There are many advantages of using these tools, and I’ll mention few of them.

• They save time and you can perform the tasks easily.
• They semi-automate the SEO process at every step and make your optimization more convenient.
• They allow you to analyze the data and set your strategy cordially.
• They use proven techniques that are being used by many successful SEO experts in the field.
• They make your work more convenient.

We will just discuss the tools that are free and most commonly used, and they will help you to perform much better in your SEO campaign. You can browse through the links as there are no affiliate links.

Keyword Discovery Tools

1. Google Ad-words External Tool

It is a very useful and accurate tool it gives the actual number of searches performed per month on the keyword that you put in it.

2. Term Extractor

This is also a free tool provided by SEO Moz it extracts keywords from any given URL.

3. Microsoft Keyword Forecast

It is a free keyword research tool, and it is very useful that provides good keyword volume data, trends and demographics.

4. Word Tracker

It is a useful tool that provides keyword volume data based on queries to Meta’s search engines. You can define your keywords for your SEO campaign through this free SEO Tool.

5. Keyword Discovery

It is an alternative of overture and provides volume data based on user queries collected from different search engines.

6. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

It uses word tracker API to get an estimate on the volume generated by the keyword. Now registration is required before you can use it.

7. Keyword Density Tool

It is one of the most popular keyword density tools by SEO Chat. It helps in analyzing how much the keyword is targeted on specific page. Due to some changes in Google, it may not be accurate as it was before.

8. Term Target Tool

This tool is very useful it takes keyword and URL, and tells you how much you have scored.

9. Search Engine Keyword Tracker

This tool is very helpful it tracks search engine rankings historically. It is probably critical when you are doing internet marketing

** If you have any suggestions or any other tools that is good please comment and recommend to others.

It can be very difficult to catch link bait, and you need to push hard to get one. This blog post will guide you how you can catch the link bait easily.

News, Information, Latest Technology and Interviews

There are latest product developments such as Apple Ipad or Iphone 4. There was a blog post about the launch of Apple Ipad and Iphone 4, both get featured and the post attracted links from different famous websites like Technorati and other websites.

Political news, Sports news, cultural news and latest information are always attracted by different sources. Even the famous news from third world countries is featured on famous websites.

Interviews with famous people or even with bloggers hit the mark. You can find famous bloggers and interview them about their success stories. These interviews mostly get featured in different blogs.

Amazing Pictures

There are several photo blogs that post funny, shocking and unseen pictures. These pictures are picked up by various websites later on. It is the best idea to share your unique pictures to get link bait.

Attractive Titles

If you can make attractive titles, probably you can generate link baits. Usually how to, product reviews, few tips and guides can generate link baits. You can also make the titles attractive by adding crisp in your title, for example “5 easy ways to attract link baits” or “top 10 tips to rank high in search engines”. You can furthermore try some link bait generators available online.

Hours of Research

When you plan to attract link baits, you need to research your topic and spend hours in researching for information and ideas. These days even if you do a little bit of research, it will pay you off. The best way to research is Google through various keywords and read what other blogs have to offer and if there is anything they forgot to mention. You can catch the missing point to your advantage. The success behind link bait is a good research for ideas.

Original Content

You need to write original content to get link bait not even re-written content. If you are re-writing from some article, make sure that you just get the idea from that article not the whole story. If you are using some software to spin the content, then it will not get you the link bait because content generated by the software are not edible.

The bottom line is to do your research and write something good and try to make the content read well.

If you have purchased a new domain and need to redirect old website or blog to a new website, you need to consider applying 301 permanent redirect. It will help you not to lose rankings in search engines. You can simply ask your web host o do the job for you. Luckily, my web host provides all the technical services for free. I am now using site5 hosting. However, if you need to set up anually, it will be very hectic for you, especially for newbies.

Single Page Redirect

You can consider this code when you are redirecting a single static page. All you need to do is put the code in your index.php file, and if there is any other code, put this one below by giving a space like pa paragraph.

?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.yournewdomainhere.com/page.html");
exit();
?>

Canonical Redirect

The canonical 301 redirect will help you add or remove www to all the pages. This code will redirect without www domain to www like seotipss.com to www.seotipss.com.  u can replace the code with your desired address.

<?php
if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www') {
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://www.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']
.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
}
?>

.htaccess Single Page Redirect

You need to edit your .htaccess file and you can create a backup by downloading the file from File Zilla. You can find the .htaccess file in your root directory or if you are using wordpress you can find it in public_html folder.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm /new/http://www.yourdomainhere.com/newpage.htm

.htaccess Canonical Redirect

It is the same process you just need to put the code in .htaccess file. It will redirect users from without www to www domain.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomainhere.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomainhere.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

This will help you to set up 301 redirect on your blogs and website. I recommend that you use a webhost that provides all these services for free. It might be very confusing for newbies, as it was for me. Try to use the tools available in your webhost cpanel. Usually there are few options from where you can do this manually without using all the above codes.

Why we need 301 redirect? It will help you in search engines not to lose rankings. It is advisable before you make any change backup any data you have on your website. I lost my all the data of one blog before I asked my web host do the job for me. If you don’t have any idea, I would suggest you hire someone who is expert in handling the job. It is much better to pay someone rather losing all your important data on your website.

There is a lot of discussion about SEO experts and people are curious about this issue they always ask questions from experts what should we do to become  successful SEO Expert or SEO professional. I will guide you in simplest way so that you learn everything and know what actually SEO experts do.

Do Not Overestimate

You might have noticed each day many newbie’s enter into this field and they tell everyone that they are SEO experts. If you are a newbie and you are reading this, ask yourself do you know the basics of SEO? You can read the Google SEO starter guide for this reference. Being an SEO expert and just a link builder is two different things and why I am saying this because once I posted a job opening for SEO expert. And I interviewed several candidates and they were saying we can do directory submissions, link exchanges, social bookmarking, forums, blogs etc. If you know all these things, then it is good, but you need to learn more and more before you can say you are an SEO expert.

Do Not Underestimate

This thing applies to newbies and some of the experts out there as well. I always underestimate my SEO skills; hence I am always reading opinions on different blogs. You might be very good in SEO; you need to practice your skills on your websites and blogs. I never build links for my own blogs because I try to get Link Baits (which I will explain later).

Do Not Over Optimize

Most of the people over optimize their website and it is harmful rather than giving you any benefit. Always focus on quality rather than quantity and when it comes to link building, 10 high PR back links are much better than 100 back links with no PR.

You Love Blog Commenting

If you ask SEO people, what do they think about blog commenting? Most of the people think it is a good way of building back links. I would say blog commenting is the worst thing to get back links, as Google track all the spam comments and penalize those websites. You can read Google blog post about spam comments here. If you are just commenting for the purpose of getting back link, it will turn in your favour. And mostly people add keywords in the “name” field. Only low quality blogs will approve your comments or those which allow comment spam.

Content Is Always King

The famous saying is “Content is always King” and still content is king. Search engines love the fresh and new content. You can invest on creating content rather than building links. If you want to be an SEO expert, focus on content more than link building because good content will automatically get you back links as other websites will link to yours’. If you cannot write in native English, try using different grammatical and spell checking softwares to proofread your content. Good content will get you link baits as well.

Always Follow Simple Ways

You do not have to look for extra and unique techniques for SEO. If there would be any changes, Google will update their SEO starter guide. The simpler you are in SEO the more chances that you will become an SEO expert. Read some good SEO books like “The Art of SEO”, it is a very good book for everyone to get the understanding of SEO and search engine terms. Start from On Page SEO and get a good grip on it because if you do it right, you will complete 80% of SEO on your website.

Link Bait

As I have mentioned earlier “Content is Always King”, link baiting is getting natural links to your website. If you write a good informative post or an article with a little bit of research, you will get link bait from other websites. People will give reference to your websites, blogs and use it in forums to guide other people. Now again many people do not know what is link bait, as I once asked an SEO expert in Digital Point forums about link bait and after hearing the answer I was surprised. He said “Link bait I don’t know maybe it is black hat never tried this”.

I hope these simple tips will help you to get a grip on SEO and you can try the book I have referred “The Art of SEO”. If you want to add something, please comment.

1. Using Flash

Use of flash on websites is very cool, you can do lot of amazing things with flash and I personally like flash websites, but when you are using flash on your website it will take sometime to load. It is possible to build a website without a flash, but if you do not want to remove flash, then you need to use it in excess. You can enhance the user experience with flash rather than covering whole website in flash. It will help your website to work faster, and you can also compress the files to load faster.

There is another frustrating thing when a visitor visits a flash website, and they cannot load the flash website because they do not have the latest version of the flash player. Provide a link to upgrading the flash player, so that they can easily navigate through your website.

2. Using Images

Images are the important to attract the attention of the visitors on your website, but sometimes some of the images take a lot of time to load. You can overcome this problem by compressing the image files. I had a problem while I was reducing the size of the images, their quality decreased while reducing the size. You can use any good image software or any online service to resize your image to your needs.

Always try not to reduce the quality of images because quality of images is the important thing to consider. Compressing the images will help you to load your website faster, and it will increase the user experience as well.

3. Using Java Scripts

Java scripts are mainly used to load advertisements such as Google Adsense or any other third party java script code. You need to avoid the java scripts as much as possible, but it is the necessity as well. You can compress your java code to make it load even faster; the best tip to compress the java script code is to look for online java compression website. It will help your website to load faster.

You can also use the third party java scripts after compression, but when there is some problem with the java script provided by the third party it might affect your website to load slower.

4. Use Less Widgets

Using the widgets on your website and blog is great; you can easily put many things through the widgets. When I started blogging, I put too many widgets to make my blog look more attractive, but the loading time was significantly increased and at that time I couldn’t figure out the problem. Later on, I found it was due to too many widgets on the blog. It might take a lot of time for the users with slow connection and after reducing the widgets speed was increased.

When you are using the widgets on your website you need to consider following:

How many widgets do I need?

How many widgets I am using?

Which ones are necessary?

It will help you out to get rid of extra widgets on your website, and it will increase the speed of your website.

5. Using Redirects

Using the 301 redirects are considered to be SEO friendly and you can use it on your old domains or paths which you have moved to a new location. I have noticed while using the redirects that when you set up a redirect on your website, it loads the old address first then to new address. This will slow down the speed of your website if you are using too many redirects.

Try avoiding the extra redirects, you can use the 301 permanent redirects on your old domains, but avoid using them on other pages over and over. This will increase the speed of the website.

6. Choosing Web Host

You might be thinking how would a web host going to affect the speed of the website? If you take an example of a web host with slower server and extra load, it will affect your website to load slower. You need to be very careful while choosing a web hosting company. Ask a lot of questions before choosing a web host if you do not have a hosting experience in the past. Ask them about their server specifications and make sure they don’t oversell. If their servers are fast, then your website will also load faster as well.

7. Using Cookies

Try to use fewer cookies on your website, you might have seen some of the websites, which require having cookies enabled to load the website. It will slow down the speed for the users; do not put too many cookies on your website. Same rule applies when you are using a flash website.

Conclusion

These are few simple tips to help you make your website faster for the users. It will help you to speed up your website. If you want to add anything or have any suggestions add through the comments.

Make Sure You Don’t Block Blog Visibility

If you are a newbie you might not know that by default wordpress uses the option “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”. You need to turn it off from settings > privacy settings page.

Allow Comments

Comments are the good way to add content to your blog posts. You might get more information and visitors engage in interesting comments as well.

Use Canonicalization

Make sure you are using canonical URL option, if you page is accessible from more than one location, search engines might get confused or you might have a duplicate content penalty.

Add No Follow to Links

Always use rel=”nofollow” to less important links, it will help you pass the link juice. Also use rel=”nofollow” on your comments because most of the spammers got attracted by do follow links.

Use Alt Attribute on Images

Always use alt tag on your images on the blogs related to your blog posts and topic. It will help you rank in image search, there is an option in wordpress in newer version to add alt text to images.

Install XML Sitemap Generator Plugin

Creating an XML sitemap will help search engines to read all your pages. It is a good idea to use a XML sitemap generator plugin on your blog.

Use Customized Permalinks

You can use custom permalinks to make the post look more attractive and shorten the whole URL.

Use All In One SEO Pack Plugin

The best SEO plugin for wordpress is All In One SEO Pack, it provides you with many options. You can create custom Title, description and keywords and you can also customize each post title, description, and keywords. It also allows you set each page title structure; it will help you customize your blog pages. All In One SEO Pack is the complete SEO tool for your blog. Turn on the following options “use noindex for categories” “use noindex for archives” use noindex for tags”, it will help you no getting penalty of duplicate content.

Choose Your Blog Topic

It is always a good idea if your blog has a topic or some particular niche, it will help your blog to be more SEO friendly. You can select the keyword rich domain to target your niche.

Make Blog Posts Wisely

When you are making a blog post always try to target keywords after doing some research. Use long tail keywords with descriptive titles rather than using a small title. You can add custom title and description to your blog posts as well.

Conclusion

These are the top wordpress SEO tips, if you like to add more to it please comment on the post. If you follow them right it will help you to gain good rankings in search engines.

The best SEO for your business is the use of good keywords and using the fresh and keyword rich content on website. SEO does not mean only the link building, if you focus on only few things you can achieve the first page rankings without generating too much back links. The main key to SEO is simplicity with good thinking, if you properly use your keyword for your each page would help you rank good in SERP. Don’t ignore the other pages of your website if you make separate title tags, descriptions; it will help you more in getting the desired results.

Everyone says that lots of quality back links will help you in good rankings; I would suggest good content without any back links can help you rank No.1 in Google or any other search engines. I have created several blogs on different niches, which have good competition, but they are ranking good just because of unique and fresh content.

When people say content is king I would not disagree with this statement, you can make a good content in a few hours by doing research on internet. You don’t need to hire the expensive writers to do the job for you. If you do research for your niche only for one hour, it will help you find the good information that will be enough to write the content of nearly 500 words.

Search Engine Optimization Mania

Every day so many people are getting into this field and I always see most of the people say they are expert in SEO by doing the SEO only for few months. The basic essence of SEO is simplicity and quality, back links can be acquired at any stage for your website, but the fresh content is hard to create time to time. Now the SEO mania is increasing day by day you need to stay ahead of the competition. When I say you don’t need to take some extra steps, if you stick to the simple steps and keep doing and generating the good content you will get the desired results within few months without any aggressive SEO. If you need an SEO on already established website, I would suggest to do the analysis of each page rather than hiring an SEO for link building.

Some of the people might not agree with my views, but it is my personal experience from years. What I see that most of the SEO companies are just selling the attractive packages to get the customers. It does not mean that you ignore SEO, but just need to focus on small fish rather than catching a Crocodile.

Keep it Simple KISS SEO

When you start doing optimization do not go for big things, if you start with simple tasks first it would be very helpful. In other words, use the KISS formula to keep everything simple, some of the companies create some aggressive campaigns or some campaign which require extra; they are actually trying to get a customer.

Research Your Keywords

First of all research your keywords, what is your niche? If you have purchased the domain or you have a website already, look for your niche and keywords. Use some tools to research the keywords Google AdWords tools is best and you can also use Google Trends to see the search popularity. If you are purchasing a domain, go for keyword rich domain after defining your keywords.

Set 301 Permanent Redirect

If you are moving to a new domain set a 301 permanent redirect on your old domain, it will help you to keep the rankings. If you use 301 permanent redirect it is Google friendly and start link building on new domain. You can also set a 301 redirect on some of the keyword rich domains as well to get the advantage.

Set the Title and Description

If you have decided the keywords and domain name for your website, it is the time to set them properly on your website. The title of your website is the first thing that crawler read and it is the most important thing to rank good if you use keywords wisely. If you set up your home page title with your keywords it will help you rank good. For example, you can use “Primary Keyword – Your Company Name,” it will be a good combination.

The second most important part is the description of your website, Google show the description as a snippet in search results. Using a unique Meta description for each page can help you rank better in search engines. If you use the same keyword which was used in title can help you rank good.

Use Unique and Fresh Content

Search engines love unique and fresh content, if you want to rank high always use good content for your website. Your home page should have the relevant content and it should be 500 words long. If your content is too short, it might not be attractive do not use too long or too short content on each page.

Start Getting Good Back Links

When you start your link building campaign try to build links on good websites with high page rank. If you get a link back from a high pr page it will be good, but make sure all links are do follow. Use your keywords wisely in anchor text while doing link building, so that you get rankings with those keywords.

Set Robots.txt File

It is not necessary to have robots.txt file, but if you set up a robots.txt file it will help the old crawlers to search your website. Check for any errors in the file before you upload it your server; it will help you get more crawlers on your website.

Monitor Website and Rankings

After setting up all the things, install Google Analytics or any other tracking tool to monitor your website statistics and rankings. You can focus on things where you are getting most of your traffic. If you do everything right you will get the good rankings in a few months.

These tips will surely help you in starting your own SEO campaign if you do all the things step-by-step and keeping in mind the KISS formula, you will get good rankings. You do not need to go ahead on something else if you follow proper guidelines.

Long tail keywords have less competition as people don’t consider it well enough to rank, but it is lot easier to target and always bring in good traffic. If we take an example of the keyword “Advertising services” it might be very specific looking, but if we compare it with “professional advertising services USA” it is giving more information and more specific. There might be big competition with this long tail keyword, but it is lot easier to target rather than short tailed keywords. Most of the people target short keywords and ignore the potential of long tail keywords. If you define a particular niche with long tail keyword it is much easier to target and it will bring more traffic as your website will show up on first page of search engines. If you use keyword suggestion tool to get your keywords try using the long tail keywords. And if you are checking the monthly search for the long tailed keyword it might be very low, but you can get high ranking with that particular keyword.

I have a question, how many times do you type short generic keywords in search engines while searching? I never use one word or two words keywords in search engines. The other day I was looking for wordpress themes, I can just type in “wordpress themes” in Google to see the results, but I was more specific like “premium adsense wordpress themes” there is a lot of difference in both of the keywords. If you consider global searches, there are more number of searches with long tailed keywords as compare to short keywords. If you target a more specific niche and using all the keyword tools for generating keyword ideas, it will surely help you more. The best keyword suggestion tool is Google AdWords tool that is free and you can also use Google trends to check in which region there are more searches with that keyword. So which keyword are you going to target for your website?

If you ask me about link wheels I would never suggest that you go for a link wheel, but there are some clients which ask for link wheels because they have heard it boosts search engine rankings. Mostly SEO service providing companies has made it so much famous that people think it is worth trying. In real they are finding new ways to attract customers to hire them for their services. I regularly update myself with SEO and I have subscribed to Grey Wolf Blog, Matt Cutts Blog; they never mentioned link wheels. If you are a webmaster just follow the proper guidelines given to you by Google and other search engines to build links. If you don’t know about SEO and you always hire someone for the services then do not get attracted by these salesy kinds of SEO techniques. Usually SEO companies always make something new which attracts the webmasters.

If you are very much attracted by link wheel I would suggest always look for that if you are creating a link wheel or hired the services, are they making original unique content on each of the web 2.0 properties. When we create a new page or blog on these web 2.0 properties they always have 0 PR, as you know links from high PR counts much more than low PR. Always make sure after creating a link wheel do regular SEO of those pages to gain some page rank. Personally I would suggest do not go for a link wheel because it is just a waste of time and it is also not White Hat.