11 Reasons why your site has lost rankings ?

0 comments Posted by Kishore at 9:31 PM

1. Link Buying - The most common way of losing your rankings. Earlier people were loosing PR but I can easily see them loosing rankings too now, which makes sense since the links which were giving you value got devalued. Google is way too serious nowdays and avoid link buying or at least make sure you don’t leave any traces.

2. Bad Neighborhood - Well people talk alot about bad neighborhood and though I always take this with pinch of salt (anyone can put your site in bad neighborhood and penalizing such sites heavily can break the Google equilibrium), but I do feels Good neighborhood is important. If you are getting links from bad neighbors, they will get penalized and effectively it will affect you too.

3. Too Fast Link Building - well this I can confirm, if suddenly u get way too many links from non authority site, your site will get hit. Avoid getting sitewide links too.

4. You have changed the Titles of pages - whenever you will change the title of the page, it will surely get a dip in rankings. Most of the time it will get back at similar position, but many a time, it will never come. It may have started ranking for some other keywords though. The safe way is to Never change title of good ranking pages.

5. You have made excessive changes in content - The moment you change content of a ranking page, it will get a dip. Reason is same as above. There was random remark I had read in some forum that Google is stopping the fast speed of web.

6. You have changed the design completely - Well I can confirm this, I used to spend lot of time in designing my sites (now I have stopped it since it don’t pay much to code and design your sites) and the moment I changed the full design of the site, it lost rankings, #4 came to #18 something. Though I had changed the urls as well (but with proper 301 redirect) so can’t say for sure how changing theme made the effect.

7. Duplicate content - You added some functionality in your site and the site started getting duplicate pages without you noting (it often happens with CMS which you don’t understand fully) and you will surely lose rankings. If you notice ranking drop and increase in your number of pages, do check for duplication.

8. Your links got removed, expired or lost value - If you have done some link building in past, the chances are, they might have got removed or expired. Sites get closed all the time and webmasters remove the exchanged/sold links too.

9. You stopped working on Link Building and SEO - Some competitive niches always need fresh links, content and seo work to keep them ranked otherwise.

10. Someone did something nasty to your site - There are all kind of people on net, and may be your competitor or some scrapper coped your content and out ranked you. I have seen many site which are running on feeds (they are 3-4 year old and have decent authority) out ranking original sites. Make sure this is not happening to you.

11. Google changed its algorithm - Well Google often tweak there algorithm and the chances are you might got a hit out of it. There is nothing much you can do other than to understand which part of the site got affected and why ? and than fix it. And do Accept the reality, that its part of the game.

 

How to Begin Keyword Research

0 comments Posted by Kishore at 12:15 AM

What is a keyword?

It's anything people type into a search engine. It could be made up of one word or several keyword phrases joined together. Every person uses their own method of searching, and that makes anticipating those keywords that will connect their websites with the right visitors very difficult. Keyword research starts with the understanding that finding lots of related keywords that deliver targeted traffic is the ultimate goal of any keyword research.

Sending thousands of visitors to a site who have no interest in your product, let alone in buying it, is just wasted effort and doesn't do any good for your business. If possible, we want to find the customer who has a clear knowledge of what they want and is close to buying something soon.

We would ideally want a few visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future. In order to achieve this, we want to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to our website.

If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes.

Thinking like your customers

Thinking like your customers is easier said than done.

All merchants are guilty of thinking in terms of features and specs of the products and not thinking in terms of benefits it can provide to the customers.

You know your business and market too well. The industry jargons and slang are in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have a very narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.

Here is an example: what is the most popular search term, "cheap flights," "cheap seats," "low fares" or "discount fares"?

As you can see it's not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it?

The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part intuition, and imagination. Since we can't get into the heads of every possible potential visitor to your site who may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on keyword research tools to tell us what people actually search for and how often.

There are a handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is mind boggling.

Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor's website. We are talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords on the web pages.

This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily there are free Keyword Analyzer tools that can dig up keywords from your competitor's sites in a snap. We'll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research project.

Keyword research is like a job interview process

In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find the perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to cast a widenet first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man. Even then, it's almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the original research only a few weeks earlier. What this tells us is the keyword selection and refinement process never ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the number of visitors you are receiving to your site.

Where and how to look for keywords

In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a variety of resources. Some of these resources may include:

Brainstorming: Getting your brain to go on a magic carpet ride is one of the best ways to find relevant keywords for your website. Don't just settle for asking the obvious question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: "What is this product made up of?" or "Who is using my services?" or "What problems do my products solve?"

Finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less than a month for even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research has ended forever, but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be done with the free keyword research tools if your budget is tight.

Free keyword research tools: You can gain access to the powerful and free Google external keyword tool to expand your keyword list. Unfortunately the Google external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search numbers. Another very valuable feature in Google external keyword tool is the "Site-Related Keywords" finder. By simply entering the website URL of your competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web pages.

Another free keyword research tool available without creating an account is the Overture keyword inventory . As of now, August 2007, this tool only shows the January 2007 search volumes as it's being phased out, but Yahoo! is promising a replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain access to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.

Related search terms suggestion tools: One of the fastest ways you can find hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools.

Creating a large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is essential to effective keyword research. Discovering related phrases that are not simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent indexing . Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words as well.

Some of the search engines provide a related search command list in their search results. Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the "clusters" side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by playing with different combination of keywords. You can also visit Technorati a well known blog aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain and generate new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the "Related tags" section directly under the search results.

Visitor statistic reports: These can be generated from web server log files or from script based visitor statistic programs. This can help you uncover new keywords for your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the search engines to find your websites. In some cases, you'll find keywords you didn't expect to come up for in the search results. You should further research those keywords and uncover new keyword niches.

Site search engines: This can be a great source of new keywords and a potential data mining source. As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords, keyword length and other important keyword metrics.

Top ranking competitors: These websites are already well optimized and contain keyword rich web pages. Why not leverage their efforts and harvest the best keywords for your own website? With the help of the SEO Studio keyword analyzer you can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and HTML page content in seconds.

A few examples of good keyword selection practices

Selecting the best keyword takes experience and a little know how, but it's always helpful to see how the pros do it, so here are a few basic steps for keyword selection.

Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or the Keywords Analyzer, type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might otherwise be overlooked.

Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60 of all searches, it follows you can expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if the search term is well targeted for your business.

At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in your basket.

Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition. Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes.

It's very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword competitiveness is around "100,000" websites. Anything above a hundred thousand results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.

 

How To Get Your Site Googled Quickly And Cheaply

0 comments Posted by Kishore at 2:47 AM

Not so long ago there was a booming cottage industry that catered to novice internet marketers who were in a bat-outta-hell rush to get their websites indexed by Google.

The purveyors of those services that catered to the burgeoning get-indexed-quickly-by-Google crowd usually directed internet marketing newbies to buy expensive one-way links for the duration of one month from high page rank websites or more specifically, high PR web pages.

Such links commonly cost as much as $800/month (not an expense for the faint of heart, as you can see). But why would someone shell out that kind of money for one measly link?

MYTH 1: BEING INDEXED BY GOOGLE MEANS LOTS OF TRAFFIC

A lot of new marketers think that once they've got their site indexed by Google, they can sit back, relax, kick off their shoes and contentedly watch the show of internet traffic snaking its way to their website. If you happen to have been (or still are) a student of this school of thought take consolation in the fact that you were (are) not alone, not by a long shot!

How come?

Because seo practioners of the day certainly weren't about to go out of their way to disavow such a misconception; after all it was very much in their interest to perpetuate the myth. How else would they convince you to fork over a princely sum for a mere one-month link? Anyway here's how the technique worked:

When you bought a one-way link on a webpage with a page rank value of 7 and above you were guaranteed of getting your website crawled by the googlebot within 24 hrs at the outmost which by proxy ensured that your site was indexed within 24 hrs. If your link was found on a web page with PR8 and above, your site would be indexed by Google within hours thanks to that high page rank link!

MYTH 2: BEING INDEXED BY GOOGLE MEANS A TURBO-CHARGED DASH UP THE SERPs

The 2nd selling point for acquiring an expensive one-month one-way link was the premise that your website would accelerate up the SERPs once it was indexed by Google. (SERPs stands for search engine rank pages which is just a fancy way of referring to the search engine page that lists relevant websites in response to your query). Obviously the higher up the SERPs your website gets, the greater the traffic flow!

But like any over-inflated bubble this one too had to explode, and so it did in time. With increased awareness and knowledge came new understanding of budget techniques that worked just as effectively.

Besides Google effectively nullified the system by introducing the Link-Aging Filter which is an algorithm tweak that negates any influence that any new link may pass to your website or blog until said link has been in place for a certain amount of time. The interval of probation varies from link to link and appears to be based upon the competitiveness of the keyword incorporated in your back-link.

The Link-Aging Filter hence effectively nullifies the technique of acquiring short-term links in order to get your website indexed rapidly by Google or accelerate your website up the search engines.

TECHNIQUES TO GET YOUR WEBSITE GOOGLED QUICK AND CHEAP!

1. Submit an original article to a high page rank article directory; don't forget to include a back-link pointing to your website with the anchor text of your choice!

This technique works as follows: article directories are content rich sites (a quality Google loves) and assuming that the directory has a high page rank, you can bet that the googlebot (google crawler, google spider, it all means the same thing) will crawl such a site several times a day. When the googlebot comes across your article it will continue its eternal crawl across your back-link to your site and Hey Presto You Just Got Googled! (Well at least your site did.)

2. The second way to get your website googled fast and cheap, is by getting a back-link pointing to your site on one of the popular tagging websites which includes the likes of: Digg.com, Technorati.com, del.icio.us to name but a few.

The trick here is not to get lost in the sea of over-popular keywords; in other words, since you're aiming to attract the googlebot not eyeballs (human internet traffic), tag your website with a little-used-little-known keyword! Once again these sites are crawled multiple times a day and tend to have a page rank value of 8 and above!

 

Social Media Marketing

0 comments Posted by Kishore at 12:10 AM

The other day, whilst doing a spot of random searching in Google for various keyword phrases related to our business (it was a light day in the office); I came across an interesting blog based web site from a fellow called Peer Lawther who markets himself under the guise of “Rubber Genius”.

What Peer seems to specialize in is “social media” or “online social media marketing" promotional services”. For the uninitiated, this basically means adopting the concepts of the various social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and My Space etc as a means of directly promoting a specific business, product or service or even raising awareness of one’s own personal brand. It’s growing area within the online digital marketing sector to be fair and there’s undoubtedly some value in it for certain types companies that have identified “social media marketing” as a promotional channel.

Anyway, that aside; what makes Peer’s article interesting is that he talks about the various digital media marketing agencies in and around Leeds and how the city is growing as a media hub in the North of England. (We’re not listed on his site yet – but give it time!)

As he continues to write, Peer sets down a challenge in which he basically invites any Leeds based digital marketing and social media marketing company (or those within a 15 mile radius of Leeds) to be listed on his site.

Now, as any search engine marketing consultant who knows his onions, will tell you; good quality in bound links to a web site are perceived as “good votes” by the boys at Google. This in turns helps boost back-link popularity which in turn helps boost a particular site within Google’s SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

Having read the pages across Peer’s site, I think we’d like to have a link from his site to ours as his site is relevant to the subject matter of ours (which is an important factor to consider).

However, he sets out some conditions. The specific digital marketing or social media marketing company based in or around Leeds, must already be listed highly in Google for the following keyword phrases;

“online marketing Leeds”, “online advertising Leeds”, “Leeds ppc”, “Leeds seo” or “social media Leeds”

At this moment in time, we’re no where to be seen in Google’s SERPS for these phrases and whilst we’d agree that a few of these keyword phrases such as “online marketing Leeds” may be a phrase that some “switched on” clients may use as search phrases when trying to find a company that will help market their business online; we’d argue that the other terms are phrases that only people who are in the industry would use. As far as we’re concerned, that’s not the sort of traffic we want to attract.

Many of our clients, both big and small; consider terminology such as “SEO” or “Social Media” to be too technical and not part of their everyday speech. In other words, it’s not a term they would use when searching for a companies such as ours and our competitors, namely the ones Peer talks about in the Leeds digital and social media sector. As such, in our mind; there’s no point in attempting to get listed highly in Google’s SERPS for these phrases.

However, having said that; we’re always up for a challenge and given that we’d like a link from Peer’s page, we’ll make it our mission to get listed in the top 20 listing results of Google for at least 3 of the above phrases and others related to online social media marketing.

If nothing else it is a good test of our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEP (Search Engine Promotion) skills.

 

32 Most Important SEO Tips

0 comments Posted by Kishore at 8:57 PM

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.


1. Make sure your site is not under construction , incomplete, with little or no unique content.


2. When site is ready submit your site to Google,Yahoo,MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories,open directories,yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us,furl, etc.


3. Submit your sitemap to Google,Yahoo,MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)


4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)


5. Create unique and rich content site. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain name but same content.


6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually contains it in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing.


7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.


8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and keyword repetitions.


9. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length


10. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces (about 25-30 words)


11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum


12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1,H2,H3…..) must contained your site’s primary keywords.


13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.


14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.


15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.


16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)


17.Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.


18. Check your web server / host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.


19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about Robot.txt file.


20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site vistors.


21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.


22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker,crack, gambling,porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.


23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.


24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site,check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.


25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affects your site's reputation.


26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing,scam,viruses,trojans,backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.


27. Make your site useful and informative.


28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility,popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.


29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.


30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.


31. Do not buy or sell links.


32. Do not create site that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.


I hope these tips will add more popularity and visibility to your site. Enjoy!

 

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