The whole process of getting your website to the top of Google can be broken down into a number of steps that when followed, can place your site right up there at the top. The key is to consistently execute these steps until you get results. Here is how to create this process for you and your website.

Step 1: Identify a Reasonable Goal

When you are setting search engine optimization (SEO) goals, set both ambitious goals and goals that are achievable in weeks. These goals will take the form of keywords. You probably can’t expect to rank in the top three for your main keyword within six months. Although it is possible, don’t build your business based on that expectation. On the other hand, it is very reasonable to aim for ranking in a few weeks for long tail keywords. Start your quest for rankings with a main keyword to target in the long run and several less competitive keywords to rank for in the short run.

Step 2: Set a Content Goal

The content goal needs to come in the form of X pieces of content per Y amount of time. For example:

Goal: 3 Blog posts a week

Goal: 100 new products a month (ecommerce site)

Goal: 1 Video blog post a week

and so on and so forth. Remember that you are going to need to be able to follow this schedule for a few months. Be ambitious, but not so ambitious that you risk falling giving up. While it is possible to rank a website of just static content, Google does place a very strong emphasis and preference on websites that are regularly updated with new content.

Step 3: Set a Backlink Goal

Backlinks are the magic that makes an SEO campaign work. Choose one or two backlink strategies that you can execute regularly. Then create a schedule for when you will do the work. For example, if your strategy is to comment on ten blogs a week, then choose which days you will do your commenting. If your strategy is to do four guest blog posts a month, then you may have to contact five to ten blogs a week to make that happen. Again, schedule when you will do that on a weekly basis. The secret to rankings isn’t getting a bunch of backlinks all at once, but consistently increasing your backlinks over time.

If you follow these three steps and consistently add both content and backlinks to that content, you will find that you will very quickly start ranking for your lesser competition keywords. In a few months, you will find even higher competition keywords getting ranked, and eventually, you will even rank for your main keywords.

Websites with a lot of duplicate content get penalized by search engines. After all, their goal is to find unique content, not content that is the same throughout the internet, or even the same throughout your website. Many webmasters will unknowingly have a lot of duplicate content on their website, often because of simple technical mistakes. Here is how to avoid duplicate content.

Where Does Duplicate Content Come From?

Perhaps the most common source of duplicate content is from archive-type pages. For example, if you run a blog, the main content is in your posts. But you also have your category pages and your archive pages. Each of your category pages has a 200-word snippet from the article as a teaser for viewers to see.

Unfortunately, that means a single page of your category pages has as much as 1500 words of duplicate content, copied straight from your articles. The same is true of your archive pages. And any given blog may have dozens of pages of category and archive pages. Less common sources of duplicate content include hiring unscrupulous outsourcers who copy and paste other people’s work, along with webmasters who republish other people’s articles with the original author’s permission (legal, but not good from a search engine optimization [SEO] perspective.) So how do you prevent duplicate content?

Learn to Use Your Meta Robots or Robots.txt

Your meta robots tag allows you to specify on a certain page whether you want the page indexed or not. If your page contains duplicate content, just tell the search engines not to index it. Robots.txt resides on your top level directory and tells the search engines which pages it can and can’t index. Basically, meta works on a single page and robots.txt directs the whole site. Learn to use both if you often need to block search engines out of certain pages. Learning to use meta robots and robots.txt is especially important if you are using HTML or PHP to build your site, rather than WordPress.

Using WordPress Plug-Ins

If you are using WordPress, a lot of the duplicate content issues can be remedied through plug-ins. Most of the SEO plug-ins will handle the major duplicate content issues for you. Make sure you get one that allows you to “noindex” your category and archive pages, as well as automatically make all your links canonical.

Scan All Content with Copyscape

If you regularly outsource content, get in the habit of scanning your content with Copyscape. Copyscape will scan the internet for copies of your content and report back to you if they have found any matches, along with how close the match was. Though you will seldom run into an issue with outsourcers copying content outright, if it does happen it could ruin your entire website; therefore, it doesn’t hurt to be careful.

Duplicate content is preventable. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to noindex the right pages and scan your content with Copyscape. Get in the habit of performing these two procedures and you will protect your rankings in the long run.

Page caching is a technique of speeding up your load times. In addition, it will reduce the processing load on your server, as well as help with your search engine rankings. Below are the different kinds of caching and how you can apply this technique to your blog or website:

Caching and Types of Caching

Caching is the act of taking repetitive PHP code and turning it into HTML so that it doesn’t have to be run through the server every time to display the same kind of page. Let’s say you run a website that uses PHP code to determine what your viewer’s IP address is and then show that back to them.

Every time someone loads your web page, the page would first determine the viewer’s PHP, turn it into HTML code, and then display that code to the user. If you cach the page the first time around, however, it will simply save that HTML so that it doesn’t have to execute the PHP command again the second time around.

In more complex web apps, as well as WordPress blogs which run on a lot of complex PHP, the speed difference and server load difference between cached and non-cached pages can be very significant.

There are three main types of caching:

1. Output caching – This is where the entire page is cached and turned from PHP to HTML.

2. Fragment caching – This is where only a portion of the page is cached. Generally this technique is used by more tech-savvy designers who want to cache just specific processing-intensive parts of a website.

3. Data caching – This is where certain data, such as comments, are cached instead of pulling it from the server every time the page is visited.

Caching Tools and Applications

If you are running a WordPress blog, you will have a lot of tools available to you for caching and speeding up your pages. Two of the most popular plug-ins are WP Super Cache and Quick Cache.

WP Super Cache is a plug-in that will take the majority of your dynamic pages and turn them into static HTML pages. It will then bypass your PHP server completely and just serve up HTML whenever it can. Although users probably won’t notice a difference right away, it can make a huge difference during peak times or if you are on a shared server.

Quick Cache is similar to WP Super Cache. Quick Cache has a complex “decision engine” (computer brain) that decides when it should and shouldn’t serve up a cached page. Anytime someone needs up-to-date data, Quick Cache will know and serve up PHP. On the other hand, anytime someone just needs a normal page, it will display the page from the cache instead.

Setting up caching on a non-WordPress website requires a decent level of PHP proficiency. Perhaps the easiest tool to set up caching on a non-WordPress platform is the Alternative PHP Cache (APC). APC is a code framework that allows developers to specify which part(s) of their website they want to cache and write their own caching code.

You now know what caching is, along with a few popular tools for setting up caching on your own website. If you are using a processing-heavy website set-up that often outputs static pages, then you could speed up your website a lot by using caching.

Having top-notch search engine optimization (SEO) practices in place for your business blog is crucial. The difference between a well-optimized website and a poorly optimized one could be tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here is why it is so important for a business blog to have phenomenal SEO:

You Face Stiff Competition

In some industries, it is all right to have poor SEO simply because other websites have similarly poor SEO, but the business industry isn’t like that. No matter what your specific topic is, chances are you are going to be facing people who know what they are doing in the search engines. If you don’t have top-notch SEO practices, your chances of ranking are virtually zero in the business space. In other industries, it is very possible to accidentally rank. In business, the chances of that happening are slim to none. Pay attention to SEO, if for no other reason than the fact that your competition is paying careful attention.

You Are Setting an Example

If you run a business blog, then business owners reading your blog will expect you to “walk the walk.” You can’t talk about building a great business if your own website isn’t properly optimized. It is not just about rankings. A business blog needs to be well optimized to set an example and to demonstrate credibility. One of the biggest advantages of working with business people is that they have money to spend. The downside, however, is that you have to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about before they will part with their money. Showing that you know what you’re doing with SEO can help establish that credibility.

You Never Know When You Will Land a “Big Money” Visitor

Rather than the sales or advertising revenue, the biggest benefit to running a business blog often comes in the form of contacts. Your future mentor might meet you through your blog, or someone might like what you are up to and decide to offer to make a large investment in your business. They may also decide they like your product enough to buy it in bulk, or they might be just step away from someone you want to meet. Therefore, since you never know who might be reading your blog is why it is so crucial that you do everything in your power to get as many visitors as possible.

It takes time, energy and effort to SEO-optimize your blog. If that’s what it takes to get your blog in front of the right people, then it is worth it and you owe it to yourself to put in that time.

StumbleUpon is a social networking site that connects you directly to others who share the same interests, and can be a fantastic tool to drive traffic and grow your business. However, in order to gain the most benefit there are a few key strategies you can utilize.

#1 Identify Your Goals

Goals help you stay on track. They also help you know when a strategy is successful and when it needs to be fine-tuned or eliminated. So what do you want to accomplish with your StumbleUpon tactics? For example, “I want to increase website traffic by ten percent.”

#2 Create a Strong Brand

It’s important to make sure you are representing a cohesive brand personality or image whenever you communicate on StumbleUpon. Your profile is also a significant brand builder. Here are a few tips to strengthen your brand through your profile:

* Post a picture – Just like other social networking websites and even your website and blog, it is important to demonstrate that you are a real, live human being. It’s also a good way to share who you are.

* Choose topics strategically – Choose topics that are relevant to your business.

* Connect with like-minded Friends and Followers – Connect with your industry gurus and experts. You can also connect with your competition this way and upload other social networking contacts.

#3 Schedule Your Interactions

Most often when people join StumbleUpon and other social networking websites, they create a few key posts and then they forget about it. If you want to reach your goals, you’ll want to participate on a regular basis for it to be effective.

It is important to know that this is a task that you can outsource. You don’t have to spend your valuable time networking. If you are managing the task on your own, set aside a few minutes every day submitting sites to StumbleUpon, interacting and reviewing. Submit regular content that offers value and helps build your brand and awareness. You can make this step significantly easier by installing a StumbleUpon toolbar on your browser.

#4 Strategic Content

Of course you will want to submit some of your own content. However, you want to make sure the pages you submit are strategic. Don’t submit everything, but rather only content that you believe will help you reach your goals. Create content specifically for your StumbleUpon audience.

#5 Testing and Tracking

When you are creating your StumbleUpon goals, make sure you also create a way to test and track your results so that you will know if your efforts are successful.

#6 Integrate

Include StumbleUpon into your other marketing efforts. For example, add StumbleUpon buttons on your website content pages to motivate Stumbles and reviews.

#7 Advertise

Once you have a solid StumbleUpon system and are achieving the results you desire, take a look at StumbleUpon advertising. Like Facebook and other social networking advertising programs, it is highly targeted and may be more effective than other advertising programs.

StumbleUpon offers businesses the ability to build traffic, awareness, SEO and much more. Create your goals and a strategy to achieve them. Implement systems and tactics and then test for success.