The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website

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It's rare that Google reveals any of its actual ranking factors, so it came as a big surprise when representatives announced they would reward sites using HTTPS encryption with a boost in search results.
HTTPS isn't like other ranking factors. Implementing it requires complexity, risks, and costs. Webmasters balance this out with benefits that include increased security, better referral data, and a possible boost in rankings.
Google's push for HTTPS adoption appears to be working. A recent Moz Poll found 24% of webmasters planning to make the switch.

SEO advantages of switching to HTTPS

In addition to the security offered by HTTPS (which we'll discuss below) there are additional SEO benefits for marketers to take advantage of.

1. More referrer data

Whenever traffic passes from a secure HTTPS site to a non-secure HTTP site, the referral data gets stripped away. This traffic shows up in your analytics report as 'Direct.' This is a problem because you don't know where the traffic actually comes from.
If you use HTTP, traffic from sites like Hacker News shows up as 'direct', because Hacker News uses HTTPS.
Fortunately, there's a simple solution: when traffic passes to an HTTPS site, the secure referral information is preserved. This holds true whether the original site uses HTTP or HTTPS.
As more and more sites make the switch, this becomes increasingly important.

2. HTTPS as a rankings boost

On one hand, Google has confirmed the ranking boost of HTTPS. On the other hand, with over 200 ranking, it's likely you'll find the effect of any ranking influence to remain quiet small.
In fact, a recent study by Search Metrics showed no detectable advantage to sites using HTTPS.
Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own.
In fact, don't expect HTTPS to act as a silver bullet. If rankings are your only concern, there are likely dozens of things you can do that will have a bigger impact. Here are several:

14 SEO activities more impactful than HTTPS:

1. Attract links
2. Competitive analysis
3. Improve social meta tags
4. Reduce crawl errors
5. Fix duplicate content
6. Perform a site audit
7. Optimize for speed
8. Local optimization
9. International targeting
10. Create quality content
11. Target relevant search phrases
12. Freshen your content
13. Improve internal linking
14. On page optimization

Off-site SEO
Technical
Location
On-page SEO

3. Security and privacy

Many people argue that HTTPS only provides an advantage if your site uses sensitive passwords. That's not exactly true. Even regular boring content websites can benefit from HTTPS / SSL encryption.
HTTPS adds security in several ways:

• HTTPS verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to,
• Because HTTPS prevents tampering by 3rd parties, it stops Man-in-the-middle attacks, making your site more secure for visitors.
• HTTPS encrypts all communication, including URLs, which protects things like browsing history and credit card numbers.

My advice is this: Make the switch to HTTPS if doing so is reasonable for your business. Security and trust add to the small ranking gains, making it worth the effort if you can.

Challenges to overcome with HTTPS

1. Mistakes happen

Moving your entire site to HTTPS requires many moving parts. It's easy to overlook important details.

• Did you block important URLs in robots.txt?
• Did you point your canonical tags at the wrong (HTTP) URL?
• Is your website causing browser bars to display warnings that frighten people away from your site? (Side note: That's the very first article I wrote for SEOmoz!)

While rare, these problems do happen. Moz has spoken privately with webmasters who have seen both rankings and conversions plummet after implementing HTTPS.
In most cases it's a simple fix, but beware the risk.

2. Speed issues

Because HTTPS requires extra communication "handshakes" between servers, it has the potential to slow down your website – especially on slower sites.
Add to this the fact that speed is itself a ranking factor, especially on mobile.
The good news is, if you follow best practices your site should be more than fast enough to handle HTTPS. New HTTPS friendly technologies like SPDY offer you the opportunity to speed up your website more than ever before.

3. Costs

Many webmasters pay between $100-200 a year for SSL certificates. That's a significant amount for small websites. It's also a barrier that most spammers won't bother with.
On the other hand, it's completely possible to switch to HTTPS for free.

4. Not everything is ready for HTTPS

Sometimes, things don't play well with HTTPS. Older web applications can have trouble with HTTPS URLs. (Fortunately, Moz updated Open Site Explorer just this year.)
If you run AdSense, you may see your earnings fall significantly, as Google will restrict your ads to those that are SSL-compliant.
Even Google's own Webmaster Tools doesn't yet support HTTPS migration. The world may be moving toward 100% SSL encryption, but in the meantime be prepared for growing pains.

Growing number of sites using HTTPS

Lots and lots of sites use HTTPS today, but most restrict usage to checkout and registration pages.
Very, very few sites use HTTPS sitewide.
According to the latest statistics from BuiltWith, only 4.2% of the top 10,000 websites redirect users to SSL/HTTPS by default. While that number appears small, the percentage drops to 1.9% for the top million sites.

This number is likely to increase in the very near future as more websites pursue adoption.

SEO and HTTPS best practices

This post talks about the SEO implications of switching to HTTPS. If you are looking for a technical guide, there are several we'd recommend:

• Moving Your Website to HTTPS / SSL
• Switch to HTTPS Now, For Free
• HTTPS for WordPress
• How to Deploy HTTPS Correctly

What type of SSL certificate works best?

Companies offer a myriad and confusing array of SSL certificates. The two primary ones to pay attention to are:

1. Standard Validation SSL – Standard level of validation. Typically cost between $0-$100.
2. Extended Validation SSL – Offers the highest level of validation and often costs between $100-500.

From a rankings point of view, it makes absolutely no difference what type of certificate you use. For now.
John Mueller of Google has stated that Google doesn't care what kind of SSL certificate your website uses, but that may change in the future.
From both a security and user experience point of view, the type of certificate you choose can have an impact. Consider how different certificates alter how your website appears in the web browser address bar.

The green bar associated with extended certificates communicates trust, while the warning symbols associated with errors can cause worry with visitors.

SEO checklist to preserve your rankings

• Make sure every element of your website uses HTTPS, including widgets, java script, CSS files, images and your content delivery network.
• Use 301 redirects to point all HTTP URLs to HTTPS. This is a no-brainer to most SEOs, but you'd be surprised how often a 302 (temporary) redirect finds its way to the homepage by accident
• Make sure all canonical tags point to the HTTPS version of the URL.
• Use relative URLs whenever possible.
• Rewrite hard-coded internal links (as many as is possible) to point to HTTPS. This is superior to pointing to the HTTP version and relying on 301 redirects.
• Register the HTTPS version in both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Use the Fetch and Render function in Webmaster Tools to ensure Google can properly crawl and render your site.
• Update your sitemaps to reflect the new URLs. Submit the new sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. Leave your old (HTTP) sitemaps in place for 30 days so search engines can crawl and "process" your 301 redirects.
• Update your robots.txt file. Add your new sitemaps to the file. Make sure your robots.txt doesn't block any important pages.
• If necessary, update your analytics tracking code. Most modern Google Analytics tracking snippets already handle HTTPS, but older code may need a second look.
• Implement HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). This response header tells user agents to only access HTTPS pages even when directed to an HTTP page. This eliminates redirects, speeds up response time, and provides extra security.
• If you have a disavow file, be sure to transfer over any disavowed URLs into a duplicate file in your new Webmaster Tools profile.

Tips for FeedBurner and RSS

Many sites still use FeedBurner for RSS feeds. Unfortunately, Google stopped supporting it long ago and FeedBurner isn't compatible with HTTPS.
If you use FeedBurner, you'll need to migrate your RSS to an HTTPS-compatible service. If you're technically competent you can do this yourself, or FeedPress has a very inexpensive RSS migration solution.

Migrating social share counts

When migrating to HTTPS, you often want to preserve you social share counts. These are the numbers that display in social share buttons.
These counts don't impact your rankings (as far as we know) but they act as strong social proof, and it's frustrating to migrate a page with thousands of tweets and likes only to see them reset to zeros.

In fact, some social networks will transfer the social counts through their APIs, but it may take weeks or months for them to show up correctly. Here's a list of what does and doesn't eventually transfer over:

• Facebook: Yes
• Twitter: No
• Google +1s: Yes
• Google shares: No
• LinkedIn: Yes
• Pinterest: No

If you want instant karma, Mike King wrote an excellent tutorial on how to preserve your social share counts by altering the code of your social buttons. We used this method on Moz when we migrated from SEOmoz in order to preserve the counts on our content.

Example button codes to preserve social shares (edit for your site):

<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-send="false" data-layout="box_count" </div>

<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-counturl="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-url="https://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-count="vertical" data-via="moz">Tweet</a>

<div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations"></div>

Keep in mind: This only displays social shares from the URL you dictate. Because of this, it doesn't update your counts with any new social shares. This works best with content like older blog posts that are likely not to get many new shares.
If you expect your content to continue to earn social activity, you may simply want to let the numbers update naturally over time.

Making the leap

Much of the web is now moving towards SSL encryption, and within a few years it may even become the default. SEOs, consultants and agencies that become experts know may be rewarded as the popularity of the protocol grows.
Will you make the switch to HTTPS?

Resource: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

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Google Updates and On-Page SEO

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I received a little SPAM email from an SEO company based in Sydney this week(or was it last week?) and I always find it interesting when SEO Companies and Consultants have to resort to email spamming to increase their client base..

Remeber! The first rule about email spam remains..

Rule Number 1. Don’t do business with email spammers – It only confirms their “marketing” method.


So if this SEO company can do what they say… (Their pages are covered with “Google Page 1 Guarantee” banners) and can get your site to page one..

Why do they feel the need to email spam?

Why can’t they get their own site to Page #1?

Why was my site and email added to their email list?

Is this just accepted “marketing” in the current environment?

Well.. It is not accepted practice here at My SEO Guy. It’s SPAM, and we hate SPAM as much as the next guy.



Now having got that off my chest.. I want to address the content of the SPAM email which was a link to their latest blog post.

Two things stood out to me:

1. They mention Google Algorithm changes by name – “Google Pigeon”

2. They mention “the increasing importance of Onpage SEO”



Re: Number 1. – “Google Pigeon“

Sometimes I think SEO people toss these names around like they know something you don’t know and it somehow gives them more credence and expertise. Pigeon, Hummingbird, Penguin.. Whale, Aardvark.. What’s in a name..? Nothing.

The name means nothing and people guessing as to what the algorithm update entails and contains will give you no help.

Google keeps information about it’s updates to itself, and information from people like Matt Cutts is sparse and general in scope.

The overriding principle in regards to any Google algorithm change is… be doing the right thing in the first place, and nothing will change.

I can not think of one algorithm change in recent times(10 years +) that has affected, any of the sites we control or any of the clients we work for. Your SEO consultant should not be worried about algorithm changes..

If they are.. ask them why they are? What are they doing that is going to be influenced by a Google algorithm change? and if so why are they doing it?

I would love to hear the answers. Meanwhile keep an ear out for the “Earwig” update!



Re: Number 2. – “the increasing importance of Onpage SEO“

This one really struck me as odd, or misguided.. or just plain crazy.

The growing importance on Onpage SEO!

On Page SEO is and has been a fundamental of SEO before the term SEO was even invented. How can the fundamental of a process be growing in importance. That is sort of like saying there is a growing importance in the construction of walls when building a house.

On Page SEO – the use of keywords, ALT tags, image descriptions and names etc – is one facet of the optimisation process for any website and business, and without it optimisation would be non-existent. I guess it has become one of the new buzzwords to keep clients engaged and scared about things they may not know about.

My view is that it has not “grown in importance”, it is fundamental and continues to be fundamental and will always be fundamental. To say that it is more important than any other aspect is probably a little disingenuous.

Try building a house without walls and see.:)

Dave

Resource :

http://www.myseoguy.com.au/google-updates-and-on-page-seo/

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5 Universal Principles For Successful eCommerce-Sites

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When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge.
There is no “Consumer Trust for Dummies,” but as eCommerce designers, we need to focus on some fundamentals. The following topics may seem as obvious as walking into a seven-foot Wookie, but rest assured you will find plenty of websites with a mouth full of fur.

1. Paint Your Pictures At Home

If your core demographic is women between the ages 35 and 65 who have an annual income of $60,000+, you would treat them different than the 18- to 25-year-old male demographic. First and foremost in e-tail: forcing your visitor to think is a bad idea. When creativity stops being subjective and can be measured by a dollar amount, making sure you’re designing for the customer is a no-brainer.
Years ago, I had an SVP of DotCom tell my team, “You can go home if you want to paint pictures.” And for the rest of the day, I couldn’t wait to get there so that I could make sure the next morning his inbox was full of expletive material illegal in most counties. After calming down, I realized he was right. All along, what he was telling us was simply to design for the customer and not ourselves. This was a challenge for designers working in an eCommerce corporate atmosphere but a very important lesson to learn.

2. Good UX Is Like A Perfect Movie Score

Build brand loyalty to gain patient, forgiving customers for a lifetime. For instance, Apple’s customer loyalty exceeds all other brands with an unusual cult following. Apple lovers forgive the company when it makes mistakes and zealously defend the company’s products and reputation.
How do you make your customers trust you this much? The answer is to give the user an “Experience.” It is not enough simply to make a website usable. The experience you create for the customer has to make them not realize that they are “using” it. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and the recipe changes from website to website, but the right combination of usability, creative design, writing, psychology and metrics and a strong brand will create an experience through which your customers learn to trust you.
Like the perfect score to a film, a good user experience is unobtrusive and transparent to the consumer because “it just works.” The Apple model will not work for everyone, but I often find myself challenged with a W.W.J.D. moment. Ask, “What would Jobs do?” and then look at other websites for inspiration.

3. eCommerce UX Pitfalls To Avoid

Just because a website is usable, does not mean customers will use it. Usability and user experience are in the same family, but more often than not user experience is the forgotten child. There are key areas in which the two must co-exist. Below are suggestions for some areas where websites should spend as much, if not more time, on the user experience.

Product Detail page

The product detail (PD) page is where some retail websites drop the ball. Too much focus is put on the design and usability of the home page, and that effort does not continue through to the rest of the website. More of the user’s time is spent on the product detail page than any other. Here, you need to offer customers all of the information they are looking for but present it in an intelligent way as well.

A few recent trends on eCommerce websites are “no-click” alternate images and swatches. A user simply has to roll over an image, without clicking, to get immediate feedback. The same approach can be used to zoom in to the image. Other UX options for the PD page are smart fields that let users know they still have to perform a required action before proceeding, without getting a typical error message.

The Checkout Process

Much like the PD page, the checkout process is a critical piece that engages the customer on a somewhat intimate level. However, unlike the PD page, where customers want to spend time to make sure they want what they are looking at, the checkout process should have as few steps as possible. Too many steps and the customer feels trapped.
But too quick and they feel like they have lost control. For instance, asking for credit card information too soon will seem out of order and no doubt scare even the most seasoned online shopper into abandoning their cart. Hidden taxes and shipping costs will make them feel like you are trying to take advantage of them.

Security

Always making sure your customer knows that your website is secure and that their privacy will never be compromised goes back to the issue of trust. It does not take much effort to display a message telling your customers that they are safe in your hands; a footer link to your privacy policy is not always enough.

Page Weight

A page’s weight is determined by its file size, by adding up every image, every line of code and anything that gets loaded when the user first hits the page. Libraries such as Scriptaculous, jQuery, MooTools and even Flash Shared Objects are often forgotten, but they all add to a page’s “weight.”
Some fascinating things are on the horizon for developers related to user experience and page weight. One notable development as of late was the release of Safari 4 Beta, which has support for HTML 5 media tags, CSS animation and CSS effects. As more and more of these features become standard in browsers across the board, we can look forward to offering users a better experience by using features directly in the browser.

4. The Value Of Content And Then SoMe

We cannot talk about user experience without touching on content and social media (SoMe). In order to be profitable, eCommerce retailers need to engage customers with their content and use social media outlets within and outside their own websites.
93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media, according to Cone, while an overwhelming 85% believe a company should not only have a presence in but also interact with its consumers via social media.

• 60% of all online adults use social media.
• 85% believe a company should not only have a presence in but also interact with its consumers via social media.
• 56% of users feel a stronger connection with, and feel better served by, companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

When a website such as Facebook, which just turned 5 years old in February, has an active user base of over 175 million people, it is easy to see the unlimited potential to increase your wallet share simply by giving your customers what they want. Some options are:

• Give your customer the ability to add your website or product detail pages to websites such as Delicious, StumpleUpon, Digg, Twitter and Facebook.
• Give them the ability to customize their experience on your website. These experiences can range from customizing the home page as they see fit to uploading their image to go beside their product reviews.
• Create an RSS feed for your website. If your website has a blog or some other content area that changes regularly, give your customers the option to add it to their favorite RSS reader.

They say, “Content is king,” but if you cannot account for your king’s whereabouts, he needs to be beheaded. Your website’s content is only as relevant as its success. So, test as much as you can. Some tests you can perform to get hard data include:

• Website and email A/B testing
  Split your promotion views between your customers. 50% see version A, and 50% see version B. You can perform these tests for just about any purpose, but make sure your goals are clear before beginning. Figure out what you are trying to solve, and then move forward with the testing. From changing your website’s navigation to simply testing the style of your promotion’s copy, doing an A/B test will give you the relevant data you need to decide whether to update or remain the same.
• Polls
  Polls are quick and simple but, depending on your pool of users, can give you mountains of data. To get more people to take your poll, consider giving some kind of incentive to participate. Some polls are fun to take, but if you’re asking, “Which brand of television is better?” and not, “Who’s hotter, Jessica Simpson or Britney Spears?” then you may want to think more carefully about how much the feedback is worth.

5. Using Type And Color To Influence

Using color and typography is nothing new to designers. Using them in eCommerce is not much different. When designing for a retail website, your client is the customer. You are trying to convince thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of potential customers to click on your promotion and buy whatever you are selling. Consider the following.

Can It Be Read?

Most designers love to play with typography: twisting, shaping and contorting letters and word to obey your every whim, forming a beautiful masterpiece of skill and beauty. However, if your customer is not an artist, chances are they won’t get what you’re doing, and you’ve just lost a sale. Up front and to the point messaging is not always the answer either.
Consider using fun copy as an alternative. For example, if you sell banjos, instead of saying, “Shop New Banjo Supplies,” you could say, “Add More Twang to Your Thang.” As stated earlier with regard to designing for the customer, this depends a lot on what your target demographic is.

Can It Be Red?

No big surprise, red is the color of choice for error messages. But consider this when thinking about the user experience. What color does Target.com use for its error messages? Makes you think, right? Good! By the way, it uses red, too. The point is to consider alternatives. If your company has red in its brand, and the website has a lot of red as well, consider another color. You’re trying to get the user’s attention, so blue text with an alert icon could work just as well.

Consistency in Type: Stylistically and Creatively.

Making sure your headers, sub-headings and body copy are consistent across your website is easy. Making sure your website has a well-defined style guide is not. A style guide requires a lot of patience and care and is never complete. A website’s style guide should be a living, breathing document that continues to grow as your company and brand grows.
There is nothing wrong with this. As you find certain styles that perform better than others, find a way to add them to the guide. This document, depending on the complexity of your brand and the size of your website, could potentially be split into two separate documents: a creative style guide and a copy style guide. Each guide serves a different purpose but live together harmoniously.

Inspiration and Sources

Designing for the user experience in eCommerce is a multi-faceted puzzle. Some solutions work across the board, and some are specific to your website alone. The good news is that finding the solutions that best fit your particular needs is the most challenging and rewarding work a designer can do. It takes a rare breed to fully appreciate the value of the user experience, and if you are part of it, I hope this article and these resources give you as much pleasure as they have given me.

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55 Quick SEO Tips

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Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.
1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written, and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for a site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
19. Text around your links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.
24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.
29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.
31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.
36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
38. Use keyword rich captions with your images.
39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.
40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:
(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar
42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.
51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.
53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.
54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Resource  : http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/

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SEO Tools

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1)Traffic Travis : Market Research SEO and PPC optimization tool

2)Keyword Pad : Keyword List Generator

3)Primitive Word Counter : Keyword Density Calculator

4)Keyword Analyzer : Tool for keyword gathering and result estimation

5)Xedant Keyword Harvester : Keyword Harvest Tool

6)Google Keyword Tool : Free Keyword Tool

7)Keyword Density Analyzer : Keyword Density and Word Depth Calculator

8)Niche Watch : Niche Keywords Research

9)Google Suggest Keyword Suggestion : Keywords Suggestion Tool

10)Free Keyword Suggestion : Keywords vs Search Volume Estimator 

11)Keyword Suggestion and Keyword Popularity Tool : Keyword Suggestion along Popularity

12)Google Semantics : Firefox Add-on

13)Alexa Toolbar : Free alexa tool

14)Search Status : Firefox Toolbar Extension 

15)Meta Tags : Firefox Sidebar Add-on for SEO

16)Web Developer : Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey Extension

17)Web Tools : Ranking and related Tools

18)Pagerank Lookup : Page Rank Checker

19)Rank Tracker : Search Engine Ranking Tool

20)Check Google Pagerank : Positioning Estimation Tool

21)Google Ranking : Ranking Tool for popular Search Engines

22)SEO Rank Tool : Ranking and Backlink Tool

23)Rank Checker : Ranking Checking Tool for Firefox

24)Gorank : Professional SEO Ranking Tool

25)Alexa Site Information : Website Monitoring Tools

26)Sitemeter : Real Time Reporting Tool

27)Traffic Estimator : Google Traffic Estimation Tool

28)Backlink Watch : Backlink Checker

29)Quantcast : Website Evaluation Tool

30)SEO For Firefox : Page Ranking Extension for Firefox

31)Goingup : Document and Image Converter

32)SEO Monitor : Video and Audio Format Converter

33)Social Poster : Social Bookmarking Tool

34)Google Analytics : website traffic

35)Social Maker : Social Bookmarking and Promotion Tool

36)Website Optimizer : Website Testing and Optimization Tool

37)Web Page Analyzer : Website speed Test

38)Copyscape : Website dupicate content checker

39)Search Engine Spider Simulator : Spider Simulation Tool

40)Web Page Analyser : Web Page Analyser gives a report on the good, and the bad points of the page in SEO terms

41)Builtwith : Website Optimizer

42)Xml Sitemaps : Sitemap Generator

43)Sitemapdoc : Google Sitemap Generator and Editor

44)Automapit : Sitemap Creation Service

45)GWebCrawler & Google Sitemap Creator : Source Code Web Indexing Engine

46)Free Online Sitemap Generator : Online sitemap creation


47)Sitemapxml : XML Sitemap Generator

48)Brokenlinkcheck : Broken link check 

49)Broken Link Checker : Link broken checker

50)W3C Link Checker : Link Checker

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