How to dominate digital marketing trends in 2018

Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends

Digital marketing has gained a lot of popularity in 2016 with large and medium-sized businesses creating their online presence and promoting their services and products through numerous social media channels and sites.
But what do we expect in the year 2017? 
While some marketers believe the internet space is going to expand further with more companies entering the digital world, others say there will be a complete makeover of how users and search engine giants give preference to the huge amount of data available on the internet.
The online marketing industry is large, complex, and volatile. The sooner you strike the right nerve of an internet user, the better you can appeal to them and stay ahead of your competitors.
To make things easier for you, I have studied and compiled a list of some of the most reliable digital marketing trends for the year 2017 that should be your focus in order to formulate effective digital marketing strategies and online campaigns.
1. The increasing dominance of video ads.

Though video advertisements are certainly nothing new for social media giants like YouTube and Facebook, the news of Google entering the fray with in-SERP video advertising will change the whole spectrum of online advertisement.
This also suggests the increasing acceptance of video ads among users and, as the trend continues, we may expect different types of video ads popping up on our screens very soon.
2. Mobile will completely dominate desktop.
 2016 was a big year for mobile.
We have seen how Google virtually phased-out all websites not optimized for mobile. The ubiquitous presence of hand-held devices and fading away of desktop traffic clearly indicates that the smart money rests on mobile-focused internet marketing.
Mobile search and mobile optimization should, therefore, be a top priority for digital marketers in the year 2017.
3. Dedicated apps will find their way. 
A dedicated application offers all the features of mobile-optimized website, but in a more intuitive, convenient, and accessible way.
Google has offered app indexing which will certainly bring in advantages to having a dedicated app in the future. Although we’re still years away from apps completely replacing websites, business owners are realizing their potential, and 2017 will be a pivotal year in mobile app development.
4. Social conversion is coming.
 Enough has been said about the power of social media. In the year 2017, the online communities will not be bound to only company-consumer conversation or attracting new prospects; instead, they will provide opportunities to improve conversion rates.
We have witnessed the same for e-commerce and lead generation websites. Social media will work as new conversion channels and offer tools to convert prospects directly into buyers.
5. Year of wearable technology and smart devices.

In the past few years, we have seen the unveiling of the Apple iWatch, Google Glass, Moto 360, and other similar smart devices that can be worn on-the-go and keep you connected with the digital world.
The year 2017 will see more of such smart devices and innovations in wearable technology that will change the entire landscape of local marketing. Digital marketers will focus on the potential of wearable technology that can diminish the difference between “online” marketing and “real” marketing.
6. Search algorithm will change. And change again. 
Like it or not, but the search engine algorithms will change. With the enormous amount of information being added to the internet every second, search engine giants will keep on updating their algorithm to decide which content should get priority and rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs), and which should not.
Therefore, the only strategy should be to remain original, informative, and helpful to your audience. Also, digital marketers should not remain focused only on Google’s algorithm, but give due consideration to Facebook’s algorithm and Bing’s algorithm as well.
7. Online advertising will become more expensive.
We have witnessed a tremendous growth in digital marketing practices over the last couple of years. The competition for online space and dominance over the internet is going to expand further.
And as the demand rises for top advertising spots, the prices for online advertising will also increase. While some marketers believe that PPC will die in the coming years, there will be more optimized advertisement alternatives ruling the web.
8. Unique, high-quality content will be the key. 
Content, often referred to as the “king” in digital marketing, will remain an essential part of any online marketing campaign in the years to come. The influx of professional writers and video producers will make content marketing more competitive.
The key will be to write unique, high-quality, and interactive content that readers can connect with. Also, there will be a huge demand for niche-based writers who possess knowledge and expertise in their subject matter.
9. Conversion Rate Optimization to offer high ROI.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) may not sound like a new term to most digital marketers, but it’s time to introduce it on your website and landing pages.
Conversion rate optimization helps you track user behavior on your site and identify elements that are producing the highest number of conversions. Instead of allocating a huge budget for advertising, marketers can use CRO to funnel more of their existing traffic into sales.
10. Growth hacking will continue to evolve.
Growth hacking is here to stay and it will evolve further in 2017.
The need for digital marketers to quickly grab their audiences’ attention through social media channels, viral marketing, and organic ads in 2017 will take growth hacking to an even bigger level.
The most fascinating digital marketing practice will continue to demonstrate its huge potential in the face of all odds in the coming years.
There are many digital marketing trends and strategies need to be altered to remain at the focus of user attention and search engine giants. Keep your eyes open and follow the best digital marketing practices that will keep you ahead of the innovative curve.
So what do you expect for 2017? Share your thoughts about digital marketing trends for the coming year in the comments section below.

source:https://www. shoutmeloud. com

How do I improve an SEO ranking in one day?

White Hat SEO can’t help you to improve your ranking in one day. If you want to improve your ranking in one day at any-cost, then you have to follow Black Hat SEO, which is not at all good for your business. Because black hat SEO is not a permanent solution, temporarily it can increase your rank, but after that it will permanently penalize your site which will not good for your business.

So be patience to get better results.

Follow White Hat SEO techniques to get the best result, ofcourse slowly but permanently.

Use below strategy to improve your SEO rank

1. Guest Blogging
2. Forum Posting
3. Infographic Submission
4. Image Marketing
5. Content Sharing
6. Blog Commenting
7. Social Media Marketing
8. Competitors link building
9. Classified Ads
10. Wikipedia Sharing
11. Top Bookmarking

What are the new SEO techniques?

As you all know, Google has been updating their algorithms very often for the last few years, that’s why so important to stay up to date and be always aware of what are the most important SEO ranking factors to take into account when getting ready to work on a website ranking or a new SEO campaign.

In this article, we will only cover the main factors that really need to be taken into consideration, and that have also been proven to be very impactful towards the website ranking. Let’s then get started:

Most Important SEO Ranking Factors for 2017

1. Backlinks

Backlinks are well known as one of the most, if not the most important off-page reference factors to calculate a domain’s authority and it can definitely help your site rank a lot better in the results of all search engines. Backlinks are usually placed on websites of high authority and reputation, it’s just a reference link to your website or one of your posts and it works to gain good reputation and authority.

There are two main types of backlinks that can be used as SEO ranking factors and they can cause a different impact towards your website ranking, do-follow, and no-follow links, these two need to be appropriately balanced in order to avoid being penalized by Google.

• You might also want to see: Best Free SEO Tools to Get Your Website Ranking #1 in 2017

-DoFollow links tell the search engines that they can follow the link to your website and also humans can follow these links, this is how you can increase domain authority, the more DoFolow backlinks you get, the more you will be benefited of the authority of those websites linking to you and improve your website ranking.

Anchor text is also considered as very important SEO ranking factors, and this is basically a DoFollow backlink with a targeted keyword. This is most likely the way someone will let you get a back link from their blog or website.

DoFollow links look like this: <a href=”http://www.google.com/”>Keyword</a>

-NoFollow links tell the search engines that only humans can follow these links to your website, but not the search engine itself. This is mostly used when you want to link to a website and you don’t want to give them backlink love. This type of backlinks is also important when you are working on an SEO campaign because you want all your backlinks to look natural in order to avoid penalizations, making sure that you have as many DoFollow as NoFollow backlinks will keep things balanced for you and stay on the safe side.

NoFollow links look like this: <a href=”http://www.google.com/”rel=”Nofollow”>Google</a>

2. Content Optimization

This is most definitely one of the most important SEO ranking factors, we all now how much google loves content. When we talk about content optimization as one important resource for website ranking, we are talking about all the following aspects:

-Meta Title (It needs to include your targeted keyword, preferably at the beginning and its length needs to be below 75 characters).

-Meta Description (This tells the search engines what your page or article is about, it needs to include your targeted keyword and its length must be between 100 and 160 characters).

-Content length and Relevance (This is not a secret, everybody knows that google loves content. The content must be original and it should have at least 800 words, but the more text you have, the more love google will give you. Also, make sure that your content is original, you don’t want to be penalized for using someone else’s content).

3. Page Level / Keyword

Being able to find the best keywords to target for, is one of the toughest tasks for bloggers who are just beginning on their career and don’t have a lot of experience or knowledge about SEO ranking factors or website ranking. There are a few basic concepts that you cannot miss if you really want to be #1 on google search results.

-Longtail Keywords: Longtail keywords are basically the ones formed by three to four words, these are indeed the least competitive keywords since they don’t have as high search volume as keywords that are only formed by one or two words, therefore it’s easier to rank for those. Let’s give you an example:

This is a good example of a short tail keyword. It’s only formed by two words and it has good search volume, that means that you will get between 10,000 and 100,000 visitors from that keyword if you are able to get to #1 on the search results for that particular keyword. Now the problem is how difficult is it to compete here?

Now let’s try to find a 3 to 4 words longtail keyword and compare it.

This keyword is formed by three words, and it can definitely drive more targeted traffic to your website, this is due to the fact that it’s also a more specific search. It’s clear that the user is looking for “companies”, while in the first example that was not so specific. Competition is lower, although it has less search volume, it will take less time and effort to start ranking for this long tail keyword, but it also has a higher CPC which could result in more revenue if you are monetizing with a PPC such as Google Adsense.

• You might also want to see: Make Money Online With Advertising – Google Adsense US$2,000/mo

4. Page Loading Speed

Google itself has officially announced that one of the key SEO ranking factors that they will be taking more seriously for this 2017, is the website loading speed. Every user is expecting a fast loading site with around 2-3 seconds for the loading speed if your website takes longer than that then they are already thinking about leaving your slow turtle website and click somewhere else. This is, therefore a very important detail that affects your conversion rate. Probably you are already located within the top 10 search results for your targeted keyword, but people is often bouncing out of your website because it takes so long for it load completely.

GTmetrix provides great recommendations to reduce your website’s loading speed.

5. Mobile Optimization / Accelerated Mobile Page

This is definitely another SEO ranking factor that google has announced to be one of the bullet points they will be targeting for 2017. Indeed google initiated the AMP project which introduces a lighter version of a website, designed especially for mobile devices. This initiative allows mobile users (Smartphones and tablets) which nearly represents at least 30% of the users searching for things through google every day, and the number is increasing. This is the reason why you must ensure that you configure your website appropriately for pages and post to display accordingly with its AMP version.

This is what some of the experts from google have to say:

“Speed has always been a cornerstone of Google Search and we’re thrilled to be working alongside others in the tech industry and publishers around the world to bring the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to life. An open content ecosystem will give publishers maximum reach and allow users to get the best content no matter which app they are using. AMP HTML will make it all blazing fast, so we can’t wait to use it!”

David Besbris
VP Engineering, Google Search

6. SSL Certificate / HTTPS

In the past, having an SSL certificate was only important if you had an e-commerce website or if you needed to collect information that needed to be encrypted, such as credit card information, SSN, etc.

Now it has all changed since google has officially announced that they will flag any site without an SSL certificate as insecure. This is certainly one of the big changes that google has announced for 2017. If you were wondering what was coming after panda, then now you know it.

An SSL certificate has an estimated cost of around $60/year, but there is also some free options out there that you can always enjoy of, for instance; Flexible SSL by CloudFlare and Freee SSL by Let’s Encrypt.

What is SEO? What are some useful SEO techniques?

SEO mainly stands for search engine optimization and it’s a part of Internet Marketing. SEO is technique or process via this we can improve website visibility in major search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing etc.

There are 2 types of SEO which are

1. On Page Optimization

2. Off Page Optimization

There are many techniques that make for a great SEO Strategy. Most of the mobile apps development companies using SEO Techniques to rank their website high in SERP.

On-Page SEO is the SEO on your actual page or blog. One of the most popular ways that search engines worldwide tend to rank websites is by looking for the prominence and frequency of certain keywords and phrases on various facets of your site

*Meta Descriptions.

*Meta Tags. ...

*URL Structure. ...

*Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)

*Keyword Density

*Image SEO

*Internal Linking

Off-Page SEO is the use of keywords off your site. Search engines use mentions of your site, business name, and keywords used on other places across the web in order to determine your ranking in their results.

*Promotions on Social Networking Sites

*Guest posting

*Article submission

*Forum Postings

*Directory Submission

*Social Bookmarking

*Blog commenting

Latest On Page Seo Techniques 2017

Latest On Page Seo Techniques 2017. Hello friends, I know many of visitors have own blog for sharing their knowledge worldwide people’s. In Blogger and wordpress we can create a blog in less than a minute. And we can post anything about all things in a short time. But without seo your blog is like a personal diary. We need to follow proper seo guides for search engines notify our blog. In my opinion many bloggers still now, don’t know about how to optimize blog posts for on page seo and off page seo. So that am gonna share your Latest On Page Seo Techniques 2017 for improve your seo score in google and other search engines. In my personal experience in blogger and wordpress am facing many troubles in search engine ranking.

Do you have a blogger blog or wordpress site?. And still now not able to understand why your blog posts not indexed in google even if you have healthy traffic?. Here is some of my on page seo techniques for you. Just follow the below guides to rank your site well in search engines.

For bloggers i recommend, At first write fresh unique contents with proper post structure for better understanding for your blog visitors. Don’t copy articles from other sites and blogs. In My experience in blogging, many blogger blog admins copying my blog posts make money with adsense. If you have also problem with copy paste bloggers. Then you should immediately report these sites on google dmca. Because by having too much of copywriter bloggers, your bog getting disturbed in google for index your posts. Let’s we go for today topic Latest On Page Seo Techniques 2017. It’s not the harder thing for seo. Just keep the below things on your mind before publishing your articles.

Latest On Page Seo Techniques 2017 :

Choose Post Title Between 60 To 70 : According To search engine experts, Title tag is important for tell about your content in search engines and your blog visitors. So use mainly targeted keyword in your title tag and choose the title between 60 to 70 chaecters.

Use Meta Description : Meta Description is the important thing in search engines. You need to tell about your contents in meta description shortly between 146 to 150. Using meta description with 146 – 150 characters gives better result in search engines. Otherwise your meta description will ignored by search engines.

Heading Tag : Heading tag is important for on page seo while writing blog post. You need to use h2 and h3 tags in your posts for index the content well. There are some limits for using heading tags in search engines. Use only one h1 Tag Per page. And use h2 tags in post paragraph titles. H2 tag shuld be less than 10 numbers in your page for better result in indexing.

Optimize Post For Higher Seo Result :

Image Optimization : It’s very simple to use image optimization blogger and wordpress. You can Just use your post titles in alt tags for images. Alt tags is important to get your images indexed in google image search results.

Post Url Permalink Structure :  Choose the post permalink carefully. In wordpress you should choose your custom permalink with seo friendly permalink structure. Don’t use any special characters like symbols and underscores in your url’s. Because url will get ignored in google sitemap.

Internal Linking : Internal Links Are helpful one for give traffic to your other blog posts and search engine will crawl your url. While writing article, Also link the same category similar post in your current post. Internal linking with nofollow tag will getting better result in search engines.

Organic Keywords : Use Keyword Tools for generate bulk traffic from search engines. Keywordtool and lsigraph will help you to get your targeted keyword related mostly searched contents. Use the keywords in your title tag and meta description. Also add the keyword with h2 tag in your post for better result.

Basic Blog Seo Procedures:

Submit Sitemap To Search Engines : I Know all of you using google webmaster tools and bing webmaster tools for submit your sitemap. But choose the correct sitemap in your blog and submit them on search engines. Create custom sitemap for blogger and wordpress and submit them too with your sitemaps.

Robots.Txt : Robots.txt helps search engines for crawl your site. use proper robots tag in vlogger and wordpress for getting good result. Adding sitemap url in robots tag will helps you to search engines crawl your sitemap via robots header tag. But this is slightly unwanted one for robots tag. Add your sitemaps in search engines manually. It will helps you to get indexing faster.

Increase Your Post Length : While am browsing some blogs in my free time. There are many bloggers writing contents too small. Actually in less than 200 words, what you gonna share with your blog posts?. Just write blog posts more than 350 words. Because your post length is important to get better result. Also you can increase your seo quality by writing more words about your blog.

Backlink : What is backlink and how to use it?. Backlink is the important one for increase your domain authority of your blog and get well indexing in search engines. But many bloggers using backlink in wrong manner. Don’t get more than 2 backlink from the same site. Just link your related content url while commenting on others site and getting backlink from other services. Don’t use your blog title all time. If you gonna comment any seo related post in other blog. Just paste link of your seo related article from your blog while comment.

Avoid Bot Traffic :

Paid Bot Traffic : Using paid bot traffic is stupid thing for boost alexa rank for free. Search engines requires quality traffic for index your posts and pages. So don’t use iframe views and bot traffics for generate traffic for your blog posts manually. Just focus on natural traffic and gain search engine visits.

Don’t Use Too Much Of Ads : Advertisements are the ways to earn money from blogger and make money in blogging. On the internet many sites offering ads for your site and gives earnings for ad clicks. Except banner ads, Pop under ads are too irritating for users. Also search engines got issues by your ad redirects. Not only views, annoying advertisements can hurt your site loading time by javascript. Use less javascripts in webpage for improve site loading time.

Site Loading Time / Site Speed : Site speed is important for getting good traffic in search engines and other social networks like facebook. Yes, now a days everything comes to mobile. 70% Users using search engines in mobile [Survey Said]. So google optimized mobile search results for better experience in search results. In this time google launches googleweblight launched by google for browse faster in low speed loading sites. Check your site with google mobile friendly site checkup for fix your problems in mobile view.

Adsense : Yes, Adsense also important in Latest On Page Seo Techniques 2017. Use ad units in proper placements and avoid unwanted places like important paragraph. Am saying this because of some blog admins using adsense link ads between post paragraphs for getting more clicks. Actually it will hurt your seo. Also it’s against adsense terms and conditions.

Templates : Use seo optimized blogger templates and seo friendly themes for wordpress. Don’t show your css intelligence in blogger and wordpress too much. Use responsive blogger templates.

CONCLUSION :

Which Template I Shoud Use for Better Result in Seo And How To Getting Them for Free : 

The below types of blogger templates recommended by me : Seo Friendly Responsive Blogger Templates. Mobile Optimized Blogger Templates. Blogger Seo Templates. Seo blogger templates are widely available as much you want in many theme sites. For wordpress users, Don’t use free themes in wordpess, am also using free themes first time and switched to premium seo template. And got good results in improved seo.

So Guys this post will help you to understand blogger and wordpress Latest On Page Seo Techniques 2017 for improve your search engine score. Share your thought about this post and share your seo problems with me. I will respond you shortly and clear your problems.

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Latest SEO Techniques

Website for Users and Web Spiders:

Google or any search engines web master guidelines were invented to give the best to the users. But no web master guidelines are revised daily. But users thoughts were changing minute to minute. We are in the position to built a website not only for web spiders also for the users (Targeted users).

• Understand what users wants
• At what time they need that thing
• Choose the right location of where your targeted audiences are
• Try to be in the place where your targeted audiences meets together
• Help them for free/low cost to create brand awareness
• Try to provide quality of service so that word of mouth marketing, Person to person marketing automatically starts
• This tool sure help to do this Website Review Checklist, Website Grader, Backlink Watch, Growth Hacking

Study a lot about how internal links works better than the backlinks.

Convert your website more search engine friendly (Read in depth about Google's 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List)

Deal the link buidling campaign with content marketing alone

Here's the Link Building Strategies Ultimate Guide

Promote the content in the form of

1. Presentation

2. PDF

3. Document

4. Video

5. Infographic

6. Instructographic

7. Video

8. Press releases, article submissions

Beyond SEO: Googlebot Optimization

You know all about search engine optimization — the importance of a well-structured site, relevant keywords, appropriate tagging, technical standards, and lots and lots of content. But chances are you don’t think a lot about Googlebot optimization.

Googlebot optimization isn’t the same thing as search engine optimization, because it goes a level deeper. Search engine optimization is focused more upon the process of optimizing for user’s queries. Googlebot optimization is focused upon how Google’s crawler accesses your site.

There’s a lot of overlap, of course. However, I want to make this important distinction, because there are foundational ways in which it can affect your site. A site’s crawlability is the important first step to ensuring its searchability.

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is Google’s search bot that crawls the web and creates an index. It’s also known as a spider. The bot crawls every page it’s allowed access to, and adds it to the index where it can be accessed and returned by users’ search queries.

My animated infographic on How Google Works shows you how the spiders fetch the web and index the information.

The whole idea of how Googlebot crawls your site is crucial to understanding Googlebot optimization. Here are the basics:

1. Googlebot spends more time crawling sites with significant pagerank. The amount of time that Googlebot gives to your site is called “crawl budget.” The greater a page’s authority, the more crawl budget it receives.
2. Googlebot is always crawling your site. Google’s Googlebot article says this: “Googlebot shouldn’t access your site more than once every few seconds on average.” In other words, your site is always being crawled, provided your site is accurately accepting crawlers. There’s a lot of discussion in the SEO world about “crawl rate” and how to get Google to recrawl your site for optimal ranking. There is a terminology misunderstanding here, because Google’s “crawl rate” refers to the speed of Googlebot’s requests, not the recurrence of its site crawl. You can alter the crawl rate within Webmaster Tools (gear icon → Site Settings → Crawl rate). Googlebot consistently crawls your site, and the more freshness, backlinks, social mentions, etc., the more likely it is that your site will appear in search results. It’s important to note that Googlebot does not crawl every page on your site all the time. This is a good place to point out the importance of consistent content marketing — fresh, consistent content always gains the crawler’s attention, and improves the likelihood of top ranked pages.
3. Googlebot first accesses a site’s robots.txt to find out the rules for crawling the site. Any pages that are disallowed will not be crawled or indexed.
4. Googlebot uses the sitemap.xml to discover any and all areas of the site to be crawled and indexed. Because of the variation in how sites are built and organized, the crawler may not automatically crawl every page or section. Dynamic content, low-ranked pages, or vast content archives with little internal linking could benefit from an accurately-constructed Sitemap. Sitemaps are also beneficial for advising Google about the metadata behind categories like video, images, mobile, and news.

Six Principles for a Googlebot Optimized Site

Since Googlebot optimization comes a step before search engine optimization, it’s important that your site be as easily and accurately indexed as possible. I’m going to explain how to do this.

1. Don’t get too fancy.

My advice, “don’t get too fancy” is for this reason. Googlebot doesn’t crawl JavaScript, frames, DHTML, Flash, and Ajax content as well as good ol’ HTML.

Google hasn’t been forthcoming on how well or how much Googlebot parses JavaScript and Ajax. Since the jury is out — and opinions run the gamut — you’re probably best off not consigning most of your important site elements and/or content into Ajax/JavaScript.

I realize that Matt Cutts told us that we can open up Javascript to the crawler. But some evidence and Google Webmaster Guidelines still proffer this bit of advice:

If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

I side with skepticism on the use of JavaScript. Conjecture what you wish, but basically, don’t get too fancy.

2. Do the right thing with your robots.txt.

Have you ever really thought about why you need a robots.txt? It’s standard best practice for SEO, but why?

One reason why a robots.txt is essential is because it serves as a directive to the all-important Googlebot. Googlebot will spend its crawl budget on any pages on your site. You need to tell the Googlebot where it should and shouldn’t expend crawl budget. If there are any pages or silos of your site that should not be crawled, please modify your robots.txt accordingly.

The less Googlebot is spending time on unnecessary sections of your site, the more it can crawl and return the more important sections of your site.

As a friendly bit of advice, please don’t block pages or sections of your site that should not be blocked. The Googlebot’s default mode is to crawl and index everything. The whole point of robots.txt is to tell Googlebot where it shouldn’t go. Let the crawler loose on whatever you want to be part of Google’s index.

3. Create fresh content.

Content that is crawled more frequently is more likely to gain more traffic. Although pagerank is probably the determinative factor in crawl frequency, it’s likely that the pagerank becomes less important when compared with freshness factor of similarly ranked pages.

It’s especially crucial for Googlebot optimization to get your low ranked pages crawled as often as possible. As AJ Kohn wrote, “You win if you get your low PageRank pages crawled more frequently than the competition.”

4. Optimize infinite scrolling pages.

If you utilize an infinite scrolling page, then you are not necessarily ruining your chance at Googlebot optimization. However, you need to ensure that your infinite scrolling pages comply with the stipulations provided by Google and explained in my article on the subject.

5. Use internal linking

Internal linking is, in essence, a map for Googlebot to follow as it crawls your site. The more integrated and tight-knit your internal linking structure, the better Googlebot will crawl your site.

An accurate way to analyze your internal linking structure is to go to Google Webmaster Tools → Search Traffic → Internal Links. If the pages at the top of the list are strong content pages that you want to be returned in the SERPs, then you’re doing well. These top-linked pages should be your site’s most important pages:

6. Create a sitemap.xml

Your sitemap is one of the clearest messages to the Googlebot about how to access your site. Basically, a Sitemap does exactly what the name suggests — serves as a map to your site for the Googlebot to follow. Not every site can be crawled easily. Complicating factors may, for lack of a better word, “confuse” Googlebot or get it sidetracked as it crawls your site.

Sitemaps provide a necessary corrective to these missteps, and ensures that all the areas of your site that need to be crawled will be crawled.

Analyzing Googlebot’s Performance on Your Site

The great thing about Googlebot optimization is that you don’t have to play guesswork to see how your site is performing with the crawler. Google Webmaster Tools provides helpful information on the main features.

I want to advise you that this is a limited set of data, but it will alert you to any major problems or trends with your site’s crawl performance:

Log in to Webmaster Tools, and go to “Crawl” to check these diagnostics.

Crawl Errors

You can find out if your site is experiencing any problems with crawl status. As Googlebot routinely crawls the web, your site will either subject itself to crawling with no issues, or it will throw up some red flags, such as pages that the bot expected to be there based on the last index. Checking out crawl errors is your first step for Googlebot optimization.

Some sites have crawl errors, but the errors are so few or insignificant that they don’t automatically affect traffic or ranking. Over time however, such errors are usually correlated with traffic decline. Here is an example of a site that is experiencing errors:

Crawl Stats

Google tells you how many pages and kbs the bot analyzes per day. A proactive content marketing campaign that regularly pushes fresh content will provide a positive upward momentum for these stats.

Fetch as Google

The “Fetch as Google” feature allows you to look at your site or individual pages the way that Google would.

Blocked URLs

If you want to check and see if your robots.txt is working, then “Blocked URLs” will tell you what you need to know.

Sitemaps

Use the sitemap feature if you want to add a sitemap, test a sitemap, or discover what kind of content is being indexed in your sitemap.

URL Parameters

Depending on the amount of duplicate content caused by dynamic URLs, you may have some issues on the URL parameter indices. The URL Parameters section allows you to configure the way that Google crawls and indexes your site with URL parameters. By default, all pages are crawled according to the way that Googlebot decides: