SEO Task 1 – Keyword research (fine-tuning or finding new areas of opportunities)

How to do keyword research?

• Brainstorming sessions
• Analyze at your own website’s traffic sources and webmaster tools
• Use various online tools such as Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool
• Check what key phrases are bringing traffic to your competitors
• Estimating competition for same keywords on search engines
• Create lists of key phrases you intend to target

SEO Task 2 – On-site optimization (helping search engines to find all content correctly)

How to do on-page optimization?

• Check validation of the website’s code as per W3C standards
• Optimize HTML page titles, meta tags and content
• Enhance the internal linking structure
• Sort all canonicalization issues
• Create robots.txt and sitemap.xml

SEO Task 3 – Building online authority (gaining quality incoming links)

How to build online authority?

• Search engine submissions
• DMOZ, Yahoo and other directory submissions
• Optimize press releases
• Post content on 3rd party websites
• Contribute in your niche’s blogging community
• Contact people who might be interested in recommending your website
• Promotion of exceptional content for linkbaiting

SEO Task 4 – Monitoring industry changes (keeping up-to-date with algo changes)

How to monitor industry changes?

• Participate in specialized SEO forums and online communities
• Follow and communicate with the most popular SEO experts
• Testing various SEO ideas and monitoring performance

SEO Task 5 – Maintenance and reporting (for successful long-term benefits)

What are the most common SEO reports?

• Tracking number of indexed pages and incoming links for your website
• Keyword ranking reports to monitor position on search engines
• Daily, weekly and monthly organic traffic reports
• Reporting spam in search results to search engines

The above tips are not a complete list of all SEO tasks and responsibilities, but am sure it gives a clear picture of the effort involved. If you’re looking for freelance workers, follow this link.

Here I will be explaining all the issues one should be aware of, related to changing IP address without losing Google ranking. This procedure is initiated by simply changing the DNS to point to the new web host.

1. DNS Propagation
   During the propagation process, you should keep the website live on both old and new IP address. Although propagation is usually very fast in most locations, it can take even up to a week in third-world countries. You simply need to be sure that all web pages are reachable during the whole process by Googlebot and users of course. Checking the logs of the old server will give you a clear indication when this process is terminated.
2. Content Updates
   A change of IP address can be associated by Google with a change in a website’s ownership, especially when combined with other factors such as radical content changes. Thus I recommend you to keep content updates to a minimum during this whole process. By not updating content at all, you will also be making sure that you’re supplying same content on the old and new IP, during the propagation process discussed in point one too.
3. Capitalization Issues
   Some servers are case-sensitive. I suggest you to check all internal linking at the new location to make sure you don’t have any broken links. You can use a free software like Xenu’s Link Sleuth to crawl your website and make sure everything is in order. If necessary, you will need to setup 301 redirects to fix capitalization issues.
4. Indexed Web Pages
   It’s imperative to verify that all web pages on the old server are present at the new location too. Most of the websites I investigate usually have several orphan pages online that might be old and not even linked internally, but are still in Google’s index for various reasons and might be attracting traffic too. I recommend you to either replicate all exactly or clean the website properly before copying it to the new server.
5. Blocked IP Address
   You should verify whether the new IP address is not blocked in any country or whether it will be neighbor to black listed websites. Google does indirectly associate websites which reside on same class C IP address. Also, you will need to check whether you own any other websites on the same C block too, cause this might dilute any incoming link value originating from your other sites.
6. IP Geolocation
   Physical location of a website’s IP address does influence Google localized search results. If the new IP address is located in a different area or country, you will potentially rank better at this new location, but worst in the previous area.

I tried to cover the most important factors related to changing IP address without losing Google ranking, but feel free to add your own suggestions or comment on any of my points.

I will also be reviewing some of the best tools available and giving you my personal recommendations. Will be blogging about other SEO experts in this industry that one should be aware of and mentioning some of the most successful websites owned by Maltese individuals too. Most of all, I will be around to answer any questions you might have about search engine optimization.

Learning SEO (search engine optimization) is not just about improving Google rankings, it’s much more! Check out my blog posts, follow me on twitter and you will understand what I mean.