Advanced-Seo-Concepts

Understanding the techniques used to capture this meaning helps to provide better signals as to what our content relates to, and ultimately helps it to rank higher in search results. This post explores a series of on-page techniques that not only build upon one another, but can be combined in sophisticated ways.

While Google doesn't reveal the exact details of its algorithm, over the years we've collected evidence from interviews, research papers,

As you read, keep in mind these are only some of the ways in which Google could determine on-page relevancy, and they aren't absolute law! Experimenting on your own is always the best policy.

We'll start with the simple, and move to the more advanced.

1. Keyword Usage

In the beginning, there were keywords. All over the page.

The concept was this: If your page focused on a certain topic, search engines would discover keywords in important areas. These locations included the title tag, headlines, alt attributes of images, and throughout in the text. SEOs helped their pages rank by placing keywords in these areas.

Even today, we start with keywords, and it remains the most basic form of on-page optimization.

While it's important to ensure your page at a bare minimum contains the keywords you want to rank for, it is unlikely that keyword placement by itself will have much of an influence on your page's ranking potential.

2. TF-IDF

It's not keyword density, it's term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF).

Google researchers recently described TF-IDF as "long used to index web pages" and variations of TF-IDF appear as a component in several well-known Google patents.

TF-IDF doesn't measure how often a keyword appears, but offers a measurement of importance by comparing how often a keyword appears compared to expectations gathered from a larger set of documents.

If we compare the phrases "basket" to "basketball player" in Google's Ngram viewer, we see that "basketball player" is a more rare, while "basket" is more common. Based on this frequency, we might conclude that "basketball player" is significant on a page that contains that term, while the threshold for "basket" remains much higher.

For SEO purposes, when we measure TF-IDF's correlation with higher rankings, it performs only moderately better than individual keyword usage. In other words, generating a high TF-IDF score by itself generally isn't enough to expect much of an SEO boost. Instead, we should think of TF-IDF as an important component of other more advanced on-page concepts.

3. Synonyms and Close Variants

With over 6 billion searches per day, Google has a wealth of information to determine what searchers actually mean when typing queries into a search box. Google's own research shows that synonyms actually play a role in up to 70% of searches.

To solve this problem, search engines possess vast corpuses of synonyms and close variants for billions of phrases, which allows them to match content to queries even when searchers use different words than your text. An example is the query dog pics, which can mean the same thing as:

• Dog Photos • Pictures of Dogs • Dog Pictures • Canine Photos • Dog Photographs

On the other hand, the query Dog Motion Picture means something else entirely, and it's important for search engines to know the difference.

From an SEO point of view, this means creating content using natural language and variations, instead of employing the same strict keywords over and over again.

Under Hummingbird, co-occurrence is used to identify words that may be synonyms of each other in certain contexts while following certain rules according to which, the selection of a certain page in response to a query where such a substitution has taken place has a heightened probability.

4. Page Segmentation

Where you place your words on a page is often as important as the words themselves.

Each web page is made up of different parts—headers, footers, sidebars, and more. Search engines have long worked to determine the most important part of a given page. Both Microsoft and Google hold several patents suggesting content in the more relevant sections of HTML carry more weight.

Content located in the main body text likely holds more importance than text placed in sidebars or alternative positions. Repeating text placed in boilerplate locations, or chrome, runs the risk of being discounted even more.

Page segmentation becomes significantly more important as we move toward mobile devices, which often hide portions of the page. Search engines want to serve users the portion of your pages that are visible and important, so text in these areas deserves the most focus.

5. Semantic Distance and Term Relationships

When talking about on-page optimization, semantic distance refers to the relationships between different words and phrases in the text. This differs from the physical distance between phrases, and focuses on how terms connect within sentences, paragraphs, and other HTML elements.

How do search engines know that "Labrador" relates to "dog breeds" when the two phrases aren't in the same sentence?

Search engines solve this problem by measuring the distance between different words and phrases within different HTML elements. The closer the concepts are semantically, the closer the concepts may be related. Phrases located in the same paragraph are closer semantically than phrases separated by several blocks of text.

Additionally, HTML elements may shorten the semantic distance between concepts, pulling them closer together. For example, list items can be considered equally distant to one another, and "the title of a document may be considered to be close to every other term in document".

Now is a good time to mention Schema.org. Schema markup provides a way to semantically structure portions of your text in a manner that explicitly define relationship between terms.

The great advantage schema offers is that it leaves no guesswork for the search engines. Relationships are clearly defined. The challenge is it requires webmasters to employ special

6. Co-occurrence and Phrase-Based Indexing

Up to this point, we've discussed individual keywords and relationships between them. Search engines also employ methods of indexing pages based on complete phrases, and also ranking pages on the relevance of those phrases.

What's most interesting about this process is not how Google determines the important phrases for a webpage, but how Google can use these phrases to rank a webpage based on how relevant they are.

Using the concept of co-occurrence, search engines know that certain phrases tend to predict other phrases. If your main topic targets "John Oliver," this phrase often co-occurs with other phrases like "late night comedian," "Daily Show," and "HBO." A page that contains these related terms is more likely to be about "John Oliver" than a page that doesn't contain related terms.

Add to this incoming links from pages with related, co-occurring phrases and you've given your page powerful contextual signals.

7. Entity Salience

Looking to the future, search engines are exploring ways of using relationships between entities, not just keywords, to determine topical relevance.

Entity salience goes beyond traditional keyword techniques, like TF-IDF, for finding relevant terms in a document by leveraging known relationships between entities. An entity is anything in the document that is distinct and well defined.

The stronger an entity's relationship to other entities on the page, the more significant that entity becomes.

In the diagram above, an article contains the topics Iron Man, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts and Science Fiction. The phrase "Marvel Comics" has a strong entity relationship to all these terms. Even it only appears once, it's likely significant in the document.

On the other hand, even though the phrase "Cinerama" appears multiple times (because the film showed there), this phrase has weaker entity relationships, and likely isn't as significant.

Ultimate Guide to Increasing Your YouTube Adsense Earnings

Improving your Ads

The first place to improve is with your ads themselves. This assumes that you’ve already reached a point where you can become an official YouTube Partner and monetize your videos.

Monetize video 

Generally you’ll be invited to become a YouTube Partner once you have around 1,000,000 channel views, a reasonable daily view count and a decent number of videos. 

Use keyword research to target your videos.

keyword research helps you know what users are looking for in videos, and it helps them find your videos on the subject. 

 video tags to attract higher value ads.

Sometimes all it takes to access better ads is tweaking your keywords.

Improving your Videos

More impressions and clicks means more profit so optimize your videos and produce excellent content to maximize your profits.

Create videos people want to see. 

This is the key to all YouTube success. You can spend thousands of dollars on high production videos all you like.

Post videos regularly. 

 A schedule does two things. First, it gives users a guarantee of regular content, even if it’s once per week. It gives them something to look forward to. Scheduling is why weekly television is so effective.

Brand yourself. 

 You can post the same video on two different channels, one with a personal username and one with a brand name, and the brand name will almost definitely perform better.

Link in the description. 

Your video description is partially hidden by default, so only the most interested people will be expanding it to check out the details. This is a great place, surprisingly, to include links to your site, Facebook, Google+, Twitter or whatever other sites you want to advertise.

Include end-of-video call to action boxes.  

The standard, when you watch serious channel videos, seems to be two boxes with annotation links to related videos, a box that links via annotation to your channel subscription page, and space for some words or an actor encouraging clicking one of the boxes.

Optimize descriptions and titles for SEO.  

Your video description and your title are the only text associated with your video, unless you implement captions, which aren’t indexed by search engines anyway.

Pick a compelling thumbnail. 

By default, YouTube selects frames from partway through your video – generally the 25 percent and 50 percent points – to create thumbnails for you to choose.

Optimize your channel page itself. 

Few beginners think to change the look and feel of their channel page, but even a few simple changes can make a world of difference.

Use shorter videos as intros to the channel. 

Users have a hard time justifying the investment of starting a video 10+ minutes long if they don’t already know they like the content produced by the channel.

Implement captions. 

Closed captions can be generated automatically by YouTube, but the software that creates them is notorious for poor captions.

Create video responses to popular industry videos.  

Responding to other videos has declined somewhat in recent years, but it can still be a good way to siphon traffic from more popular channels, particularly when the response you make is valuable and interesting.

Promote your videos in blog posts.  

Many businesses use YouTube as an afterthought, to host videos they embed in their blog posts for value.

Promote your videos on social media accounts. 

Facebook and Google+ work very well to post videos with their robust preview generation. 

Promote your video series’ through partner blogs. 

You aren’t limited to using your videos in your own blog. One common blog sharing technique is to write a post responding to a popular post, in hopes of sharing that post’s audience.

Rule #1: Pick a focus keyword that doesn’t suck.
Make sure your focus keyword is one that people care about (I’ve chosen “how to rank without backlinks” for this page) and one that might generate some traffic to my website and enter it into the focus keyword field in the Yoast SEO plugin, as shown below.

How To Rank Without Backlinks

When it comes to ranking a page for a particular keyword, it’s a generally accepted principle that building backlinks to that page (with at least some of them containing the keyword in the anchor text) is important. But I’d like to show you that is not necessarily the case. In this post, I’m going to show you how to rank without backlinks.

How To Rank Without Backlinks

This might seem like a tough challenge, but by the time you are done reading this post you will know how to rank without backlinks. Just follow the 11 rules below, wait a couple days, and I’m confident you will have success. I know we have!
IMPORTANT NOTE: To follow along, you’ll need to be using WordPress with the Yoast SEO plugin. If you aren’t using WordPress, I’m sorry. This post will probably still help, but not as much as if you were using WordPress.
Rule #1: Pick a focus keyword that doesn’t suck.
Make sure your focus keyword is one that people care about (I’ve chosen “how to rank without backlinks” for this page) and one that might generate some traffic to my website and enter it into the focus keyword field in the Yoast SEO plugin, as shown below.

Rule #2: Make sure that your content is worth reading.

If you don’t have anything valuable to say, it won’t matter that you know how to rank a page for a keyword. You want quality traffic, not people showing up and then “bouncing” off  your page. If I didn’t know how to rank without backlinks and start to demonstrate a knowledge of this by now, you wouldn’t still be reading.

Rule #3: Make sure your focus keyword is in the Title Tag (called “SEO Title” in the Yoast SEO Plugin).

Your title tag should be more than 40 characters but less than 70. Ideally, your focus keyword should be in the beginning of the Title Tag, not the end.

Rule #4: Add your focus keyword to your Meta Description.

Make sure your Meta Description is 156 characters or less. Do you best to make your Meta Description appealing, as a Google searcher will see it on the page of search results delivered to them. You want to pull the searcher in with a compelling Meta Description and get them to click on your listing. Here’s what I used for the Meta Description of this page:

“People assume they can’t rank a page without links, but it can be done. In this post, I give you 10 rules that will teach you how to rank without backlinks.”

OK…so I’m not Shakespeare. But I got “how to rank without backlinks” in there and it gets the job done.

Rule #5: Aim for a focus keyword density of between 1-3% on the page.

The Yoast SEO plugin will let you know exactly what your keyword density is.

How To Rank Without Backlinks

When it comes to ranking a page for a particular keyword, it’s a generally accepted principle that building backlinks to that page (with at least some of them containing the keyword in the anchor text) is important. But I’d like to show you that is not necessarily the case. In this post, I’m going to show you how to rank without backlinks.

How To Rank Without Backlinks

This might seem like a tough challenge, but by the time you are done reading this post you will know how to rank without backlinks. Just follow the 11 rules below, wait a couple days, and I’m confident you will have success. I know we have!
IMPORTANT NOTE: To follow along, you’ll need to be using WordPress with the  If you aren’t using WordPress, I’m sorry. This post will probably still help, but not as much as if you were using WordPress.

Rule #1: Pick a focus keyword that doesn’t suck.
Make sure your focus keyword is one that people care about (I’ve chosen “how to rank without backlinks” for this page) and one that might generate some traffic to my website and enter it into the focus keyword field in the Yoast SEO plugin, as shown below.

Rule #2: Make sure that your content is worth reading.

If you don’t have anything valuable to say, it won’t matter that you know how to rank a page for a keyword. You want quality traffic, not people showing up and then “bouncing” off  your page. If I didn’t know how to rank without backlinks and start to demonstrate a knowledge of this by now, you wouldn’t still be reading.

Rule #3: Make sure your focus keyword is in the Title Tag (called “SEO Title” in the Yoast SEO Plugin).

Your title tag should be more than 40 characters but less than 70. Ideally, your focus keyword should be in the beginning of the Title Tag, not the end.

Rule #4: Add your focus keyword to your Meta Description.

Make sure your Meta Description is 156 characters or less. Do you best to make your Meta Description appealing, as a Google searcher will see it on the page of search results delivered to them. You want to pull the searcher in with a compelling Meta Description and get them to click on your listing. Here’s what I used for the Meta Description of this page:

“People assume they can’t rank a page without links, but it can be done. In this post, I give you 10 rules that will teach you how to rank without back-links.”

OK…so I’m not Shakespeare. But I got “how to rank without back-links” in there and it gets the job done.

Rule #5: Aim for a focus keyword density of between 1-3% on the page.

The Yoast SEO plugin will let you know exactly what your keyword density is.

Rule #6: Add at least one image to the page and make sure the focus keyword is the alt tag.

Adding images does not just give you another opportunity to get your focus keyword in the source code of the page. It breaks up the text and makes the page more visually appealing.

Rule #7: Include at least one outbound link (but no more than 2 in most cases) to a high-authority, high-trust domain other than your own. 

In this article, I linked to the Yoast SEO Plugin home page. I often link to relevant pages in Wikipedia though.

Rule #8: Include the focus keyword in the first paragraph of your page copy.

You want to send the signal to Google and other search engines that your post is highly relevant for the focus keyword you’ve chosen. It’s hard to do that if you don’t mention it right off the bat.

Rule #9: Include the focus keyword in a header tag. 

You’ll see this posts’ focus keyword in a H2 tag near the top of this page.

Rule #10: Write at least 300 words.

Preferably more than 500. Just make sure it isn’t filler content, or you’ll be breaking rule #2 above.

Rule #11: Establish Google Authorship

This is pretty easy if you are using the Yoast SEO Plugin with WordPress. Here are the steps you’ll need to take:

1. Create a Google+ account.
2. Add the domain of the site your are writing for in the “Links” or “Contributes To” section of your profile.
3. Go into WordPress admin and navigate to Users –> All Users. Select your user profile.
4. Add your Google+ page URL in the Google+ field.
5. Make sure you are logged in to your user account when composing the page in WordPress (this will ensure you are credited as the author).

If you want to make sure you setup Google+ Authorship correctly,

Given the uncertain future of the trusty back-link as it relates to SEO, knowing how to rank without back-links is a very valuable skill. If you’ve been doing SEO long enough to survive Panda and Penguin, you understand this all too well. While back-links are still extremely important (and probably will be for at least several more years), it’s important that you learn to survive without them. That way, if the day comes that Google decides to stop using back-links as a measure of authority and trust, you will be prepared.

Critical SEO Mistakes to Avoid

As the old saying goes, never put the cart before the horse. Nowadays, websites are no longer a luxury - they’re a necessity for businesses in nearly all industries in order to remain competitive. In the wake of the cut-throat competitive spirit today, website owners often end up adopting aggressive marketing tactics in such haste without proper planning. This indirectly and adversely harms their website visibility in search engines when it should aid in the search. You need to be careful and attempt to avoid making the following mistakes:

    Absence of a Proper Sitemap 

It is the most basic fundamental rule to have a good 'sitemap' page for search engines to index your website. This is essential irrespective of how well your pages are designed or how nice the graphics are. A good sitemap will be appreciated by search engines and it is on the top of the SEO best practices’ list.

    Insufficient Directory Submissions

Always keep in mind that you will have a better chance of showing up in the ‘not-so-evolved’ cyberspace if you've submitted your site to the 100-200 minor directories. These directories will will help you rank on the basis of your best keywords and therefore you will attract the maximum prospects directly. Remember, the more direct it is, the better it is.

    Insufficient Information About the Website Owners 

One of the most essential things is to establish a bond of trust with your visitor. You are a stranger to them and your visitors will want to know about you and your company in order to trust you. Only if you succeed in forming the trust will they visit you and sale will happen. It’s always good to put your picture along with a brief bio on the very first page of your site so that you can extend some basic information and assurance there.

    Confusing Site Structure

You do not want your visitors to get confused and shift to the next best option. In order to avoid confusion, you need to know exactly what your visitors want and give them exactly what they are looking for. It is best to put a search option on your website so that you get reports on what people search for and this will help you get a better idea.

    Improper Link Building

There is this misconception among website owners that buying links is a quick and effective way that will result in a boost to the rankings of their site. You should avoid going after quantity when it comes to link building and should concentrate on the quality as too many unnatural inbound links can trigger devastating penalties on your website.

    Improper Planning

The most frequent and silly mistake most website owners commit is that they fail to draw out a systematic marketing plan for their website. Always have a strategic detailed marketing plan because lagging behind due to absence of that is the last thing you want. Design your plan in a way that it establishes your brand and differentiates it from the plans of your competitors.

    Duplicate Content

Content should act as the base of your website. It will not only boost your search engine rankings but host other benefits such as branding and audience building. That said, lack of content might still be less harmful than duplicate content. It is absolutely imperative that there is no duplicate content on your website.

Having a digital presence is just as important as the services and products that your business is based on. If you remember to be careful, vigilant, and stay updated when it comes to Internet Marketing, you will be safe.

5 Seo Important Skill

Technical SEO

If you think SEO is all about keyword research and then wordsmithing (think stuffing) them on a page, then you’re in for a surprise. That’s not what it’s all about.
SEO is about making websites better at both the page and server level in a structured way to enhance their chances of being found on search engines, with the eventual goal of generating traffic and conversion.
Yes, knowing on-page optimization (e.g., title tags, alt tags, H1, copy optimization) is helpful but it's more critical to understand the technical side of SEO, such as code. You can win your IT battles easily if you’re well-versed with technical SEO.
Go ahead and learn everything related to technical SEO, including server-side settings, sitemaps, server response codes, rewrites, and more.
Understanding both page-level optimization and server-level optimization is what makes a rounded SEO practitioner.

Social Media Marketing

Does a day go by when you don't hear about social media? Not in this wired world.
Social media skills shouldn't be limited to maintaining accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but actually driving traffic from social sites. Traffic generating exercises that can help you develop into a well-rounded SEO include creating fan acquisition strategies, working on building Twitter followers, and optimizing videos on YouTube.

Yes, leveraging social media tactics for link building is critical, but the modern SEO needs to generate traffic and acquire customers through social media. Increasingly, we're seeing synergies between SEO and social media and this integration is only increasing. I had also written about ways SEO can start working with social media managers here.

Create an action plan around this skill and start working on it today.

Link Building

With the rise in social media platforms over the past few years the opportunities to build links has increased tremendously.

Now we have traditional (legitimate) ways of building links like good old-fashioned directories, association sites, credible high PR sites, and so on. These links are also known as permanent links with a longer “shelf life” than say temporal type of links acquired through social media channels (e.g., content syndication, blogs, Twitter, bookmarking).

The other side is internal link optimization – not just on your own properties but also on social media platforms such as your Facebook page. With so much content created by your internal social media team, internal link optimization could be the low-hanging fruit you want to go after.
It's critical for SEOs to be skilled in both external link building and internal link optimization.

Usability & Information Architecture

SEOs should value the importance of good site usability. Site usability implies how your objects are placed on your page and if the information you provide on your site is useful for the users and if your site is easy to use and navigate.

Learning about information architecture is critical as well since it’s all about how you organize content on your site, decide on your folder structure, and how you label elements on your site. This is often an area where SEOs make mistakes especially when they take a keyword approach to IA.
Again, as competition increases and attention span of users decreases, it's important to not let your visitors drop off your site.

This skill is critical for SEOs to learn and make that part of their arsenal. Good resources to learn on this topic is Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the Modern Web and my interview with Shari Thurow on information architecture and SEO

Content Marketing

Content is really what engages users and is a great way to get visitors into your marketing funnel, so it's essential as an SEO you possess this skill. Content marketing can be divided into two main tasks: content creation and content distribution.

An SEO need to be well versed with both pieces of content marketing strategy, especially content creation. You may come across situations when there will be lots of excitement in your company to create content – from bizarre content creation ideas ("Let’s create 1 million new pages!") to ideas that have keyword stuffing written all over it.

As an SEO, it's your job to act as a gatekeeper and support content ideas that can add value to search engines and users. Basic skills like keyword research, finding content gaps, and distributing your content will come in handy.

Summary

SEO as an industry has matured. There is an increased focus on results and ROI.
A deep understanding of web analytics and metrics is a given. But the above listed skills are few must-haves for any SEO or would-be SEO.
It’s your turn now, which other skills would you add to the list?

8 Metrics To Keep Your Eye On In Google Analytics

Visitors

One of the first you’ll want to take a look at is at is the number of people coming to your website. The visitor count is something you will keep a close eye on because it helps you see if you’re increasing traffic to your website. A good sign of improvement is when you’re seeing growth each week. Cuutio helps you monitor how your performance in Google’s search results affects your keyword-specific traffic.
If your numbers are declining you’ll want to increase to traffic using the following tips in this post:
You should also take a look at the keyword suggestions in Cuutio. There you’ll discover new keywords people find you with but could perform better in terms of more relevant traffic.

Unique Visitors

As Google defines it,

“Unique Visitors is the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.”

While you want to build a loyal following, getting new people to your website is the way to grow your presence.
Make sure you get maximum exposure to attract more uniques, by focusing on the right keywords, getting active on social media and promoting your content.
You’ll then want to measure your reach, by tracking the metrics mentioned in our previous post:

Page views

Page views or impressions – when advertising is concerned – is the amount of views a page has attracted. For instance one person may view 10 pages. This will tell you whether people have stayed to consume more content.
If the number is close to your visitors figure then you might want to find a way to lead them onto other content on your site.
A related posts box at the end of every post does a good job of moving visitors to other content. But ultimately your goal is to get people to buy from you, in which case you can include a nice visual on your sidebar linking to your buying page.

Content

Here is where you evaluate which content is the most popular on your website. Take a look and see which pages get the most views and how long people are staying on the page. After a while of publishing content you’ll notice patterns and see which posts perform better.
Remember it’s about publishing content your audience wants to read, so if how-to posts perform better than top 10 lists – aim for more how-to posts.

Bounce Rate

The reality is not everyone is going to like your content. The bounce rate is essentially the percentage of people who leave your website from the same page they entered without any interaction with the page.
Ideally you want to keep this percentage low. If you think the bounce rate is high, take a look at the average time spent, exit pages and where visitors are clicking (see In-Page Analysis below).
Usually a 20% – 30% bounce rate is considered normal. With high traffic websites, even 40% is quite tolerable. Check out your metrics to decide what kind of bounce rates to aim for.

Traffic Sources: Referrals and Search

We’ve mentioned a couple of times in previous posts that you can use Google Analytics to find relevant keywords to target. You’ll find the data in the Traffic Sources section and see which keywords and phrases people are using through search engines.
Combined with Cuutio’s keyword suggestions, you are able to find both new and existing keywords you should focus on.
Another handy feature here is that it helps track where your content is online. With inbound marketing you want to produce epic content people will link to from their own sites. So if somebody linked to your content, head over to their website and leave a comment – it goes a long way in developing relationships online.
Another thing to consider is Google Analytics shows you only those links that draw in traffic. Whereas with Cuutio you can find all your inbound links whether they create traffic or not.
You’ll also notice social networks on your list of referrers which is great for analysing which social network brings in the most visitors. For instance if you’re pressed for time and on social media overload, focus on the social network that brings in the most people.

Average Time On Site

This is real simple: the more time people consume your content, the better! Taking a look at the average time spent on your website helps determine whether people are actually reading your content.
If you find one of your 600 word blog posts has attracted over 1000 page views but the average visit duration is under 12 seconds, then people aren’t really reading what you published.
There can be a number of reasons behind this. The most common is slow loading speeds. Other times it can be a weak opening paragraph which doesn’t excite people to continue reading.

In-Page Analysis

Here you’ll be presented with a map that lets you view where your visitors are clicking. This feature helps find out how your visitors are interacting with your website.
For instance, if you’ve got a signup form nobody is clicking on. Then you might want to change the design or consider a different value proposition and call to action. Another benefit is to find out how many people scroll below the fold and read the content at the bottom.
Google Analytics connected with Cuutio is categorically the strongest tool combination an inbound marketer can use. And that’s because it gives you data on what matters most: The performance of your website.

Local SEO Tips and Tricks For Local Businesses

1. Google+ Local Page

This should be the first thing you do. Head over to http://www.google.com/+/business/ and create your business page under the “Local Business or Place”.

Fill out all the information that is relevant to your business, place your business in 5 categories, and upload 5 high-quality photos. Verify your business, and make sure your page profile is filled out at 100%, which is showed at the top of your page's dashboard.

Tip: You can put a link to your website in the “About” section and this is a dofollow link.

2. Hosting

You should have some version of dedicated hosting, virtual dedicated hosting or your own server. These types of hosting mean that when the search engine spider hits your site it thinks your site is all alone.

Tip: You want to keep your site on its own IP address. Google has been known to devalue sites based on the company they keep on a server. Don't let hanging out with the bad kids hurt your site.

3. Servers

Caching/Compression make sure your site is loading in quickly and only downloading what is needed. Also make sure your uptime is as close to 100 percent as possible.

Tip: If your site is down less than 24 hours, you are OK.

4. Domain Name Resolution

Check your domain name. Does it resolve to one domain or many? Do you use the www or non-www?

Does your site's www, non-www and homepage name resolve to the same name? For example, a site uses the non-www version of its site domainname.com, but has not created 301 redirects for its www and pagename versions. Google now thinks it has three sites.

Make sure you choose a domain version and redirect the other homepages to it.

Tip: There is no general use case in which you would choose the pagename version.

5. Sitemap

Ask yourself the following:

    Does your site have a sitemap.xml that lists all indexable site pages
    Do you update it regularly? When you have new content? Ever? Never?
    Does your sitemap get uploaded to the server after creation?
    Do you let the search engines know you have a new sitemap?
    While we are talking sitemaps, if needed, do you have separate ones for your images and on-site videos?

Sitemaps are important to help the search engines locate content on your site that it might miss on a simple crawl.

Tip: If you don't have a sitemap, your site will still get indexed, but this is the guide that tells the spider where all indexable pages are located, so make one (or two).

6. Robots.txt File

Do you use your robots.txt correctly? Do you get odd messages in the SERPs that show the page you thought was hidden from the spider, but shows in the description that it was not?

What you might not know: Robots.txt files don't block your pages from being found. Robots.txt files are meant to prevent crawling and indexing of the site content, not indexing of page information.

What Google says: “While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other pubilcly available information such as anchor text in links to the site, or the title from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), can appear in Google search results.”

The issue lies in the fact that if the page is in the robots.txt and you wanted it blocked from the search results the no-index tag cannot be read on the page, so the page URL is indexed with the description that explains the robots.txt blocked it.

Tip: You can fix this by blocking folder level sections in the robots.txt and using the no-index page code on the page level.

7. Page Speed

Are you checking your site's page speed? Do you know what rating you are given with Google's page speed tool? Have you checked your analytics values?

You may have heard that page speed is only helpful to 1 percent of site queries, but we've yet to meet a site that doesn't do better almost immediately by improving their page score to above a 90. Just do it!

Users who don't get their page downloaded in a second or less (3 to 4 is the max), are likely to abandon your site, so it helps you either way.

Tip: You want a 90 and above if you can get it. Make sure you don't go below 85. There is no hard and fast rules on this, just personal experience.

8. Site Crawl

Use a tool, such as Screaming Frog, to run a crawler through your site and complete a site-wide check for the following:

    Is your anchor text written properly?
    Are your redirects handling properly?
    Do you have site crawl issues?
    Do you have broken links (coming into your site, going out, or in images)?
    Are your meta tags too long, too short, duplicate or non-existent?
    Are your title tags too long, too short, duplicate, over-optimized, or non-existent?
    Are you using the alt text in your alt attribute correctly?

Tip: Using a large-scale site crawler like Screaming Frog helps you see site-wide issues quickly with one-click shareable reporting.

9. Duplicate Content

When is the last time you checked your site's content for duplicate content in the SERPs?

Your content may be 100 percent original, but that doesn't mean your content hasn't been duplicated somewhere or that someone hasn't scraped your site. You should do regular checks on your site content.

Tip: Use sites like Copyscape to check for scraped content, though you should also do a hand review. Some copy is scraped into Flash and can be read by Google, but not Copyscape.
10. Canonicalization

Speaking of content, have you checked your site to make sure you have properly implemented your canonical tags? Do you have canonical tags?

Canonical tags can tell Google:

    That the content you spent all that time writing is yours.
    That these N duplicate pages on our site are really copies of an original page.

Tip: Canonicalization is the only way, at this time, to tell Google you own said content. Don't let your site or anything for that matter, leave your site without it (includes syndication).

11. Content

Content is one of the most important parts of your site health and authority. Without great content you might find it difficult to position your site well within its term set and even more difficult to find quality users who want to spent time with your pages – and no one likes to be left alone on a Saturday night.

    Is your content informative?
    Do you create original, unique, relevant content on a regular schedule?
    Do you update content other than just the blog page?

You need fresh, unique, original, relevant content added to your site on a regular basis. While the blog is a great place to do this on a site, you need to add to the site in more places than just the blog.

Tip: Make sure your content is longer than 600-700 words (or at least most content) on your site. "Thin Content" will likely get you penalized and since that just makes for a bad day, don't skimp here, it will just make you sad.

12. Usability

Have you tested your site for usability? Is it easy to use? Can users find their way around simply? Do they know what your site is about in a "blink"?

You have less than 3 milliseconds to establish trust with users.

Your site design should pass the "blink" text. Close your eyes. Open them. You should be able to tell what your site does and where to go in that one second after you open them, if you can't re-examine your homepage and site pages for proper site pathing.

Make sure your site highlights the most important site paths.

Tip: Before you add/change anything on your site pages ask yourself:

    Does this make my site functionally better for users?
    Does this make my site better for search engines?
    Does this help me make money?
    Does this inform users?

If the answer to these questions is no, re-examine why you are adding to and/or changing the site. It isn't likely that the add/change will be beneficial to you or the users.

13. Google Analytics

Google Analytics can tell you a lot about your site health in terms of the search engines and users long before other data sources.

    How often do you check your site analytics?
    If not, do your analytics give you granular data?
    Are you comparatively checking your site metrics?

Aside from just your standard visit/page view graph some of the things you can review in your analytics are:

    Keyword Queries: Are you being found on the searches you think you should? Now for many this will be hidden in the "not provided", but it can at least give you an idea how you are being found and if that has changed dramatically since the last comparison period. Large changes here can indicate site changes elsewhere. Red flags are often found here.

    Organic vs. Non-Organic Searches: How are your organic searches and one what engines? Always check your organics, even when your numbers look OK. Other metrics such as direct, or referral sources could be sending in traffic large enough to hide a downturn in site visits.

    Branded vs. Non-Branded Searches: Are your site branded visits down? You might need to see if you have had a change in your offsite marketing or check your SERPs for ads trading off your brand listing. One client was losing 10% of their traffic from a site buying main keyword and branded terms, then displaying the ads for short periods of time over months. Their loss of traffic was due to AdWords, not a change in the algorithm as they had suspected.

    Conversion Pages (if you have them): Have your conversions gone up or down? Did you make a change to your site or marketing plan that would account for this variation? Check your conversion metrics. This is the canary in a coal mine, if your conversions are down significantly and it isn't just because it is 4th of July, this is a red flag indicating more review needs to be done.

Tip: There is a wealth of data in your analytics that can inform everything from market strategy to how go glean 100,000+ users off the Google logo on a holiday (true story). Don't just check site visits, they can be misleading and you might be missing out on information that will keep your site away from rocky shores and steaming nicely along.

14. Google Webmaster Tools

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? And Bing's? If you are, do you know what the data is telling you? Are you paying attention to your messages?

Webmaster tools can provide some fairly immediate and valuable information about your site including:

    Messages from Google telling you why it just dropped your site down in the index.
    How many pages are being indexed.
    How many pages are being crawled, have ever been crawled, been dropped by you and are removed.
    What queries are used to find your site.
    What links are being used internally.
    What links are being pointed at your site (and even if they are redirected through another site).
    How Google views your site.
    What changes up/down there are to your page position on average.

Tip: Webmaster Tools should be checked every day and thoroughly once a week or more. The data in here can inform marketing strategy, prevent a negative site link attack, help you control how Google crawls your site, and much more.

15. Social Media

Social media is less a direct ROI metric and more the assist to the basket. However, this doesn't make it less meaningful.

Studies show engaged customers make loyal customers and its effect on ROI is often much greater than thought. So make sure you have sat down and talked about your social media plan, how to implement it, what voice you will use and what your strategy will be.

    Do you have an integrated social media plan?
    Does it support your site goals?
    How have you implemented social on your site?

Tip: Make sure you allow users easy methods for sharing your site content, not just follow or like you, across all social media channels. Then use this in your integrated media plan to promote all your channels throughout your marketing activities.
16. Schema.org

Are you using schema tagging? Do you know what schema tagging is?

Schema tags are tags that help the search engines pull data from your site and place it on their pages. In Google, you can see this in the "Knowledge Graph" display on the right side of the SERPs.

Tip: Schema tagging feeds a new type of search in Google's toolbox called entity search. Make sure to implement schema tagging on your site; you risk getting left behind if you don't. The site schema.org has full documentation on how to use schema tagging.

17. Backlinks

When is the last time you ran a link check profile on your site? Do you know what your percentage of good links to bad is? Do you know how negative link SEO works on a site and what to do if it happens to you?

Links are the most scrutinized part of the Google algorithm today. How you acquire them, at what speed, from where and from whom can all affect your site health and yes a competitor can attack your site with negative links.

Not keeping an eye on this part of your site is one of he fastest ways out of the engine at either the keyword, page or site level.

Tip: Many people have been writing that links are dead and just write good content to obtain links.

Links are not dead (and social is not the new link building it is the cranberry sauce to the turkey dinner, nice to have, just not the meat.)

While you should never buy links, you will be waiting years to obtain the links a site needs to position in moderately to highly competitive markets, so you will have to find some method for acquiring them for your business to have visibility in the search engines.

The key to successful link acquisition: it must look natural. If you aren't sure how this works, don't attempt at home. Hire a professional.

18. Geo-targeted Keywords

Make sure your site is optimized for the location you are targeting by placing location based keywords in your title tag, header tags(h1, h2), and throughout the content on your page.

Tip: Don’t keyword stuff your website. This will cause Google to penalize your site. Also, ensure there are no duplicate title tags or header tags.
19. Encourage your customers to leave you reviews.

At the top search results, do you think Google will show results for businesses with reviews, or show a business with no reviews at all. Obviously, Google will show businesses with reviews, particularly higher reviews, in the top search results.

There are pages that rank higher than those without reviews, but most the time, that is not the case.

Tip: you can get your site reviewed on other local directories, and eventually, you should, but to jump start things, get reviews on your Google+ Local Page.

20. Get listed in directories

There’s a few listings to be sure you’re listed in: Bing Local, Yelp, YP, DexKnows, Factual, Infogroup, and Manta just to name a few. It's important you're in these listings because when someone searches for your business to do some research, these are the pages that will pop up with your name on it. This shows that at least your a real business that took the time to get listed in various directories.

Tip: An awesome directory you can get listed in and receive a high authority link is your local chamber of commerce.

21. Make sure your NAP is consistent

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. When you list your business in business directories and on your website, it’s very important you have a consistent NAP.

If you have different information listed on the different directories, this throws around some red flags. NAP doesn’t include your website address, but make sure your website address is listed the same: http://epointdigital.com vs http://www.epointdigital.com. Pick one and stick with it.

Tip: Use the autocomplete feature in your web browser to save all the information you type in to the first directory submission so you won't have to type out everything every time. Also, have a phone ready to verify your business in some of those directories.

22. Make sure your site is mobile friendly

If you’re site is not mobile friendly, stop reading and make it mobile friendly right now.

Here are some statistics for you:

    88% of consumers who search for a type of local business on a mobile device call or go to that business within 24 hours. (Google Movement Mobile Study, 2011)
    Of the estimated 30 billion annual mobile searches, about 12 billion are local searches. (Search Engine Land)
    48% of users say that if they arrive on a business site that isn’t working well on mobile, they take it as an indication of the business simply not caring. (Hubspot)

You see the importance of having a mobile version, or just a responsive version, of your website, so if you are lacking in this department, let’s get that fixed.

Tip: If you use Wordpress, install WPTouch to make this process a lot easier.

23. Place your business information on every page

There’s two places you can add your business information to all the pages.

    You can place it in your footer and this is common practice for many sites. This is where I put my business information (marked up with Schema of course).
    You can also place it in your header, and I’ll explain why I like this a little better than the footer. Items at the top of the page are deemed more important than items at the bottom. When your business information (marked up with Schema) is at the top of the page, Google sees that information as more important.

Tip: Make sure your business listing in your footer and header match your NAP on the local directories you have submitted your websites to.

Implement Google Authorship
This doesn’t automatically make you rank higher inside the Google algorithm, but when you have your photo next to an article or your website in the search results, people are more likely to click on your website/link for the search query they entered. And that matters in the Google algorithm. Google will see your website relevant and important to that particular search query because users are clicking on your website when they are searching for [enter search query here].