SEO

SEO has changed the past years that many online marketers are not sure what is outdated, what is important, what will actually work.

Submit your website to Google in order to appear in search results and have a good ranlking is nonsense.

Ranking is not the supreme end goal that it used to be. You could rank quite well for a term, get traffic, and make nothing from it.

SEO doesn’t require only technical expertise from IT and Web Designer making sure your website is crawlable and setting up redirects and XML sitemap files, but also web marketing expertise.

On-page or off-page SEO? When you invest in content, that content can be used for webpages, blog posts, lead generation offers, and guest posts on other sites. On-page SEO will bring more links over time. Your SEO strategy should be focuses on quality throughout on-page optimization, off-page optimization, user experience, and conversions.

What about Keywords? There is no ideal number of times that you should repeat a keyword on a page.

Meta Description? Having a relevant, compelling meta description can be the difference between a searcher who clicks through to your page and one who clicks elsewhere.

Make sure you have a social media strategy and to think of it as part of your search optimization efforts.

Your homepage content should be long enough to clarify who you are, what you do, where you’re located, how you offer support, your value proposition, and what visitors should do next.

Microsites and other domains I own that link or redirect back to my site will help my SEO? No, Google knows the domain registration name and the server where the website is hosted.

If you can take one thing away from this guide, it’s this: “Search experience optimization” is what SEO should really stand for.

1. Use  Facebook, and Twitter to share your content. Write content to your pages on a regular basis and share it with social media websites. This will help to show your services to a large audience and readers can find your content valuable and link to their own blog. Social media can help to create quality backlinks.
2. SEO copywriters will help to create well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase. So when you write your content ping search engines and let them know that you are the author of that content before it is scraped from other webmasters.
3. Make sure that webmasters create backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link and this must be done in a natural way without using any software for backlink building don’t try to optimise the page for several keywords at once.
4. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords and ask websites that link to you to change the text of the link if needed or remove them if you think that the website doesn’t give a useful experience to its visitors.
5. Use captions, “HTML title” and “HTML alt” with your images and pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on the text that surrounds them on the page.
6. To index videos, create a video sitemap or RSS feed and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account. Surround video content on your pages with a description of the video with keywords.
7. Don’t design your website for Googlebot to improve your ranking in search engines. The web pages must be the same for real visitors and Googlebot and avoid any cloaking technique. The geo-location can be used to change the title of the page based on the IP address to give the user a better experience.
8. Use canonical code to help Google not index duplicate pages. And also submit a sitemap in the Google Webmaster tool to help Google to understand the structure of your website and index useful and unique content.
9. Make your website easy to share, review, rate, etc. A website where anyone can leave feedback can give a better experience to its readers.
10. If you are on a shared server, make sure other websites under the same IP address are not on a blacklist because their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings and you will be penalised.

International SEO is the ability to optimise different websites for different audiences. Below you will find many different strategies that go into getting more traffic to your sites from around the world.

Use different domain extensions for different countries

Use .com for your main english website and "it" for Italy, "co.uk" for UK and use cross -domain canonical tags for websites with similar language to avoide content duplication.

Use local servers for each website

If you can afford it, I advice you to buy hosting sapce from different countries making sure that you don’t buy the cheapest option that could slow down your website. The faster your website loads, the better rank your site will have on search engines

Use the language meta tag

• English (U.S.): <meta http-equiv=“content-language” content=“en-us”>
• English (U.K.): <meta http-equiv=“content-language” content=“en-gb”>
• Italian: <meta http-equiv=“content-language” content=“it”>

Let visitors navigate to different locale sites

A list of different domain should be near the top navigation and footer.

Webmaster tools for location and sitemap

Submit a different sitemap for each website and make sure to select the right country for each domain.

Build a keyword list for each country or language

A correct and accurate translation of a keyword or term may not be what people actually use to search for a product or service locally. For this reason you need to hire a local SEO Consultant to find out the right keywords and provide native transaltion.

Keywords in the page title and URL

Google and other search engines also use the text of the URL of the page to determine the content of the web page and the page title should follow these guidelines:

• Be under 70 characters with no more than two keywords per page title
• The primary keyword should appear first
• Each page title on your website should be unique

Monitor your Rank

Keep checking your rank on search engines and track your progress.

Local site on local directories

Register websites on local sites and get inbound links from target countries. Get sites in the UK to link to your co.uk extension, sites in Italy to link to your .it extension, etc.

Avoid black -hat link building strategies

Don’t do the following:

• Link buying
• Link farming
• Article submissions

Use globally recognized fonts

It’s best to use common fonts on your website that are recognized around the world. This will help ensure the text is displayed correctly on most screens.

Use Responsive design

Responsive design is the leading solution to the mobile usability challenge and is also beneficial to search engine optimization.

Geo-target paid search campaigns

If you plan to use Google AdWords, be sure to geo-target your campaigns. This way you can create ads for particular countries and languages.

Use local social media

Use local social media to share your content and when you are tweeting, leave some space in your tweets to allow for “RT @Username” and room for users’ commentary. The more retweets you get relating to the keywords you want to rank for, the better your SEO will be.

Learn cultural differences

If your business targets customers in countries foreign to yours, learn about the different countries’ cultures to understand what appeals to them versus your country.

Research the local competition

Competition may be far different in other countries. In some cases, there are countries without any competition, and they are able to completely dominate the market.

Last personal advice on landing pages

Make sure attract more visits on your website and
turn that traffic into leads. You landing page needs to have a clear call to action.