SEO

As you might have guessed, creating a copy of your website and putting it on a subdomain risks duplicate content issues. You would think that the mobile search engines would be smart enough to understand and interpret the duplication, but they can still get confused. If this is the case, your newer mobile content has little hope of ever outranking your older traditional content, even in mobile search. While the browser-detection and redirection should take care of this issue, you the duplicate content also risks bleeding a bit of the SEO value from the content on the traditional site.

If this is a concern, the best thing to do is try using the canonical tag, to push all the value from your mobile site back to your traditional site, and then rely on your browser detection and redirection to take care of the rest. The risk here is that you will hurt your rankings for searches on the less sophisticated phones, because you are pushing all the SEO value to the non-mobile content. The next option, if that doesn’t work, is use your robots.txt file to block the traditional crawler from reaching your mobile content, and potentially also blocking the mobile crawler from accessing your traditional content. This can be a bit risky, and should approached with caution, but should also improve the efficiency of both crawlers, keeping them focused on the content that is most important to them.

The other risk associated with any sophisticated mobile SEO strategy is that you get in trouble for the browser detection and redirection. Search engines are wary of automatic redirection because of its historical use as a spamming technique. The good news is that the search engines are very much in favor of good usability. Since the redirection is for the benefit of the user you should be OK, as long as you are providing the search engines with the same content as the visitors and you are not trying to do anything sneaky. This however, is another good reason to link directly from page-to-page, when you are creating the self selection links, because that is the best way to ensure that the two pages in the redirect scheme have similar content, so the redirect is less likely to be perceived as deceptive.

The future of mobile SEO

As you might have noticed, the mobile space and the development of mobile technology is moving along quite rapidly. It is important to understand that the search engines are scurrying to keep up, and they are still doing a lot of testing. Mobile algorithms get updates just like traditional web search algos, and in some cases, they can be significant.

Changes like the increased personalization of search results and the inclusion of real-time content like tweets and wall-posts is great for mobile search because it provides the user with information that they want quickly and easily. When you think about it, computers can be shared, but mobile phones rarely are, so the level of personalization in mobile search will continue to expand. The search engine can almost always safely assume that the person searching on your phone is you, and they can adapt results based on your previous search behavior, even when you are not actually logged in.

Mobile SEO can also be very focused on location, and though the search engines re not yet actively including your current GPS location in normal mobile web search, I think they will soon. Currently, to include GPS location data with your search query you actually have to set your location before you do your search. The potential for automatic inclusion of location information coupled with the personalization will make mobile search results even harder to anticipate and track. Mobile SEO will focus heavily on traffic as a measure of success for exactly this reason. The caveat is that if you are using mobile SEO to drive foot traffic to a store, people may get everything they need from the map, address, phone number and other information included in a mobile search result, and they may not even need to click through.

Applications are also altering mobile SEO. Mobile searchers are actually turning to mobile search applications instead of web search more and more. These include search engines like WikiTude, UrbanSpoon, RedLaser and Shazam. Downloadable search applications have different input mechanisms that can make them more fun, more interactive or more useful, and in many cases, the results tend to be more specialized and provide more information than a regular mobile web search.

It is also important to understand that applications are actually ranking in Google search results somewhat like a Universal result; so if your app is ranking well in the app store it could be pulled into a normal search result. With the launch of Google’s new mobile application marketplace Campfire, as well as the Android Marketplace and the AppStore, you can expect this to happen even more, both in mobile and traditional results. When you click on the link in the search results, it actually opens the AppStore on your phone or iTunes on your traditional computer, executing a command much like opening a PDF file in Adobe reader. Having applications that rank well in the application marketplaces is important for driving downloads, but it is can also be a strategy to push competitors down in traditional search results, like videos or images that rank in Universal results might do.