SEO Professionals already know that Google says that there are over 100 factors that go into ranking a web page. How many you need to address is dependent upon what your competition is doing. If they’ve mastered 10 areas of a page to get their ranking, you’ll need to focus in those same 10 areas and more. If they’ve focused on 50 different areas, spending time with only 10 will seem frustrating to you as you wonder why your site isn’t taking over the competition. The good news is there are tons of industries that I’ve come across where there is little to no competition or poor search engine optimization for the top rankings.
What follows is a list of areas that top SEO professionals look at when determining which areas of a site to improve.

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White hat / Black hat SEO.

White hat SEO means to use honest tactics to improve your positions in the search results. These tactics include many things webmasters might reasonably do to their site if they were not trying to improve their positioning.  Adding text to alt tags for example is something a good html program might do automatically. You won’t get punished for that. Getting links to your site is something that can happen naturally over time. You won’t get punished for that either. So what’s frowned upon?

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To optimize a web page simply means to make it more appealing for the search engines. Making your web pages more appealing for SEO does NOT involve getting out your crayons and making the page prettier by using brighter colors or bigger images. To appeal to a search engine is to change,  add to or reformulate the underlying existing HTML code. There are a variety of different ways to do this. How much you need to do this varies from page to page. Let me give you some basic steps to take, followed by some advanced areas to focus on. You can use a program like Dreamweaver to modify pages, or you can even use Note Pad.

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Increasing conversion efficiency should be the goal of every Web site publisher. Regardless of what you’re trying to accomplish with the sit, having a higher conversion rate than your competitor provides you with a strategic advantage. …

These larger Web sites have all of the natural elements that search engines look for. All they have to do is build a Web site that is remotely search engine friendly and institute some basic best practices for SEO and they’d enjoy the benefits that it has taken smaller firms years to accomplish. With proper consultation, these large brands could begin to dominate the SERPs, if they could just learn to get out of their own way. …

More than ever, it’s so very important that a Web site be created for everyone, including those who are blind or disabled. Not only will you get more search engine traffic, you’ll gain users that may be a valuable part of your revenue stream. …

If you want to be found in local search, keep an eye on the growing number of local search directories. You should also consider using social media to both get attention for your business, and to follow other local search practitioners for advice. …

For many years, SEO consultants and agencies have faced one major challenge, beyond keeping up with ever-changing organic ranking algorithms: lack of implemented recommendations. Let’s look at some causes of this implementation paralysis, and ways to avoid or mitigate its impact. …

As a VP of advertising or CMO, where do you start and end your exploration for communication integration and efficiency? Let’s start with the basics and move toward the complex to address the questions. …

Every day, people are talking online about your company and products. Some discussions are positive; some are negative. The trick is to capitalize on these discussions to build a better brand and link popularity. …