SEOmoz Pro Webinar on link building strategies for 2010; focusing on how important link building is for SEO becuase of how much ecommerce stores have to benefit from SEO as part of their marketing mix. Here are some takeaways from the webinar with suggestions on how to apply to your online store.
Before you launch any marketing endeavor, you need to decide the desired outcome you want to achieve so you can set proper goals, create a strategy to meet those goals and then take action to bring your marketing strategy to life. To start, here are five worthy goals that a well planned & executed link building campaign will help you achieve:
1. Spread your brand awareness
2. Increase the individual ranking of a specific page for a specific keyword search
3. Diversify traffic from web properties beyond search engines
4. Increase your website’s ability to rank pages, both new & old
5. Achieve more complete indexation of your existing pages
Resist the temptation to shoot for all five goals at once. Pick one that is the most important to you; list the others in descending order of importance, for future action.
You’re much more likely to succeed and stick to the roadmap if you see progress early. Putting all your focus toward one goal helps you see progress much quicker than if you were to spread your efforts across five projects. Now for a little secret: many of the link building methods I am going to share will help you achieve multiple goals with each action. In essence, you compress the work needed to achieve multiple goals at once with overlapping link building.
Here are 3 methods to achieve each of the goals above.
Spread Brand Awareness
Increasing your brand awareness with SEO requires you to focus on exposure points for your website and brand.To increase brand awareness, go after sites with a high traffic volume, focusing on websites that already attract the people you want to sell to. Use these three simple, daily tasks to start spreading brand awareness:
Spread brand awareness with technorati, google blog search and yahoo answers
1. Read & comment on blogs
2. Answer questions in industry forums, groups (LinkedIn Groups) and answer sites (Yahoo Answers)
3. Start using Twitter, don’t promote yourself; instead, promote others with Retweet
Increase Rankings For Specific Pages
Getting your website to show up on the first page or top 3 results in the search engines for a specific keyword search is what most people think of when performing SEO. A definite advantage to this is that you can craft your content & marketing to the customer persona of someone performing that specific search. In order to achieve your desired outcome you will need links from a variety of high quality websites with specific anchor text linking to a specific page.
Here are three link building methods for getting links to rank individual pages for specific keyword searches:
Increase rankings with SEOmoz Linkscape and PRweb
1. Review sites already ranking for that keyword and build a list of domains that link to the site already ranking for the keyword query. Using Linkscape, you can find out exactly how many websites link to the site with that exact anchor text. Go after the links the sites already ranking have obtained.
2. Write an article on a long tail keyword that contains your short tail keyword term, syndicate or license that content to other sites with an attribution link to your site. This gives you complete control over the link and anchor text. Depending on where you syndicate you may or may not be able to control what websites pick up the article.
3. Press Release on a newsworthy topic your company is involved with targeted anchor text. PRWeb allows you to submit a press release and include a link with anchor text you choose for $200. Trust me, that’s a bargain.
Diversify Traffic Beyond Search Engines
While it feels great to see 80%+ of your traffic coming from organic search and anywhere from 75% to 90% of that traffic coming from Google it puts your website traffic at high risk. What happens if you disappear from the Google search results because of something out of your control? Do you really want your business to rely on just Google or any other search engine? Assuming you want continued and lasting success, you should diversify your traffic so that it is coming in from many sources.
Successful investors diversify their portfolio and successful online stores diversify their traffic sources because it leads to increased revenue sources. There are two areas to focus on when diversifying your traffic: sites with large volumes of traffic and sites with highly targeted traffic. Sites that have both are the cream of the crop for you and deserve the most focus.
The same tactics covered above in spreading brand awareness also work for diversifying your traffic. In addition, here are 3 more useful ideas.
Tubemogul video distribution and analytics
1. Tubemogul – Use tubemogul to distribute videos to multiple sites. I don’t care what you sell people are looking for videos to watch about it because the majority of people would rather watch than read. Don’t believe me? Video consumption is up while Newspapers are cutting jobs.
2. Flickr – A Picture is worth a thousand words and you can tie pictures of unrelated things back to your product or service with creativity. Pictures also help show you are a real, living human doing real things in the real world. The “fake” persona immediately disappears.
3. Your Favorite Website – That’s right, on whatever websites you enjoy today for fun start connecting with people and spreading awareness of your website. If you read news, then use something like reddit or digg. If you like randomness use twitter more. In the end, give back to the website you love in an unselfish way and you will find opportunities for exposure open you never thought possible.
Increase Ranking Ability
How cool would it be for your new pages to show up on the first page of the search results within days or hours? Amazon, ESPN and CNN have all accomplished this by generating so many incoming links from so many different websites that the search engines make an assumption that almost anything they publish must be worthy of ranking.
The good news is you don’t have to be a million or billion dollar brand website to accomplish this. You may not be able to take on Amazon for books; however, everything from jewelry to pet supplies to clothes still has room for dominant players in the search results.
The goal to accomplish this is to get a high volume of authoritative sites to link to you consistently over time. A key to success is that once someone knows about you or talks about you; don’t let them forget about you. When you stay “top of mind” the likelihood of getting multiple links over time increases.
Here are some ways to passively get a large number of links from a ton of different sites; there is work upfront but the payoff is ongoing:
1. Create a fun quiz that gives a badge at the end people can share on their blog or profile page on any number of sites. An example might be, “Are You A Redneck Marketer? Take A Quiz To Find Out”. Create 3-5 levels of Redneck Marketer and present based on answers.
2. Create free online training and offer some certification or completion recognition that includes embeddable HTML content (similar to the quiz badge) for people to put on their site, blog or profile.
3. Create a tool to help solve a problem. This could be something people use to make a purchase decision such as a wizard to decide what fits your customer’s needs. Or maybe it helps post purchase with something such as an electrical conversion calculator.
Achieve More Complete Indexation Of Your Site
As your site grows to 100,000 pages and progresses past 1,000,000+ pages you may find it difficult to keep your pages in the search index.
Amazon indexation in Google
The best way to combat this is to continually get links to your inner pages with a focus on pages you see falling out of the index. You can use both internal linking and external link building to help solve your indexation woes.
1. Link to the pages not getting indexed from pages on your site that are already indexed and get crawled often in Google. You don’t have to use your home page but the page with the link should be within one link click from your home page which makes the page out of the index only two link clicks away. The sooner the link appears on your site page the better because search robots crawl from top to bottom, left to right.
2. Guest blog post on another site and find a way to link directly to the page you want indexed. The great part about this is you get a page on someone else’s site with a very targeted link.
3. Contest Prize – Usually for ecommerce sites specific product pages are the ones that become difficult to keep in the index. Hold a contest focused around the product(s) that you are having trouble keeping indexed. Everywhere you promote the contest include a link to the product page.
Now you have three link building strategies to help you achieve five different link building goals. The most important part of being successful in SEO is taking action immediately and daily. Pick your most important goal from above and perform one of the strategies today.
What tactics have you deployed to achieve your link building goals? Share your ideas by leaving a comment below.
After June 2009, Google Page Rank next update was definitely expected in September 2009, but now there are some news coming as Google has started the process. Google updates the PR at an interval of 3 months or so but this time they are taking more time. Google released the Google Wave and then they are also busy in Google Caffeine. Webmaster team is also busy in the upgrading the Webmaster Tool. But this time lot many websites confirming the news that Google has started the process in July and it is going to release its update on 30 October 2009.
The last update was in 23rd of June. Until now only a few site have been affected by the PR update. On 30 Oct 09 we will see clearly what are the effects of this October PR update.
Although page rank doesn’t determine your position in results, it shows your site social status and power. A site with PR 7 has more back links and more weight, when this site publishes an article it will get quickly on the first page of Google Search, even if it doesn’t have back links.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.
What are considered as duplicate content?
There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilized by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings.
One way of getting a duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter.
Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganizing it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.
Product descriptions from many eCommerce sites are actually being utilized by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilized by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be a duplicate content, or spam.
Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.
How do a search engines filter duplicate content?
Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analyzing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyzes and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that It has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.
How to avoid duplicate content?
Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.
Do you know that the basic excogitation of shared online bookmarks innovate in around April 1996 when their is an official launch of itList which features to included public and private bookmarks.As the time passes and web 2.0 is ready to take birth their is a series of launch of several online bookmark services like Blink, Backflip, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and so many others.They provided folders for masterminding bookmarks, and some services automatically synchronizes the bookmarks into folders.
What is the benefits of using Social bookmarking?
If you are a webmaster,blog owner or a blogger then you must have to know about the benefits of using social bookmarking services.Some of the important reasons are as follows:
1. To get unique traffic from various zone of social networks
2. In order to create a social buzz on your product and brands
3. To get faster indexing of the website in the search engines like google,yahoo and msn live search.
4. To get high Google page rank from various back links and bookmarking sites.
5. To get a good alexa ranks with the help of target traffic coming on your website from classified origins.
What to do if we don’t have time?
If you don’t have time to buzz your brand then you can ask your friends to do so or the best way is to get some Social Bookmarking Service that may enrich you with the above 5 benefits like Buzz,traffic Google indexing and if you want you also the Link Building Service to get better juice of google page ranks.
The third way to improve ad performance is to choose another ad format. AdSense provides you with many different ad formats.
In general, wide formats seem to perform better than narrow formats. This is because people can read more words at a time without having to skip a line. I've experienced that the 336x280 large rectangle, the 250x250 square and the 160x600 wide skyscraper have done best. These are quite big ad formats, of course, so they need lots of space, but if they're placed well they usually generate more income than the smaller and narrow ad formats.
Another good format is the wide 728x90 leaderboard, which does best under the editorial content of a web page or directly under the page header, in my experience. The 468x60 banner format does not convert that well, but it can still be placed in areas where there isn't much space available, i.e. directly in the page header (next to the logo) or within articles.
I hope these tips help to get your Adsense CTR up by at least 100% if not more.
Best Google Adsense Link Colors to get higher CTR?
• Match the colors of your ads with the colour scheme of your site. Blending with your sites color profile helps to identify them not as ads, but as links similar to those of your site. The more the AdSense looks like part of your site, the higher CTR you will get. You can also match the Adsense fonts with your website font design for great results.
• Blend ads with your page - remove the borders by having a similar color as your background helps to show ads as being part of your site. Do not blend text or the ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ with your background color as it is against Google TOS (Google does not like hidden text!). However, such blending may not work for you always due to banner blindness. Neither do they see the ads, not do they click on them. So sometimes a bold contrasting ad may work better depending on your website design.
• Experiment by changing the colors, background of advertisements. You have to find out what works best for your site, not others. You can also rotate Adsense colors to reduce ad blindness.
Design and content guidelines:
# Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
# Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
# Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
# Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
# Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
# Make sure that your elements and alt attributes are descriptive and accurate.
# Check for broken links and correct HTML.
# If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
# Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Technical guidelines:
# Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. 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.
# Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
# Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
# Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
# If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
# Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
# Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
Quality guidelines:
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.
Quality guidelines - basic principles:
* Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
* Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
* Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Types of SEO Reports :
SEO Report provides a comprehensive analysis of your website which includes Website analysis and top 10 competitor analysis apart for the followings:
• Title tag Report
• Keyword Desnsity Report
• Keyword Meta tag Report
• Description Meta tag Report
• Body Text Report
• In page Link Report
• Link Popularity Report
• Outbound Link Report
• IMG ALT Attribute Report
• Top 10 inbound Link Optimizer Report
• Page Rank Report
• Anchor Text Report
• Comprehensive Summary
• Suggestions for Optimization
The complete report consists of about 75-100 pages and covers each and every aspect of search engine report.
Title Tag Report:
Title tag report analyse your existing title tag optimized for given keywords. Report also provides the most appropriate title tag for maximum optimization.
Keyword Density Report:
Keyword density report provides the density of all keywords. It also suggests the ways to improve your keyword density.
Keyword Meta tag Report:
Keyword meta tag report analyses existing keywords and provides suggestions for improvement.
Description Meta tag Report:
Description meta tag report provides analysis and ways to optimize it.
Body Text Report:
Body text report generates a comprehensive report for your main content of the given page.
In page Link Report:
In page links are the links
Link Popularity Report:
Link popularity refers to the number of incoming links. The Report contains a comprehensive report on the Link Popularity and also provides suggestions to optimize the the links.
Outbound Link Report:
Outbound links are the links from the website to other websites. Google and other search engines rely on the outbound links for calculating the page rank of a web page. The report contains the comprehensive outbound link report and suggestions for optimizing the same.
IMG ALT Attribute Report:
Alt tags are very important for SEO. The report contains the Alt tags and we also provide suggestions to optimized Alt tags for images.
Top 10 competitor Report:
The report offers top 10 competitors analysis against various criteria.
Keyword Density Report:
Keyword density report calculates the density of all the keywords in your website.
We generate the SEO reports from a variety of sources, we do manual analysis, compiled them together and provide to you in an easy and readable format.
We'll continue adding more videos, both from Google and from our partners. If you want to keep up with all the new videos you can subscribe to the Website Optimizer Channel or add an iGoogle gadget to your homepage.
Update Your Google Affiliate Network Sign-in to a Google Account
0 comments Posted by Kishore at 10:02 AM
You can now update your Google Affiliate Network sign-in information to a Google Account. This will let you access all your Affiliate Network account and Google products with a single sign-in. After you update to a Google Account, you’ll be able to: Use the same sign-in for Google Affiliate Network and other Google products, including AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Personalized Search, and much more.Switch among Google Affiliate Network and other Google applications without having to sign in again.
The following image provides an overview of the process to update to a Google Account.
Please note: We cannot update the Google Affiliate Network sign-in pages until all users have updated. Therefore, we recommend that you bookmark the Google Account sign-in page for Google Affiliate Network.
Users who have updated to Google Accounts have the option to bookmark their new sign in pageAlready Updated? Sign in with my Google Account from the legacy sign in page. In addition, if you are already logged in to your Google Account (via another product) and navigate to either of these pages, you will be brought to your Affiliate Network dashboard (no need to enter login information again).
Users that choose to not update to a Google Account at this time can continue to log in with their existing credentials from the legacy sign in page. or select the link marked
whom I asked to create a simple depiction of SEO not dying and he came
back to me with this masterpiece in no time:
Incredible! I wish I had that kind of talent. Now onto the post:
There is constantly talk about SEO dying. In years past, there have been many people who have predicted that SEO would be dead by now. Many others think SEO is dying out as I write this post. I really hope these people didn’t quit their SEO jobs and get into a career that has anything to do with forecasting. At this point in time, SEO is as alive and well as it has ever been. With the downturn in the economy, companies are flocking to SEO agencies desperately seeking for a medium that brings results for a fraction of the price of other marketing mediums…and they’re finding it. But this post isn’t about what’s going on now. It’s about the future of SEO and why it will never die…that’s right…never.
In order to explain this, it is imperative that the value of search engines is understood. Due to the development of the internet and other technologies, it is extremely easy to globally communicate and share information. So easy that our society is experiencing an information overload. A quick example: Over 10 million new books are written every year. If you think of the time it takes to write a book (I would assume an average of 1-5 years) that’s pretty astounding. Now think of how many new websites are created every year…new web pages!..new blog posts!
If you were looking to buy the book Vita di Alberto Pisani by Carlo Dossi in Italian, and you didn’t have the internet, how would you find and purchase it? Perhaps I’m naive, but I think accomplishing this task would be quite difficult and take days, if not weeks or months to complete. Now think of how you would accomplish this same task with the intern et as a tool. How would you do it? Amazon? Google? Ebay? Regardless of how you find it, I can almost g.
1. Not using Search engine friendly urls - Mostly due to ignorance and some due to performance issues (really!) people don’t use search engine friendly urls.
2. No Titles or Same titles - This happens when people blindly download any template from http://oswd.org and forget to edit the header or when they hand code site. In such cases, the site pages either just missed the title tag or some random title gets copied to all pages!. I can recall atleast one instance when a client of mine was having an e-commerce site and due to cms mis-configuration (it was hacked oscommerce), all the pages were having same titles!
3. Wrong title(s) - Using very few words or using too many words or using a lot of “if,in,but,of” etc kind of stop words in title is another common mistake.
4. Using too Many Keywords in Keywords meta tags – I have seen people using way too many keywords, as much as like 10 to 15 in Keywords meta tags. And then to make things worst, the same list gets repeated in the every page of site!
The best way is to have just 1 or 2 keywords which really explains the page to search engines. That’s it.
5. Same Description for all the pages – If repeating same titles and keywords was not enough, people also repeat the same description on all the pages. Description is the most important meta tag from search engine point of view, and you better make sure its unique for all pages or else, you will lose some points over your competitors.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.
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.
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.
It requires a lot of effort
in designing and building a site, but it can be all in vain if you can't attract enough traffic towards it. You put all your efforts in an attractive design of your website and the next step you do is to put it in front of the online world.You can't get success only by uploading your website on the www; the target is to attract well-qualified visitors towards your website, which can't be done unless you put your site in the eyes of the search engines.
Today, all of the internet users
How to optimize your website for search engines?
There are two ways of doing it.
* Off Page Search Engine Optimization
* On Page Search Engine Optimization.
This article will focus on the tips useful for On Page Search Engine Optimization.
All search engine optimization techniques are usually classified into On Page Optimization Techniques and Off Page Optimization Techniques. Both help in achieving one common goal; to get higher ranks in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Useful On Page SEO Tips
Following are some of the most common tips for better On Page Search Engine Optimization:
The most important word; The Keyword: it is always suggested that before you upload your website, put all your efforts into the keywords since users will be using keywords to find websites of their interest. Each page of your website should be treated as a separate entity having its own title and targeted keywords.
Always try to name your webpage files starting with your targeted keyword like crickethome.htm etc. For instance, if your website is about Telescopes then the title of each of your webpage should always start with the word Telescope and name each webpage file starting with word Telescope like Telescopereview.htm because the search engine robots look at filenames.
Always remember
You should keep in mind the keyword density and never over-optimize your web page. It is not necessary that the greater the optimization level of your web page the better it will be.
Title Tags are considered to be one of the most important factors of On Page Optimization. You can say in other words that it is mandatory for you to include the main keyword as part of your title.
You should always use Header tags with lots of care
Putting the main keyword in the URL is always beneficial in the eyes of the search engines. Most of the users are usually not bothered with that but it will help in better SEO. If it is not possible to include the complete keywords or a phrase in the URL then try at least to include the most important keyword in the URL.
There are many more On Page SEO tips
Onpage Optimization using SEO Software
Search engine optimization is one of the most important factors that is responsible for the success of a website, thereby resulting in enhancing the business prospects of a website. It is the art of designing your webpages to be ranked high by search engines for keywords that you target. This is the reason search engine optimization has moved to the forefront of several online marketers advertising plans. There are many options to conduct a search engine optimization and this can vary from one search engine to another. One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the onpage optimization.
The onpage optimization deals with the placement of important keywords on the page, the header tags, the appearance of the keywords and the use of keywords in the Meta and alt tags on the page.
Here are certain tips on achieving perfect onpage optimization. Most web experts utilized these tips to optimize their websites successfully.
• Select a particular page title that only includes your keywords.
• Make use of Header Tags to accentuate the key words you have selected for your webpage. Use your number I keyword in the {H1} tag and secondary keywords in your {H2} header tags.
• Create a content that is accurate, powerful and relevant to the purpose of your website. The content must include your main and your secondary keywords throughout the text. Try using your first keyword as near the top of the content and as close to the bottom of the content.
• As soon as you are through with the content for your website, go through and randomly bold, italicize and underline the main and secondary keywords.
• It is very important to make sure that you use your keywords in the alt tags of your images.
• Use anchor text in between body
Try conducting a search for your main keywords in Google or any other search engines. View the page and the source code of the page to see what Onpage optimization that particular webmaster had done in order to get a top rank. This will definitely help.
Onpage optimization can be an important factor to offer a top rank to your website. However, there are several other factors that help in this regard such as page content, link popularity, site indexing and competition.
Onpage optimization would prove to be a turning point in your Internet marketing strategy. All you have to do is to keep the above tips in mind to be successful.
File Name
The file name of a page is taken into account when search engine spider your website. You should therefore always try to use your main keyword in the filename (here: onpage-optimization.html). If you are using dynamic pages you could use mod_rewrite in the .htacces file to rewrite your file names and URLs.
Title Tags
The page title is what most search engines will show on their search result pages. It is vital that you make extra effort into getting this right and it should not (only) be the websites name.
Is your page title defined and is it containing your main keyword?
Is it short and does it describe the page content correctly?
Preferably 5-8 words.
Example:
Meta tags
Although most search engines don’t pay much attention to meta tags it is still important to add your meta tags for onpage optimization. Some search engines still use them to display your page in their lists. Try to make them different for every webpage.
Is your description defined and is it describing your content?
*Preferably a maximum of 25words in your description tag.
Are your keywords defined and do they also list misspelling and typos?
Are keywords not repeated more than 3 times?
Preferably 1-3 main keywords and 1 keyword phrase in your keyword tag.
Example:
Heading Tags
Right after your page title your heading tags are of most importance. Search engines use them to define the importance of your keywords. If you find your heading tags too big and use css to define how they look.
Make sure you are using only one
tag.
Is your short and does it contain your main keyword?
Preferably your tag should match your page title.
Are your tags defined and do they contain variations on your keyword?
Could you be categorizing even more with tags?
Have you styled all heading tags using CSS to improve page design?
Example:
Onpage Optimization
Page Title
Preferably your
tag should match your page title.
Are your tags defined and do they contain variations on your keyword?
Could you be categorizing even more with tags?
Have you styled all heading tags using CSS to improve page design?
Example:
Onpage Optimization
Page Title
Could you be categorizing even more with
tags?
Have you styled all heading tags using CSS to improve page design?
Example:
Onpage Optimization
Page Title
The page title is what most search engines...
Mata Tags
Although most search engines don’t pay...
Plain Text
Spread out your keywords throughout the pages paragraphs (
) and repeat them a couple of times. Try not to make the text unnatural, because you still want people to be able to read it. Readability should be more important here than onpage optimization.
Are your keywords used at least several times?
Try not to have one keyword take up more than 5% of the total amount of words used.
Is your main keyword mention at the beginning of the page and at the end?
Preferably use a maximum of 7 repetition per word. Distribute 4 in the top third of the page and 3 in the bottom. Use at least every keyword in the first 7500 characters of the page.
Bold and Italic Text
A bold or italic word has more weight for most search engines. So try and use your main keyword in bold and italic . Please note that the use of and instead of and does not matter. Google has stated that they treat this code exactly the same.
Image Alt Tags and Names
Search engines don’t just look at text they also take images into account. Try to Use Image Alt tags and name images using your main keyword.
Example:
Promotional Comments
Some search engines, like the Inktomi search engine, read comments in the “
That’s the basics of Onpage Optimization. Once you’ve done this you can start with Offpage Optimization.