6 easy steps to get Ranked for All Your Niche’s Keywords

Step 1: Keyword Research

Step 2: Analyze Your Existing Rankings

Step 3: Group Your Keywords

Step 4: Assign Each Keyword Group to a Specific URL on Your Website

Step 5: Perform On-site SEO for Each Assigned URL

Step 6: Build Links to Your Pages

What about E-commerce websites?

If you run an e-commerce business, then follow the steps above, in addition to the following:

• Properly arrange each of your products into corresponding categories, and set up category pages which highlight the best products within each category
• If you have less than 10 categories, link to each category from your homepage. If you have more than 10, link to your top five or 10 categories in terms of profit margin
• Ensure each product page has proper on-site SEO elements and encourage augmented content such as user reviews, comments, and editorial review or opinions
• Enable easy social sharing via share buttons

Best practices to help Google find, crawl, and index your site.

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action. If a site has been affected by a spam action, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

• Design and content guidelines
• Technical guidelines
• Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/.


• Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.


• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.


• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.


• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.


• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.


• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.


• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.


• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.


• Check for broken links and correct HTML.


• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.


• Review our recommended best practices for images, video and rich snippets.

Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.


• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.


• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.


• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.


• Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file.


• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.


• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.


• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.


• Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Google's goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve. Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools. For more information, tools, and resources, see Let's Make The Web Faster. In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
  

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here. It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please let us know by filing a spam report. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. While we may not take manual action in response to every report, spam reports are prioritized based on user impact, and in some cases may lead to complete removal of a spammy site from Google's search results. Not all manual actions result in removal, however. Even in cases where we take action on a reported site, the effects of these actions may not be obvious.
Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.


• Don't deceive your users.


• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"


• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

what is google panda updates?

Google’s announced that another Panda Update is being unleashed on its results, one that it says will impact 0.7% of queries. We’re calling it Panda 3.92, through we’re wondering if it’s time to declare Panda 4.0 upon us.
Here’s the official news from Google:
Panda refresh is rolling out—expect some flux over the next few days. Fewer than 0.7% of queries noticeably affected: http://goo.gl/woSU3
The link leads to Google’s official announcement of the first Panda Update back in 2011.

Panda Update History

We’ve had a string of updates since then, as follows, along with the percentage of queries Google said would be impacted:

1. Panda Update 1.0, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
2. Panda Update 2.0, April 11, 2011 (2% of queries; announced; rolled out in English internationally)
3. Panda Update 2.1, May 10, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
4. Panda Update 2.2, June 16, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
5. Panda Update 2.3, July 23, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
6. Panda Update 2.4, Aug. 12, 2011 (6-9% of queries in many non-English languages; announced)
7. Panda Update 2.5, Sept. 28, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
8. Panda Update 3.0, Oct. 19, 2011 (about 2% of queries; belatedly confirmed)
9. Panda Update 3.1, Nov. 18, 2011:  (less than 1% of queries; announced)
10. Panda Update 3.2, Jan. 18, 2012 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
11. Panda Update 3.3, Feb. 27, 2012 (no change given; announced)
12. Panda Update 3.4, March 23, 2012 (about 1.6% of queries impacted; announced)
13. Panda Update 3.5, April 19, 2012 (no change given; belatedly revealed)
14. Panda Update 3.6, April 27, 2012: (no change given; confirmed; first update within days of another)
15. Panda Update 3.7, June 9, 2012: (1% of queries; belatedly announced)
16. Panda Update 3.8, June 25, 2012: (about 1% of queries; announced)
17. Panda Update 3.9, July 24, 2012:(about 1% of queries; announced)
18. Panda Update 3.91, Aug. 20, 2012: (about 1% of queries; belatedly announced)
19. Panda Update 3.92, Sept. 18, 2012: (less than 0.7% of queries; announced)

Numbering Panda: From Panda 1 to Panda 2

Google doesn’t always announce these updates. Sometimes, we get reports of ranking changes being noticed, and then after the fact, we get a Google confirmation. Sometimes Google does announce them, either the day the go live (as is the case today) or shortly after the fact)
When Google announces or confirms and update, sometimes it explains how much of an impact it is expected to have on the search results. The very first Panda Update was huge, estimated by Google to have an impact on 11.8 percent of all queries done on Google in the US. In contrast, today’s announced update is said to have an impact on less than 1% of queries globally.
Google doesn’t number these updates. We began doing that when the second Panda Update happened. Since it was the second, we called it Panda 2.0. At times, people from Google have occasionally used our numbers, as have others (notably on SEOmoz’s excellent chart of Google algorithm changes).

From Panda 2 To Panda 3

When the third Panda release happened, we were ready to call it Panda 3.0. But Google itself said that this wouldn’t be right, that it was a minor update that wasn’t worthy of a full increase in number. That’s why we dubbed it Panda 2.1.
Following updates were all minor, so we carried along with the “point” naming, in other words, Panda 2.2, Panda 2.3 and so on.
In hindsight, we probably should have dubbed Panda 2.4 to be Panda 3.0, because it was such a major change in that Panda rolled out beyond the English language (except for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages). Still, perhaps we’re to be forgiven given what happened when we finally did get to Panda 3.0.
You see, Panda 2.5 came and went, yet another minor update. Then we had a warning of “Panda Flux” get issued, which made it sound like the schedule of Panda Updates happening every few weeks was changing to an ongoing update.
Instead, Google belatedly said that one of the updates we numbered as minor should have been tagged as major (and thus warranting a 3.0 figure). We did the best we could to figure out which one that was, which is why the October 19 update became Panda 3.0.

Getting To Panda 4.0

When do we finally get Panda 4.0? I suppose it’s whenever we want to declare it. Potentially, it happened in March. I say that because March is the last time Google said the impact on queries would be above 1%.
In hindsight, this seems an obvious metric to use, how big an update is as given by Google. But as I’ve explained, Google doesn’t always give that estimate. In fact, with Panda Update 3.5, no one even knew that a Panda Update had happened. Because it came around the time of the Penguin Update, all the ranking changes that normally signal an Panda Update were masked by Penguin Update changes. Only Google itself commenting that a Panda Update had also happened alerted everyone.
As the updates kept coming, we hit something unexpected. We were running out of point numbers. That’s why we ended up with Panda 3.91 last month and Panda 3.92 today.

Panda 20, Anyone?

We could go back and say that Panda Update 3.4 is being renamed to Panda 4.0, which would bring today to Panda 3.7. But there’s no guarantee we’ll have another major-enough Panda Update to get us away from having a Panda 3.98 or Panda 3.933 or … well, you get the point.
I’m against going back and renaming things, because people get used to a name, so changing adds to confusion, rather than clarifies it. Instead, I’d be curious to hear comments from others on how you’d like to see Panda naming (or numbering) go forward.
One thought is to lose the entire point system that started with Panda 2.1. If we’d ignored Google’s advice and just made Panda 2.1 into Panda 3, regardless of how “major” it was, we’d be at Panda 19 right now.
That leads me to think the next Panda update should be called Panda 20, regardless of how big it is, then going forward we simple increase the number by one.

source:searchengineland(dot)com