SEO for 2016: The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide

The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide 2016

“Less than 5% of all businesses on the Internet use professional SEO services,
however of those who use Professional SEO services, they garner 87% of all
clicks on the Internet.”

SEO 2016 is dedicated to:
This Tricks is dedicated to the SEO’s, the content writers and the webmasters who
spend countless hours in the pursuit of the perfect search engine placement. And
specifically to those who are willing to share knowledge with their peers.

And there are too many to name, but to all of those who nurtured my knowledge
and have helped me become one of the best Search Engine Optimization experts
in the world.

 Chapters:

• Where SEO Began
• What’s New In 2016
• Chapter 1 – SEO

1. My website looks better than my competition! I’m good, right?
2. Search Engine Algorithms
3. Sidebar: How do search engines collect information on websites?
4. Skynet RankBrain Algorithm
5. Panda Algorithm
6. Penguin Update
7. Penalty Algorithms
8. Domain Name Match
9. Manual Intervention
10. Hummingbird Algorithm
11. PDF Algorithm
12. Search Engine Queries

• Chapter 2 – Keywords

1. The Science behind Choosing Keywords
2. Long Tail Keywords
3. Creating the Meta Data for Each Page
4. Configuring the Keyword Meta Tag
5. Configuring the Meta Title Tag
6. Configuring the Description Tag
7. Configuring the GoogleBot and the Robot Tags
8. Language Identifier
9. Configuring the Meta Revisit Tag
10. Configuring the Meta Location Tags
11. Configuring the Meta Subject Tag
12. Configuring the Author and Copyright Meta Tags
13. WordPress Meta Data
14. Choosing Quality Keywords

• Chapter 3 - What do I need to do first for SEO?

1. Adding Your Website to Google Webmaster Tools
2. How to Add and Verify A Site:
3. The Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard
4. Configuring Webmaster Tool Settings
5. Sitelinks
6. Setting URL Parameters
7. Change of Address
8. Creating Users
9. Associates
10. Malware
11. Traffic Search Queries
12. Links to Your Site
13. Internal Links
14. Sitemaps
15. Remove URLs Option
16. Structured Data
17. HTML Improvements
18. Content Keywords
19. Data Highlighter
20. Other Resources
21. Next Step, Add a Local Business Listing To Google Places
22. Next Step, Adding Your Site to Bing Webmaster Tools
23. Verification Process
24. Bing Webmaster Dashboard
25. Configuring Your Site
26. Reports and Data
27. Diagnostics and Tools
28. SEO Analyzer
29. Next Step, Add a Bing Business Portal Listing
30. Next, Add a Business Listing To Yahoo!
31. Next Step, Make Sure Your Website Has Good Mechanics
32. Next, Submit Your Website to Bing
33. Next Step, Submit Your Website to DMOZ
34. Next step? Use A Major Shortcut! Use Submission Complete to Make the Rest of this Job Easy

• Chapter 4 – SEO and Website Structure

1. SEO or Design Should Be Considered First?
2. Implementing SEO in tDesign Before It Is Live
3. Design and Optimizing For Devices
4. Focus On Your Websites Impact
5. The Very Basics of SEO in Design
6. Meta and HTML Tags
7. Header Tag Content
8. Body Text
9. Sidebar: Keywords in Text
10. Sidebar: Things to Avoid
11. Links
12. Alternative Tags
13. These Alt tags are also a good place to include additional keywords to
14. make your site more relevant. Human visitors
15. Other Items You Should Make Space For
16. How to Create an RSS Feed for a Static Website
17. Creating an RSS Feed From a Blog
18. Other Valuable Content
19. Other Website Considerations
20. Hosting Location
21. Keyword Frequency
22. Tips
23. Keyword Density

• Chapter 5 – Off-Page SEO

1. Placing Keywords in Your Incoming Links
2. The Quantity of Incoming Links
3. Incoming Link Quality
4. Bad Links
5. Official News Sources
6. Good Website Links
7. Sidebar: Getting Good Links from Customer Reviews
8. Matt Cutts From Google
9. Disavow Tool - Common Mistakes
10. Customer Review Acquisition Strategies
11. Link Juice
12. Sidebar: The Orphan Page Link Test
13. Linking Within Your site
14. Other Things on Your Linking To Do List
15. Buy a Blog
16. Using Social Bookmarking Sites
17. Using Directory Links
18. Buying Text Links Is A “No No!”
19. Creating Outgoing links
20. Where are my links from?
21. Diversity of Your Links
22. Negative SEO
23. Google or Bing Link Penalties
24. Link Spamming
25. Comment Spam
26. Blog Spam
27. Viral Marketing
28. Self Promoter
29. Money Making Spam
30. Varied Linking Text
31. Sidebar: Getting Good Links
32. WordPress Blog Commenting
33. Forum Posting

• Chapter 6 - Google Analytics

1. Standard Reporting Options

• Chapter 7-Social Media

1. Social Media’s Value
2. Social-Media Strategies
3. Social Media Etiquette
4. Social Media Outlets

• Chapter 8-SEO Goals

1. Time and Effort in an SEO Plan
2. SEO Plan Details
3. Keyword Research
4. Reputation Management
5. Ripoff Report Reputation Management
6. PPC
7. Reprioritizing Pages
8. Additional Plan Items
9. Completing the Plan

• Chapter 9 – Black Hat Tactics

1. Flash
2. Using Dynamic URL’s
3. Dynamic Code on Pages
4. Robots.txt Blocking
5. Bad XML Site Map
6. Abnormal Keyword Delivery
7. SEO Spam
8. Webmaster Central Blog
9. Creating Doorway Pages
10. Meta Jacking
11. Agent Delivery
12. IP Delivery / Page Cloaking
13. Link Farms
14. Spamblogs
15. Page Highjacking
16. Link Bombing
17. What to Do If You Have Been Banned
18. Look Up Your Links and Disavow the Bad Ones
19. Google Reconsideration Request
20. In Google’s Webmaster Tools which is found at the link:
21. Outgoing Link Issues
22. Broken links
23. Website in a Bad Neighbourhood
24. Too Many Outbound Links Can Be Bad, As Well As None At All
25. Hidden Links
26. Ads
27. Google Calling You Out
28. NYT and WSJ
29. Third party trust metrics like Blekko, WOT, McAfee Siteadvisor
30. Making Google look stupid
31. Technical issues
32. Robots.txt
33. No follow
34. Duplicate titles and descriptions
35. Non-crawlable links in JavaScript
36. Neither a penalty Or Your Fault
37. Algorithm changes
38. Competition got better
39. Current events

• Chapter 10 – Website Marketing Principles

1. Sales Principles You Should Adopt
2. Stability
3. Statistics
4. Testimonials
5. Self-Credibility
6. Demonstrations
7. Guarantee
8. Accessibility
9. The Personal Touch
10. Admit Imperfections Upfront
11. People Will Buy to Save Money
12. Special Tactic for Creating Urgency
13. Tell People the Value They Are Getting
14. Research
15. Marketing Tools
16. Don’t Just Dream It, Do It!
17. See What Your Potential Clients Desire and Play on That
18. Dealing with Adversity

• Chapter 11 – Targeting More Than One Keyword

1. Sitemaps XML format
2. All XML Tags
3. Saving your Site Map
4. Submit Your Site Map to Google and Bing
5. Where to go for more information

• Chapter 12 – When You Need Professional SEO Services

1. Hiring the Right Professionals
2. Recognizing SEO Scammers
3. What to Expect From a Professional SEO Company

• Chapter 13 - Educating Your IT Department or Website Developer

1. Lend a Hand, Don’t Reprimand.
2. Feel Their Pain.
3. Be Realistic.
4. Be Available.
5. A Box of Krispy Cremes Would Be a Good Gift Here
6. Give Them Tools to Help Them
7. Appendix A – SEO Checklist for New Non-Ranking Sites
8. Accessibility
9. Keyword Targeting
10. Content Quality and Value
11. Design Quality, User Experience, and Usability
12. Social Account Setup
13. Link Building
14. Social Media Link Acquisitions
15. Appendix B – SEO Resources
16. Best SEO Blogs
17. SEO Information Resources
18. SEO Tools
19. SEO Forums
20. SEO Conferences
21. Appendix C – Panda vs. Penguin
22. Panda vs. Penguin
23. The Titanic’s Of Algorithm Updates from Google
24. The Panda Update
25. The Penguin Update
26. Keyword Stuffing
27. Hiding Text
28. Cloaking
29. Unnatural Link Building
30. Paid Links
31. Exact Match Anchor Text on Links
32. Debunking the Panda and Penguin Update Myths
33. Appendix D - Click Fraud Click Fraud
34. Click Fraud Is a Crime
35. Index

Where SEO Began

          

         In early 1999, I was elected president of the Sacramento Cisco Users Group just shortly after I wrote my third Cisco Certification book. The users group was dedicated to getting its members certifications, access to training on routers, switches, and using hardware to give better quality of service (QoS) to the local networks and web servers.

Just a year later the users group had over 1,000 members and people would arrive from the Bay Area which was a two hour drive to attend the meetings. If you have been in the computer industry for any length of time I am sure you can remember the Y2K issue and after the fear subsided many IT experts were looking for other careers. Many were focused on creating web servers and using Cisco devices to make the high traffic websites accessible across multiple servers. This kept the user’s web experiences fast and friendly but also eliminated a point of failure. If one of the web servers failed another one was there to keep the website up.

Yahoo! AltaVista, and AOL were the primary search engines at the time. As members in the group started to learn HTML and creating websites they started to ask what, “How do we do so well with the search engines?” One of the early speakers at the group was Mike Monahan from Excite, then later Lycos. He was responsible for creating algorithms and keeping SPAM off the first few pages of the search results.

It pretty easy to tank back then. Add some good Meta tags and put the words on the page which you wanted to be found for. Back then it was really that simple to optimize your website. There was a second part and that was to submit your website to all the search engines one by one manually by using their submission URL’s to submit your website over and over until each search engine started looking at your website.

In the year 2000, I was also teaching Cisco and Microsoft certification classes in Plano, Texas. The topic we were discussing was brought up about a group I represented in the Sacramento area whose main goal was to market to the search engines. Questions were asked by the attendees on what we did and the different topics we addressed. One of the members of the group was Ted Nugent, who at the time was an editor for the quite popular PC Computing magazine.

A few weeks after the class was over I received a call from Ted about wanting me to write an article which explained what was needed to be done in HTML to get your website to be found by the search engines especially Yahoo! and Excite which were the most popular at the time.

That article was published in November of 2000 and was titled “Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines”. Soon that article was copied, rewritten and posted all over the world. More people have made minor changes to that article and called it theirs than I think any other article ever posted on the Internet. Today most every book and text on Internet history credits me with starting the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which was first used in that article. Had I only known how popular it would become at the time and I had the forethought to get the domain name “SEO.COM”.

In the year 2001 I started doing SEO for my first client’s websites and every year since I have written a book to update my friends and colleagues on search engine optimization. Since 2001 there has never been a year where there have not been more changes to how you need to optimize your website than the previous year. This year I think was the most challenging and has the most number of changes. Not only that I have some insight in to what changes will be coming in 2017.

SEO now encompasses not just what is on your pages but what you do off-page for your website (on the Internet). This has changed so much in just the past year as well. This includes social media, link building, and what you need to do to make your website look as though or become an authority in your industry has changed so much as well.


NOTE: Link building has not gone away regardless of what Google has said or
stated publically and I can prove it. I will speak more about that later in this
book.

What’s New In 2016

          

         The biggest changes and what’s new for 2016? Well this year it will beimpossible to do SEO without a mobile website. You need to think of Google as morethan one search engine because mobile devices now have their own search results.
Second biggest? Well I might have some who think the new Artificial Intelligence Algorithm called RankBrain should have been first. RankBrain appears to be a product ofa 2014 acquisition by Google of a company called DeepMind. I will cover this newalgorithm extensively in the first chapter.

Third biggest? Well it is a combination of Google Author, Rich Snippets,Semantic Markup, Data Highlighting and great content. If you have never heard of theseterms you better get used to them because they are not so new and they are here to stayand you won’t rank very well this year without them.

This last year has been a never ending battle for ranking position and this battlebelieve it or not is getting hotter for 2016. Google is both a friend and a foe for businessesusing the Internet to market their products or services. To compete, businesses mustutilize SEO or die for the most part. Especially since many who were doing SEO havegiven up and just gone to Pay-Per-Click (PPC). This avenue though is based on anauction system and made so the highest positions in PPC go to those willing to pay themost. It is getting more and more expensive. The more players there are the worse it gets.

The cost per click is raising faster than the cost of raw materials and eating moreand more in to a company’s profits. The cost for one click for the word “Microsoft”? Itjust reached $45. Local searches for the keyword “DUI Attorney” have gone past $20.00a click in some markets.

I have seen so many businesses this past year that relied on PPC instead of SEOtake a fall and go out of business. I have also seen businesses who were doing PPC andconcentrated money on their SEO have a windfall. You always want to do PPC butconcentrate more of your money on SEO as it garners better results for the cost overtime. People click on organic results 8 times more than PPC. Why do they click onorganic results? Because they usually get more relevant information. Anyone can put anad out on Pay-Per-Click if they are willing to pay for it.