In order to get search engine optimization right, you need to be well versed in both the on-page and the off-page optimization techniques.

On-page optimization is like the foundations of a building. Without good foundations, the building cannot stand. However, it’s really what’s on top of the foundations that make the biggest difference.

If you have good foundations in the form of on-page SEO, then the rest of the game comes in the form of off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is what will really put you ahead of your competition.

==> On-Page SEO Techniques

On-page SEO techniques can more or less be split into “basics” and “advanced.”

On the basic level are all the fundamental on-page SEO practices. For example, put your keyword in your title tag, use your ALT tags to tag your images, and use meta description tags to help create your search engine rankings.

On a more advanced level you have techniques like creating silo interlinking structures to spread PageRank and relevance throughout your web pages. You have to stay on top of things like Schema.org, Google and Bing’s new system for keeping track of what different types of content are about.

You also need to be watching your site metrics more carefully to lower your bounce rate, increase your return rate and increase the time spent on site.

==> Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO consists primarily of link building.

The goal is to build backlinks from as many different types of backlinks as possible. Ideally you’ll have a combination of high quality, relevant backlinks, along with some lower quality, easy to obtain backlinks.

Building backlinks is a highly manual process. Of course, you can outsource a lot of the work once you have the systems down, but in the beginning you’ll have to do a lot of the work yourself.

Off-page optimization techniques include guest blogging, getting featured in news articles, article marketing, creating forum profile links, signature links, buying links, blog commenting, creating custom web apps and more.

==> The Best Way to Choose a Strategy

In some markets, you need to use fairly complex and difficult strategies to get ranked. In other markets, simple strategies are all you need to break ahead of your competition.

The best way to choose which techniques to use, is to start by figuring out what your competition is doing. Use backlink analysis tools to build a link profile of how your competitors got to where they are.

Once you know how they got there, all you need to do is follow their strategy better than them to get ahead.

To make a long story short, getting ranked in search engines involves getting both the on-page and the off-page optimization right. Do both the basic and the advanced on-page SEO, then choose a handful of off-page strategies and execute them well.

LinkedIn is the premier social site for business professionals on the Web. If you are not a part of it, get involved today. One effective tool is LinkedIn Groups.

You may be familiar with LinkedIn but don’t really know how it can help you. Being a business professional, it can be hard to connect with other professionals. Running an online business or holding a pivotal position in a company can consume most of your time.

LinkedIn takes the guesswork and legwork out of networking with others in your field. This site allows you to search for, connect with and get needed advice from professionals with a few clicks. There are no face-to-face meetings unless you want them. Even so, you can get to know people through their profiles and interacting in groups and discussions.

LinkedIn Groups: Increase Your Visibility and Expert Status

This brings us to LinkedIn Groups. What are they? These groups are like small gatherings of professionals with similar business niches or interests. The entire site is available to you, but concentrated groups help you to target those professionals with whom you need to network.

Groups help you do many things:

* Discover other professionals to meet quickly
* Actively participate in discussions relevant to your interests and needs
* Zero in on the most influential people on LinkedIn within your professional sphere
* Know which profiles to view and which people to “follow” in discussions
* Begin your own discussions to help establish yourself as a leader in your field

These are also excellent reasons to begin your own LinkedIn Group. Before you do, though, get a feel for the process by joining a group or two. You can search for relevant groups using different parameters.

Once you find one that you like, introduce yourself. Do this by posting a new discussion question and then leaving a comment. Let people get to know you.

LinkedIn Groups can also increase your visibility and popularity on the site. While you are leading discussions, don’t forget to leave meaningful comments on other discussion topics. It will look pretty suspicious if you only post questions and never join in the discussions of others.

Build up a presence and a following. When you are ready, create your own group. If you work for a large company, creating a group for your co-workers gives them a place to connect with others inside the company. Post about new job openings; get advice on job advancement and the like.

Ask your new business contacts to join your group. Don’t forget business contacts on other social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Invite LinkedIn members with similar interests as a way of connecting with new faces.

Why should you create a LinkedIn group? You can increase your visibility, ranking, popularity, network and credibility in the business world.

Credibility is one of the rarest yet most powerful commodities online. If you have credibility, you’ll be able to get people on email lists, get joint venture partners and get others to buy with ease. Without credibility, nobody will give you their credit card.

So how do you go about establishing your online credibility? You can do so in a few easy steps.

==> Come Up with Your Story

You need to have a compelling “where I came from” story.

Have you ever noticed how just about every product ever invented has a story? Weight loss products tell the story of someone who was perpetually overweight finally losing the fat. Real estate gurus talk about how they went from rags to riches.

Stories are compelling. Figure out an attention-catching, respect-inspiring story to base your online identity around.

==> What Results Have You Personally Gotten?

Don’t be afraid to share the results that you’ve personally gotten.

If you’re giving advice about how to make money, share exactly how you are making money. If you’re giving advice about losing weight, share your exact measurements.

People want to be able to relate to you. They want to be able to feel that you’re one of them, you know what they’re going through, and that if you can do it so can they.

==> Proof Elements on Your Page

You should have several proof elements readily visible on your web page.

For example, if you’ve appeared on radio stations, put the logos of the radio stations on your page under “as seen on.”

If you have before and after photos, put those on your page as well.

The idea is to give people bite-sized chunks of credibility. They might not even consciously look at it, but just having them there makes a difference.

==> Credibility in the First Impression

The first impression is very important. Though you can’t tell your whole story in the first impression, it’s important that you have one or two proof elements here.

Have a before and after picture above the fold. Or have a killer testimonials prominently displayed on the front page. Or have your most spectacular achievement showcased upfront.

==> Get Social Proof

Social proof is one of the most powerful ways of building credibility. Why? Because it doesn’t come from you.

Social proof means that other people who have no financial gain from endorsing you like your product enough to go out of their way to help you. It sends a strong message.

Social proof includes comments on blog posts, testimonials on other people’s blogs or word of mouth endorsements from friend to friend.

These are a few of the most powerful ways to establish your credibility online. In the beginning, this process takes quite a bit of thought, as you have to plan out your story and discover your proof elements. Once you’ve got it down, however, your proof elements will keep working for you again and again, without you having to do much work.

If you are a business professional, then you want to network with other like-minded professionals. One place where you can make that happen is LinkedIn. Join today and get noticed with a strong profile showing.

What Is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is the premier site on the Web for business professionals. Here you can find and network with others in your field as well as meet new people. You can also share business tips and techniques while offering some of your own to assist others. Make a strong online presence here to help grow your business.

If you are not on LinkedIn, you might want to reconsider. The site is free to sign up. They offer plenty of site support for you to get started. Learn what you need to know about navigating the site through the LinkedIn Learning Center.

Now that you know what it is, it’s time to get going.

Creating a Profile

The first thing you will want to do once you sign up is complete your profile. On LinkedIn, there are searchable areas in the profile that can increase your ranking on the site and by association, your business website(s). It is best to complete your profile 100 percent but as long as you are above 75 percent you will get ranked and noticed.

So, what needs to go into your profile? On the page, several fields are required, but like we said, filling them all in is your best strategy for attracting other business professionals.

* Name and tagline – If you own an online business, what is that catch phrase that helps to complete your brand? Enter that after your name as your tagline. If you don’t have one, then don’t worry. Remember, your email address doesn’t qualify.

* Resume – Who are you professionally? If you have a recent copy of your resume handy (most professionals do), then it will be easy to populate the required fields. Since this is online, make every word count. Shorten lengthy phrases to simple but effective keywords that imply a directed action that you have taken. For instance, type “managed five marketing teams” instead of “responsible for five marketing teams.” The second is more ambiguous. Let everyone know what your qualities are.

* Add a Photo – The internet can seem like a cold place. Posting a photo gives others a face to put with the personality you are trying to create here. Choose a professional print that highlights your best features. For the sake of continuity, use the same photo on your other social networking profile pages.

* Affiliations – What awards have you won? How about prestigious societies or boards you belong to? Here is the place to let your accomplishments speak for you.

* Websites – Include your professional business website that you own, or your company’s site. Include any other sites you may be affiliated with, along with active links.

* Recommendations – Even if you aren’t looking for a job on this site, you can increase your credibility with varied recommendations from other professionals with whom you have worked.

There are other fields but we have highlighted a few. Your LinkedIn profile is the first glimpse others will get of you. Put your best foot forward.

Business strategy dictates that you use an arsenal of techniques to help grow your business. Are you using all of the resources at your disposal? If you are not sure, have you tried LinkedIn Groups?

As you may already know, LinkedIn is a growing social site for business professionals. Whether you work for a company or own your own storefront or internet business, you can find others with a similar business presence. Unlike other social sites, the idea here is to give professionals a place to network effectively. Preliminary profiles give other members a quick glance at who you are to see if they want to learn more.

There are a variety of ways that you can get involved in the site. One is LinkedIn Groups. If you have the goal of growing your business (most of us do), this tool can help you if you know how to leverage it.

Ways to Maximize Use of LinkedIn Groups

* Find related groups – There are several groups available but all don’t pertain to your particular area of business. Use the search function to find targeted groups that include professionals with similar interests.

* Actively participate in different groups – It’s easy to have your name on the roster, but in order for this tool to be effective it will take some work on your part. One feature of these groups is previewing the latest comments before entering the group discussion. When something pertains to you or peaks your interest, join in and make your presence known. Also, don’t be afraid to begin discussions if you have a question or a point to make.

* Increase your visibility – Being seen in groups increases the chances that others will want to find you. It may be your name they click on to connect with your profile. That is why it is so important to include searchable keywords in relevant fields within your profile.

* Start groups – Invite other professionals to join a group on a topic that you start. When you are involved in other group discussions, you can learn what professionals like you want. Meet that need with a new niche LinkedIn group.

* Learn about those in your group – Read their profiles, study their business tips and contact them personally for advice. Build a rapport with other professionals. You may be fostering future business collaborations in the process.

* Learn the latest buzz – What is going on in the business world you inhabit? Groups allow you to keep up with the latest news and events that you may want to attend in the interest of business growth.

* Learn what others are saying about you – Use site tools to see how you are faring with your fellow professionals. Use the comments and feedback to adapt your strategy and increase your visibility and popularity.

LinkedIn Groups can work not only to connect you with other professionals but also to increase your business.

Any search engine professional will tell you – to succeed, you need the right tools. Tools to evaluate keywords, tools to gauge your competition, tools to get backlinks.

Without the right tools, even the best SEO professionals in the world won’t be able to get very far.

What are the most important tools you should know about? Here are some of the most important tools for Google search engine optimization.

==> Backlink Checking Tools

Backlink checking tools allow you to figure out exactly how strong your competition is for any given keyword before you begin a campaign.

It also allows you to reverse engineer strategies that are already working for other people in your industry. If you can figure out what’s already working and do it even better than your competitors, you have a very good chance of success.

Two great backlink checking tools are Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO. Both of these tools have free versions that give you quite a bit of data, along with a paid version with even more data.

You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools to check backlinks; though both of these tools have serious drawbacks.

==> Submission Tools

If you’re doing mass backlinks using a social bookmarking website or article marketing, you’re going to want to have a few programs that do it for you.

For example, if you’re regularly submitting content to social bookmarking websites, you’ll probably want to use a tool like Bookmarking Demon or Ping.fm. These tools will submit new content to a wide array of social media websites all at the click of a button for you.

If you’re doing article submissions, you’ll either want to use a submission program like Article Submitter or use a service like iSnare.

==> Market Research Tools

There are several market research tools on the market that offer stellar keyword research and niche research capabilities.

For one, Google’s own Google Keyword Tool is still the best tool out there for raw traffic data. If you’re just trying to figure out how much traffic certain search terms get, it’s one of the fastest and easiest places to get data.

Another tool that’s been taking off rapidly is Market Samurai. In addition to search volume, Market Samurai will also evaluate the competitiveness of each keyword you type in and give you a rough gauge of how much you can expect to earn in that market if you successfully rank.

==> How Much of SEO Is in the Tools?

Though not having the right tools can prevent you from succeeding, having the right tools doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll succeed.

You need to use the tools in the right way to get the results you’re looking for. If you want to get ranked, tools can help you get there faster, but they can’t do the bulk of the real work for you.

A lot of beginning web marketers will launch websites without any kind of tracking on them. This is okay in the very beginning stages of launching a website, but the moment you decide that the website is more than a hobby and is something you actually want to make money from, you should install tracking right away.

Why?

The Very Basics: How Is Your Website Doing?

If you don’t even track the rudimentary things, such as how much traffic your website is getting, how many people are coming back to your website after leaving and other basic metrics, you’ll have no idea how your website is doing at all.

If your website is starting to get serious traffic, that means an opportunity to make money. If you don’t have tracking installed, you won’t know when that happens.

In addition to the basics, there are a lot of other benefits of tracking some of the more advanced metrics.

Using Metrics to Rank Well in Search Engines

With the Panda update, Google has publically stated that they’re using visitor metrics much more heavily now in their ranking algorithms.

That means that pages where people stay longer will tend to rank higher. Pages where users click and then never come back to Google also rank higher, as that probably means they found the answer to their question on your site. Pages which users don’t bounce from and instead go to other pages on your site will rank higher.

These are just a fraction of the metrics Google is now considering in their ranking algorithm. If you want your website to rank, you need to be consistently monitoring things like return rate, bounce rate and exit rate to improve them over time.

Tracking Performance to Immediately Improve Cashflow

Some metrics may not immediately improve your bottom line. Improvements in other metrics, however, can immediately improve your cashflow.

For example, what’s your current visitor to email sign-up rate? What’s your email to conversion rate?

By tracking these two metrics, you can immediately add more cash to your bottom line. More importantly, any improvements you make to these metrics will last over time, paying off for months and years.

Improving the Non-Tangibles of Your Business

How useful are people finding your website? How many people feel like your site is resourceful enough that they come back? How many people post things from your site to their Facebook status?

These are metrics that won’t necessarily add to your bottom line right away. However, they’ll result in more links, more visitors and more community goodwill. In the long run, that’ll turn into more visitors and more cash.

These are some of the many reasons you should be tracking the performance of your website. Without good tracking, you’re essentially flying blind. By tracking and measuring your metrics, you’ll be able to refine and improve your website over time.

Exit rate and bounce rate are two metrics that sound very similar but in reality are very different. They can both be used to gauge how well you’re doing in terms of content quality and user behavior. Here’s what each of these means.

What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

Your bounce rate is the number of people who leave your website without visiting any other page. It’s measured on a page level, so you can see your bounce rate from any particular page.

A high bounce rate on a page generally means users aren’t satisfied in some way. It could be that the content isn’t good enough. It could be that your navigation structure is confusing. It could be any number of things.

The bounce rate won’t tell you exactly what to fix, but it does give you a good idea of whether a page is working or not.

Generally a bounce rate of 55% or higher is considered quite bad. If you’re over 50%, that means over half of your visitors are simply leaving your site. On the other hand, anything 35% or lower is considered stellar.

What Does Exit Rate Mean? 

Your exit rate is the number of people who leave your website from that particular page.

Exit rate can be a bit of a mixed bag. A high exit rate doesn’t necessarily mean users aren’t satisfied. For example, if you have a step-by-step guide, it’s only natural that users will leave your site at the last page of your guide.

Your exit rate can be used to compare the effectiveness of different kinds of pages. So if one content page has a drastically different exit rate than another page, you might have to seriously look at the higher exit rate page.

A Few Examples:

Just to clearly illustrate the difference between bounce rate and exit rate, here are a few examples.

Example 1: A user comes to your website and leaves without clicking a link. That counts as both an exit and a bounce from that page.

Example 2: Someone came to this page from another page on your site, then leaves your website. This counts as an exit, but not a bounce.

Example 3: Someone comes to this page from another page on your website, then goes to another page on your website. This is neither a bounce nor an exit. It will count as an exit from the page they leave from.

As you can tell, though these two metrics are related, they aren’t the same thing. The bounce rate can be used to identify weak pages, while the exit rate needs to be treated a little more carefully. When using exit rate as a metric, make sure to ask yourself why a page’s exit rate is low or high rather than just looking at the number.

Your bounce rate measures the number of people who come to your blog and don’t visit any other post or page on your blog. Naturally, the higher the bounce rate, the less exposure you’re getting as the visitors see less of your content.

Also, bounce rate is starting to play more and more of a role in search engine optimization (SEO). Google is starting to pay less and less attention to links and more attention to on-page metrics. They can get these metrics from the Google Toolbar, Chrome and Google Analytics.

In short, having a lower bounce rate means you’ll have more satisfied readers, as well as a higher chance of ranking well in search engines.

Here’s how to improve your bounce rate.

Check All Browsers

Check for browser compatibility on all browsers. If your site doesn’t look right in one browser, chances are all users of that browser will leave your site.

Even if the browser only has 15% penetration, you’re still losing 15% of your traffic. Make sure to check all the major and even smaller browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.

Also check how your site looks on a smartphone.

Cluster Your Information

Instead of having just one piece of stand-alone content, try to publish your content in groups.

For example, if you own an origami website, don’t just make one page of content around how to make a T-Rex dinosaur. Make a cluster of origami content around how to make all kinds of dinosaurs.

Also try to give a clear next step at the end of every page or post. Give them further reading.

Segment Your Traffic

Not everyone coming to your site is looking for the same thing. If someone came from a search engine, chances are they’re looking for the answer to a very specific query. On the other hand, someone from a banner ad campaign may be in more of a “browsing” mood.

Different kinds of traffic should land on different kinds of pages. Different keyword traffic should land on different pages. Make sure you’re serving exactly the right kind of pages to users who’re most likely to want to see those pages.

Test Your Above the Fold 

The things that show up above the fold on your website will have a bigger effect than just about anything else you can do from a content perspective.

Test different kinds of headlines to see what gets the lowest bounce rate. Try different headers. Switching out your old header for a new header can have a massive positive or negative effect on your site-wide bounce rate. Test different headers to see what gets the best results.

These are a few things you can do to immediately improve your bounce rate. A lower bounce rate may not immediately put cash in your pocket, but is essential to the long-term health of your business.