Your Complete Guide to SEO in 2012 - Part 1

Very informational post
Waiting for part 2, Just what I need ATM.
+rep +ty

Thanks for the part 1, very informative for a Newbie like me, very much looking forward to part two.

Thanks for this, really great info. I didn't really know about LSI keywords but that really helped me brainstorm some good ideas for article content.

Can't wait for part 2, hope it includes a little info on social signals Hope you're feeling better as well

excellent information!

Hi Bro

Greaaaaat Post Like it very much and hope it's beneficiary for all SEO ers even me .If you remain any more idea please reveal soon.

Regards,
d

Thats a great read.Thanks alot, looking forward to section 2 Keep Rocking.............???

Section 1c - More on page SEO

Interlinking

Structuring your site so that each page on your site interlinks to some other page/homepage is a very good practice.
Here are some basic pointers that you should keep in mind when designing/creating your sites:
Have a top menu with pages like Home - Privacy Policy - Contact Us - Blog etc. Make sure the links in that menu are do-follow (99% of the time, they are by default). This is very basic practice but it would benefit you in the long run once your site gains some age and authority, Google will more then likely include "site links" in SERPs for your site. They look like this:


Other than that menu thing, try to include a sidebar with your latest or most popular posts on it.
There's a plugin called "Yet Another Related Posts Plugin" which lets you include a widget right under your post that displays related posts and links to them... its a very smart way to interlink your whole blog and Google is perfectly okay with that.


Using Images and Videos on your site:

Again its pretty basic advice (like the other ones) but don't underestimate the power of media. A blog/site with only text bores not only people but google bots also tend to love a site filled with different types of content e.g. text, images and videos etc.
You can find relavant images to use in your posts/pages on on Google images.
A little optimization is required when using an image.
Use proper alt text and title your image properly. Every once in a while, link it back to some other page on your site... while linking an image, make sure you put your exact keyword in alt text field.

Site speed does matter

Google ranks sites based on a lot of factors of which one is site loading speed i.e. how much time does your site (page) take to load.
The faster your site loads, the better.
Some basic pointers on how to improve site speed:

• Use simple and clean wordpress themes... Many themes have shitloads of features like sliders and this and that but guess what, it all adds up to decrease your site's loading speed.
• Delete unnecessary plugins - the more plugins you have activated, the slower your site will load.
• Get a good host - for small sites shared hosting is fine but if your site gets a lot of traffic you better get a decent VPS. I recommend Berman Hosting (not affiliated) for VPS as they have top notch machines for a fraction of what the big companies are charging you.

You can use this tool to test your page speed : https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

Some wordpress plugins to help you out:

Most of us tend to use wordpress over any other CMS platform due to its ease of use and flexibility/scalability. Many people wonder what are some of the best wordpress plugins for SEO.
Here are a few that are on top of my list (some are not directly related to SEO but they help quite a bit):

• Yoast SEO for Wordpress (Free) - you can use All in one SEO or Platinum SEO but Yoast is my favorite so far.
• SEO Smart Links (Paid) - this for interlinking. There are free alternatives out there, just google it
• WP Super Cache or W3 total cache for wordpress... this for caching which makes your site load a lot faster.

In addition to those three essential plugins for every wordpress blog, check out this thread to learn how to make your WP blog secure... not directly related to SEO but you don't want to see your SEO'd blog getting hacked do you?

Thats it for now.. I wrote this post in 10 minutes so I'm pretty sure I've left out some points worth mentioning but excuse me for that and feel free to add your own below.

Thanks everyone.

PS: Part 2 coming soon... this time I mean it by "soon"

Alright guys there is section 1c as promised.

That post has been merged in the first post (thanks to BigBuddy)... Do read it if you're a beginner in SEO world.

Awesome POST
this post was great i am new in seo a lot of information in it i hope to see other posts like this was a good idea to write that thanks man

cant wait for part 2
thanks a lot buddy

Great post!
Looking forward to read second part

This is one of the most straight to the point posts i've ever read on here...Great info.

Thanks to bk071 for an in-depth and informative post. Looking forward to part two. Any differing advice for someone using static/conventional .x/html sites? I've used Wordpress before, but a lot of times found that I don't have the same flexibility in coding and layout that I have with .x/html coding.

I've done a few sites with little more than notepad or equivalent, and still found that layout and coding can be easier than with Wordpress.

Once again thanks for writing information.

Waywyrd

Anything that debunks all the false myths and goes back to the basics is a huge +1 in my book.

Just another piece of general advice;

Don't believe everything that you read (not directed at OP, my own result and experiments come to the same conclusions) - when panda/penguin hit and when Google manually deindexed BMR... probably the three biggest events that happen within this year, a lot of things happened and a lot of people got penalized... but one trend that started...

People started making rumors and spread false information based on fear.

Yes, penalties were given out in the updates/manual deindexes; however, people spread all these other rumors that just were not true. For example, people started making claims that tools like Scrapebox/Xrumer don't work anymore...

Uh, these tools have hundreds if completely different uses other than blasting your crappy spun comments to thousands of crap quality autoapprove blogs that contain outgoing anchor texts with porn/pharma related words.

Make your own conclusions people; perform your own tests.

Thanks for the awesome post OP.

PandiBimla said:

Can someone please tell me exactly how i can do this, I didn't really understand it.

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You can set this on GWT ( Google webmaster tool ) but a lot of people here will advice you not to use GWT or Google analytics ...

Never used GWT but are you sure you are able to do this with it ? I now have four sites with the 4-6 link bars underneath but they are well planned out Authority sites with hundreds of pages of articles and thousands of indexed pages in Google....someone could have told me there was shortcut !

tritina said:

You can set this on GWT ( Google webmaster tool ) but a lot of people here will advice you not to use GWT or Google analytics ...

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nice sharing

suscribed and waiting for part 2.

Great post! It's very informative for many people.