Jitendra Singh Jat

Good to know

2011-12-27T07:15:00.000-08:00

मंज़िलों की खोज में तुमको जो चलता सा लगा, मुझको तो वो ज़िन्दगी भर घर बदलता सा लगा

Too Good

2011-01-20T05:51:00.000-08:00

Swarg ke dwar pe 3 log khade the.

God : Sirf 1 hi andar ja sakta hai....

1st : Main Brahmin hu, sari umar aapki seva ki hai. Swarg pe mera hak hai....

2nd : Main Doctor hu, sari umar logo ki seva ki hai. Swarg pe mera haq hai....

3rd : Maine IT MEIN JOB KI HAI.... ......

God : Bas... aage kuch mat bol.... Rulaayega kya pagle..? Andar aa ja......... Tera forwarded mails, follow-ups, bench pe 2years, night shifts, PM se panga, CTC se zaada deductions, pick-up drop ka lafda , client meetings, delivery dates, weekends mein kaam, kam umar mein baalon ka zhadna - safed hona, motape ka problem, etc etc…. mere ko senti kar diya yaar…..aja jaldi andar aja…..

Footer Link Optimization for Search Engines and User Experience

2010-11-08T22:25:00.002-08:00

Site after site that I visit lately has been showing a tendency for using footer links to run their internal SEO link structure and anchor text optimization. While this practice in years past held value, today I rarely ever recommend it (and yes, SEOmoz itself will be moving away from using our footer for category links soon). Here's why:

Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically
Check out the evidence - Yahoo! says they may devalue footer links, Bill Slawski uncovers patents suggesting the same and anecdotal evidence suggests Google might do this (or go further) as well. Needless to say, if you want to make sure your links are passing maximum value, it's wise to avoid the footer (particularly the footer class itself).
Footer links are often not the first link on the page to a URL
Since we know that the first link on a page is the one whose anchor text counts and footer links, while anchor text optimized, are often a second link to an already-linked-to target, they are likely not to have the desired impact.
Footer links get very low CTR
Naturally, since they're some of the least visible links on a webpage, they receive very little traffic. Thus, if algorithms like BrowseRank or other traffic metrics start to play a role in search rankings, footers are unlikely to have a positive impact.
Footer links often take a page beyond a healthy link total
Many pages that already have 80-100 links on the page are going to lose out when they add a footer with another 30-50 links embedded. The link juice passed per link will go down and the value of each individual link is lowered.
Footer links can be a time suck
The time you spend crafting the perfect link structure in the footers could be put towards more optimal link structures throughout the site's navigation and cross-linking from content, serving both users and engines better.

That's not to say I don't suggest doing a good job with your footers. Many sites, large and small, will continue to use the footer as a resource for link placement and, just as with all other SEO tactics that fade, they do carry some residual value. Let's walk through a few examples of both good and bad to get a sense for what works:

Thumbs Up: Shopper.Cnet.com

I like the organization, the clear layout, the visibility and the fact that they've distinguished (through straight HTML links vs. drop downs) which links deserve to pass link juice and ranking value. I'm also impressed that I actually see a "Paris Hilton" link in the footer yet am not completely unaccepting of the idea that it could be there entirely naturally, simply as a result of what's popular on CBS.

Thumbs Down: Hawaii-Aloha.com

These are my least favorite kinds of footers. The links are just squashed together, the focus is obviously on anchor text, not relevance, the links are hard to see and read and there's little thought given to users. The links don't even look necessarily clickable until you hover.

Thumbs Up: VIPRealtyInfo.com

When I searched for "Dallas Condos", I was sure I'd find some examples for thumbs down, which is why I was so thrilled to find VIPRealtyInfo, a clearly competitive site in a tough SEO market doing a lot of things right. Yeah, there's some reasonable optimization in the anchor text, but it's definitely not overboard and the links are useful to people and search engines. The visual layout and design quality gives it an extra boost, too - something that can't be overstated in importance when it comes to potential manual reviews by the engines.

Thumbs Down: ABoardCertifiedPlasticSurgeonResource.com

The site's done a great job with design - it's really quite an attractive layout and color scheme. The links in the "most popular regions" aren't that bad; it's really the number of them that makes me worried. If they'd stuck to one column, I think they'd easily pass a manual review and pass good link juice (rather than spreading it out with so many links in addition to everything else on the page). The part that really sent me over the edge though was the two sentences in the green box, laden with links I didn't even realize were there until I hovered. Technically, there's nothing violating the search guidelines, but I wouldn't put it past the engines to come up with smart ways to devalue links like these, particularly when their focus is so clearly on anchor text, not user value.

Thumbs Up: Food.Yahoo.com

Again - great organization, good crosslinking (remaining relevant, then branching out to other network properties) and solid design. Even the most aggressive of the links on the right hand side appear natural and valuable to users, making it hard for an engine to argue they shouldn't pass full value.

Thumbs Sideways: DeviantArt.com

It's huge - seriously big. And while it's valuable for users and even contains some interesting content, it's not really accomplishing the job of a footer - it's more like a giant permanent content block on the site. The arrow that lets you close it is a good feature, and the design is solid, too. However, the link value really isn't there and the potential for big blocks of duplicate content across the site makes me a bit nervous, too.

So what can we take away from these analyses? A few general footer-for-SEO rules of thumb:

Don't overstuff keywords in anchor text
Make the links relevant and useful
Organize links intelligently - don't just throw them into a big list
Cross-linking is OK, just do it naturally (and in a way that a manual review could believe it's not solely for SEO purposes)
Be smart about nofollows - nearly every footer on the web has a few links that don't need to be followed, so think about whether your terms of service and legal pages really require the link juice you're sending
Make your footers look good and function well for users to avoid being labeled "manipulative" during a quality rater's review

Best Practices for Content Optimization

2010-11-08T22:25:00.001-08:00

Is it possible that in all the years we've been writing at SEOmoz, there's never been a solid walkthrough on the basics of content optimization? Let's fix that up.

First off, by content, I don't mean keyword usage or keyword optimization. I'm talking about how the presentation and architecture of the text, image and multimedia content on a page can be optimized for search engines. The peculiar part is that many of these recommendations are second-order effects. Having the right formatting or display won't necessarily boost your rankings directly, but through it, you're more likely to earn links, get clicks and eventually benefit in search rankings. If you regularly practice the techniques below, you'll not only earn better consideration from the engines, but from the human activities on the web that influence their algorithms.

Content Structure

Because SEO has become such a holistic part of website improvement, it's no surprise that content formatting - the presentation, style and layout choices you select for your content - are a part of the process. Choosing sans serif fonts like Arial and Helvetica are wise choices for the web; Verdana in particular has received high praise from usability/readability experts, such as this article from WebAIM:

Verdana is one of the most popular of the fonts designed for on-screen viewing. It has a simple, straightforward design, and the characters or glyphs are not easily confused. For example, the upper-case "I" and the lower-case "L" have unique shapes, unlike Arial, in which the two glyphs may be easily confused.
Another advantage of Verdana is that the spacing between letters. One consideration to take into account with Verdana is that it is a relatively large font. The words take up more space than words in Arial, even at the same point size.
The larger size improves readability, but also has the potential of disrupting carefully-planned page layouts.

Font choice is accompanied in importance by sizing & contrast issues. Type smaller than 10pt is typically very challenging to parse and in all cases, relative font sizes are recommended so users can employ browser options to increase/decrease if necessary. Contrast - the color difference between the background and text is also critical - legibility usually drops for anything that isn't black (or very dark) on a white background.

Content length is another critical piece of the optimization puzzle that's mistakenly placed in the "keyword density" or "unique content" buckets of SEO. In fact, content length can have a big role to play in whether your material is easy to consume and easy to share. Lengthy pieces often don't fare particularly well on the web, while short form and easily-digestible content often has more success. Sadly, splitting long pieces into multiple segments frequently backfires, as abandonment increases while link-attraction falls - the only benefit is page views per visit (which is why so many CPM-monetized sites employ this tactic).

Last but not least in content structure optimization is the display of the material. Beautiful, simplistic, easy-to-use and consumable layouts garner far more readership and links than poorly designed content wedged between ad blocks that threaten to overtake the page. I'd recommend checking out The Golden Ratio in Web Design from NetTuts, which has some great illustrations and advice on laying out web content on the page.

CSS & Semantic Markup

CSS is commonly mentioned as a "best practice" for general web design & development, but its principles coincide with many SEO guidelines as well. First, of course, is web page size. Google used to recommend keeping pages under 101K and, although most suspect that's no longer an issue, keeping file size low means faster load times, lower abandonment rates and a higher probability of being fully indexed, fully read and more frequently linked-to.

CSS can also help with another hotly debated issue: code to text ratio. Some SEOs swear that making code to text ratio smaller (so there's less code and more text) can help considerably on large websites with many thousands of pages. My personal experience showed this to be true (or, at least, appeared to be true) only once, but since good CSS makes it easy, there's no reason not to make it part of your standard operating procedure for webdev. Use tableless CSS stored in external files & keep Javascript calls external and follow in the path of CSS Zen.

Finally, CSS provides an easy means for "semantic" markup. For a primer, see Digital Web Magazine's article, Writing Semantic Markup. For SEO purposes, there are only a few primary tags that apply and the extent of microformats interpretation (using tags like or

) is less critical (the engines tend to sort out semantics largely on their own since so few web publishers participate in this coding fashion). Using CSS code to provide emphasis, to quote/reference and to reduce the use of tables and other bloated HTML mechanisms for formatting, however, can make a positive difference.

Content Uniqueness & Depth

The final portion of our content optimization discussion is the most important. Few can debate the value the engines place on robust, unique, value-adding content. Google in particular has had several rounds of kicking "low quality content" sites out of their indices, and the other engines have followed suit.

The first critical designation to avoid is "Thin Content" - an insider phrase that (loosely) means that which the engines do not feel contributes enough unique material to display a page competitively in the search results. The criteria have never been officially listed, but I have seen & heard many examples/discussions from engineers and would place the following on my list:

30-50 unique words, forming unique, parseable sentences that other sites/pages do not have
Unique HTML text content, different from other pages on the site in more than just the replacement of key verbs & nouns (yes, this means all those sites that build the same page and just change the city and state names thinking it's "unique")
Unique titles and meta description elements - if you can't write unique meta descriptions, just exclude them. I've seen similarity algos trip up pages and boot them from the index simply for having near-duplicate meta tags.
Unique video/audio/image content - the engines have started getting smarter about identifying and indexing pages for vertical search that wouldn't normally meet the "uniqueness" criteria

BTW - You can often bypass these limitations if you have a good quantity of high value, external links pointing to the page in question (though this is very rarely scalable) or an extremely powerful, authoritative site (note how many one sentence Wikipedia stub pages still rank).

The next criteria from the engines demands that websites "add value" to the content they publish, particularly if it comes from (wholly or partially) a secondary source. This most frequently applies to affiliate sites, whose re-publishing of product descriptions, images, etc. has come under search engine fire numerous times. In fact, we've recently dealt with this issue on several sites and concluded it's best to anticipate manual evaluations here even if you've dodged the algorithmic sweep. The basic tenets are:

Don't simply re-publish something that's found elsewhere on the web unless your site adds substantive value to users
If you're hosting affiliate content, expect to be judged more harshly than others, as affiliates in the SERPs are one of users' top complaints about search engines
Small things like a few comments, a clever sorting algorithm or automated tags, filtering, a line or two of text, or advertising does NOT constitute "substantive value"

For some exemplary cases where websites fulfill these guidelines, check out the way sites like C|Net (example), UrbanSpoon (example) or Metacritic (example) take content/products/reviews from elsewhere, both aggregating AND "adding value" for their users.

Last, but not least, we have the odd (and somewhat unknown) content guideline from Google, in particular, to refrain from "search results in the search results" (see this post from Google's WebSpam Chief, including the comments, for more detail). Google's stated feeling is that search results generally don't "add value" for users, though others have made the argument that this is merely an anti-competitive move. Whatever the motivation, here at SEOmoz, we've cleaned up many sites' "search results," transforming them into "more valuable" listings and category/sub-category landing pages, and have had great success recovering rankings and gaining traffic from Google.

In essence, you want to avoid the potential for being perceived (not necessarily just by an engine's algorithm but by human engineers and quality raters) as search results. Refrain from:

Pages labeled in the title or headline as "search results" or "results"
Pages that appear to offer a query-based list of links to "relevant" pages on the site without other content (add a short paragraph of text, an image, and a formatting that makes the "results" look like detailed descriptions/links instead)
Pages whose URLs appear to carry search queries, e.g. ?q=seattle+restaurants vs. /seattle-restaurants

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

2010-11-08T22:22:00.000-08:00

Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases,WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
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Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority).Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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Link Intelligently
When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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Invite Guest Bloggers
Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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Cover Topics that Need Attention
In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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Pay Attention to Your Analytics
Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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Use a Human Voice
Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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Archive Effectively
The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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Implement Smart URLs
The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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Reveal as Much as Possible
The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
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Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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Build a Brand
Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.

Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

2010-07-22T04:48:00.000-07:00

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

Review of your site content or structure
Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
Content development
Management of online business development campaigns
Keyword research
SEO training
Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading "Sponsored Links") as well. Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central.

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it's a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:

If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
What's your experience in my industry?
What's your experience in my country/city?
What's your experience developing international sites?
What are your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been in business?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:

Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
"Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."
Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.
Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.
You should never have to link to an SEO.
Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
Choose wisely.
While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
Be sure to understand where the money goes.
While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

owns shadow domains
puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
offers to sell keywords in the address bar
doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it athttp://www.econsumer.gov/.

The Foundation Of A Success SEO Campaign: Keyword Research

2010-07-22T04:45:00.000-07:00

Here is an outline of the steps you should follow for keyword research:

Start with a brainstorming session to list all possible words and phrases that people would use to find what you have to offer. Remember to put yourself in the mindset of the potential customer.
Do the necessary research to continue building your list.

Research your competitors and see what keywords they are using.

Look at your web stats and logs and pull words and phrases from there (this is a great source of info, you can find the words that people are already using to find you and enhance your rankings on those words so you can get even more traffic).

If you have a search feature on your site, look at the logs and see what people are searching for within your site once they get there.

Take the large master list you have come up with and use a keyword tool to determine how much traffic there is and how competitive the words/phrases are. Remember you can’t live and die by this information, it only acts as a guide for you.
Take your list and break it into segments. You want some “low hanging fruit” – which means keywords that may be longer phrases with less traffic. These words will be easy to rank for fairly quickly so you can use those as your starting point to drive some quick traffic to the site. The second segment of your list should be words that are more competitive and have more traffic and will take longer to get rankings for. You will be glad you selected keywords from each segment because you will be getting traffic from the low hanging fruit while you are waiting for the more competitive phrases to kick in.

Because #4 is so vitally important, let’s break that down a little further. If your keywords are too generic and not targeted it will take a long time to get rankings and the traffic likely won’t convert as well. If you use keywords that are way too specific you won’t get enough traffic. The solution? Use a 3 tier approach.

Broad:

Shorter phrases and single words
Generic to your industry
Lots of traffic
Lower conversions

Focused:

Slightly shorter phrases
Higher traffic numbers
Phrases are still focused on what you offer

Laser Focused: The Long Tail

Longer and more targeted phrases
Traffic numbers are smaller
People are further along in the buying process so conversion rates are higher

The thought process behind “long tail keywords” is that the more detail someone

types in, the more they know exactly what they want and the further along they are in the “buying” process.

For example if someone types “blue plates” they could want to buy them or they could want info or they could want to see pics – who knows.

But if someone types in “Pfaltzgraff Blue dinner plates for 8” then they know exactly what they want and are more likely to buy.

Typically the longer the phrase, the less traffic there is but the more targeted it is, so it is likely to convert higher.

A solid SEO strategy should definitely implement some long tail because that allows you to get rankings quicker (there is usually less competition on long tail keywords) and it allows the conversion rate to be higher.

You get the benefit from the long tail while you are waiting for your more competitive phrases to get ranked and kick in.

Most people are continually adding new long tail phrases and find that when they add them up, in total the long tail phrases end up becoming a large part of your traffic.

Here are some examples:

• Broad: Generic and competitive keywords:

Plates
Blue plates
Dinner plate

• Focused: Less generic, and less competitive:

Buy dinner plates
Set of dinner plates
Cost of dinner plates

• Laser Focused: Long tail phrases:

Pfaltzgraff plates for 8 set
Pfaltzgraff Ocean Breeze dinner plate set
Buy dinner place settings
Replacement dinner plates for sale

Another thing to consider is the searchers intent. Let’s look at this scenario to understand a little more.

“buy MAC lip gloss ” – the searcher is looking to buy online

“MAC lip gloss prices” – they are comparing prices and probably trying to decide if they will buy

“MAC lip gloss” – they are interested in a specific brand

“lip gloss” – interested in a type of product

You want to capture leads at the different phases, but understand you will convert more at the top level where they are further along in the buying process.

Your SEO strategy should include keywords from each of those “tiers” above.

BUT we’re still not done! Most people stop here (or often don’t even do all the steps to get here). So what else is there?

Did you know that 25% of searches each month are brand new, never before seen search words and phrases? That is shocking. You would think with the number of search queries running through Google, they have seen it all.

So, how do you handle keyword research and make sure you are staying current?

First and foremost you want to make sure you have outlined your strategy. Without a plan in place you are likely to forget to do it, and it’ll just rattle around in the back of your brain or sit on a post-it note that gets stuck to the back of another piece of paper in your planner.

So, before that happens, let’s define your plan right now.

You’ve already done your initial keyword research steps as outlined above. Here is where most people are missing out and need to plan further action. There is a step 5 in the process…

Once a month you should do keyword research and see what new words and phrases come up and add those new words and phrases to your campaign. If you find once a month is too often, do it every other month. Just make sure you have a plan to check back regularly so you can take advantage of new search phrases and tap into more traffic. You could put a monthly reminder in your Outlook or use an online reminder service. Find a system that will work for you!

Of course all these keywords aren’t going to do any good if you are working on adding content and building links for them. So if you are adding content to your site like you should be, then adding these new keyword phrases should be easy to work into the new content you are writing. J

You should also schedule at least a monthly review of your web stats (if not more often).

Check out how much traffic you are actually getting from the engines. Find out what phrases people are actually finding your site with. Don’t forget the engines will start picking up your site for “bonus keywords” – which are different combinations and variations of your core keywords that you optimized for.

If you identify some of these “bonus keywords” it’ll give you insight into exactly how people are searching and what they are looking for. You may find it’s worth adding content for these new phrases so you can try to get even more exposure for them.

How to Get 10,000% More Backlinks in Google, Without Doing Anything

2010-07-22T04:40:00.000-07:00

That’s the jittery reality of Google Caffeine, the new indexing system that Google rolled out in June. Billed as the “largest collection of web content we’ve offered,”, Caffeine indexes the Web more deeply and frequently, providing better real-time results for up-to-the-minute content like blogs and tweets. Google provides this diagram of how it works:

So, instead of a neatly stacked search index that’s refreshed in layers, the new one somehow involves all kinds of crazy flying objects.

Never mind the technical details. The most obvious change for SEO professionals is the “Links to Your Site” section in Google Webmaster Tools, which have skyrocketed wildly. (The change was recently verified by Google here.) Taking a sample of our clients at our SEO content firm Media Shower, plus self-reported data from other sites, we have seen an average 10,000% increase in Google-reported backlinks.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Some sites (particularly smaller sites) have seen a “modest” backlink increase of 400%, while others have seen their link counts explode over 50,000%! Here’s a partial list of sites we surveyed.

We’ve always known that Google only showed a fraction of indexed backlinks in Webmaster Tools. While this was not clear from the interface, the company always referred to link counts as a “sample.” Now Google appears to be revealing a complete count of backlinks, or as complete as they’re able to index. This looks to be the most accurate count of backlinks on the Web, which is great news for those of us who track month-to-month progress on building links.

So, who are all these new sites linking to yours? The bad news is that when drilling down into specific backlinks (not overall counts), Google is showing an even smaller sample than before. Worse, the sample may be lower quality than ever, since you will likely find hundreds of spammy sites that have simply scraped your URL off Google SERPs.

The “S”-word: Google will only tell you a fraction of the sites that link to yours.

While Bing has followed suit, only displaying a maximum of 1,000 backlinks to your site, it displays a more helpful sample of 1,000 high-quality links to your site. With Google, you have no idea what you’re getting from their sample; it could be from the fresh end of the link pool, or it could be from the part that someone just peed into.

In short, Google’s Caffeine-powered backlink reports are both a blessing a curse. On the one hand, we now have more accurate (and, we hope, stable) backlink counts that can be used to track monthly progress in linkbuilding efforts. On the other hand, downloading a specific list of backlinks gives us even less useful information than before.

Here’s how Google can make Webmaster Tools the “Bing-Killer”: simply provide more transparency in their “sample” of reported links. Is it a random sample? Is it weighted more heavily in favor of high-quality or low-quality sites? Is it based on an algorithm extrapolated from Sergey’s DNA?

The best SEOs want to know the highest-quality sites that are linking back, so they can find more sites like them. That’s also what Google wants. It’s good for sites, good for webmasters, and good for the Web.

We’ve always known that caffeine is a Web developer’s best friend. We hope that Google Caffeine will eventually become a similar friend for those of us working to make the Web a better place.

Google Website Optimizer

2010-07-22T04:38:00.000-07:00

Beginning Analytics: Basics

2010-07-22T04:36:00.000-07:00

Will domain registration changes ding me in Google?

2010-07-22T04:28:00.000-07:00

Do site load times have an impact on Google rankings?

2010-07-22T04:23:00.001-07:00

Will SEO still exist in five years?

2010-07-22T04:19:00.000-07:00

Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update 9/29/2009 08:46:00 AM

2009-10-06T23:33:00.000-07:00

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
Select business and university customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky onstreamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers andlab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we...

Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/surfs-up-wednesday-google-wave-update.html

What’s an update?

2009-10-06T23:29:00.000-07:00

What is an update? Google updates its index data, including backlinks and PageRank, continually and continuously. We only export new backlinks, PageRank, or directory data every three months or so though. (We started doing that last year when too many SEOs were suffering from “B.O.”, short for backlink obsession.) When new backlinks/PageRank appear, we’ve already factored that into our rankings quite a while ago. So new backlinks/PageRank are fun to see, but it’s not an update; it’s just already-factored-in data being exported visibly for the first time in a while.

Google also crawls and updates its index every day, so different or more index data usually isn’t an update either. The term “everflux” is often used to describe the constant state of low-level changes as we crawl the web and rankings consequently change to a minor degree. That’s normal, and that’s not an update.

Usually, what registers with an update to the webmaster community is when we update an algorithm (or its data), change our scoring algorithms, or switch over to a new piece of infrastructure. TechnicallyUpdate Gilligan is just backlink/PageRank data becoming visible once more, not a real update. There haven’t been any substantial algorithmic changes in our scoring in the last few days. I’m happy to try to give weather reports when we do our update scoring/algo data though.

Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search

2009-10-06T23:06:00.000-07:00

We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.

To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role in search rankings. We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google. Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.

WAKE UP CHAMPU

2009-08-21T03:38:00.000-07:00

Pareshaan thi Champu ki wife

Non-happening thi jo uski life

Champu ko na milta tha aaram

Office main karta kaam hi kaam

Champu ke boss bhi the bade cool

Promotion ko har baar jate the bhul

Par bhulte nahi the wo deadline

Kaam to karwate the roz till nine

Champu bhi banna chata tha best

Isliye to wo nahi karta tha rest

Din raat karta wo boss ki gulami

Onsite ke ummid main deta salami

Din guzre aur guzre fir saal

Bura hota gaya Champu ka haal

Champu ko ab kuch yaad na rehta tha

Galti se Biwi ko Behenji kehta tha

Aakhir ek din Champu ko samjh aaya

Aur chod di usne Onsite ki moh maya

Boss se bola, "Tum kyon satate ho ?"

"Onsite ke laddu se buddu banate ho"

"Promotion do warna chala jaunga"

"Onsite dene par bhi wapis na aunga"

Boss haans ke bola "Nahi koi baat"

"Abhi aur bhi Champus hai mere paas"

"Yeh duniya Champuon se bhari hai"

"Sabko bas aage badhne ki padi hai"

"Tum na karoge to kisi aur se karaunga"

"Tumhari tarah Ek aur Champu banaunga"

HTML 5 and SEO

2009-08-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

HTML 5 and SEO

HTML 5 is still in the making but for any SEO expert, who tries to look ahead, some knowledge about HTML 5 and how it will impact SEO is not unnecessary information. It is true that the changes and the new concepts in HTML 5 will impact Web developers and designers much more than SEO experts but still it is far from the truth to say that HTML 5 will not mean changes in the SEO policy.

What's New in HTML 5?

HTML 5 follows the way the Net evolved in the last years and includes many useful tags and elements. At first glance, it might look as if HTML 5 is going in the direction of a programming language (i.e. PHP) but actually this is not so – it is still an XML-based presentation language. The new tags and elements might make HTML 5 look more complex but this is only at first glance.

HTML 5 is not very different from HTML 4. One of the basic ideas in the development of HTML 5 was to ensure backward compatibility and because of that HTML 5 is not a complete revamp of the HTML specification. So, if you had worries that you will have to start learning it from scratch, these worries are groundless.

How the Changes in HTML 5 Will Affect SEO?

As a SEO expert, you are most likely interested mainly in those changes in the HTML 5 specification, which will affect your work. Here are some of them:

Improved page segmentation. Search engines are getting smarter and there are many reasons to believe that even now they are applying page segmentation. Basically, page segmentation means that a page is divided into several separate parts (i.e. main content, menus, headers, footers, links sections, etc.) and these parts are treated as separate entries. At present, there is no way for a Web master to tell search engines how to segment a page but this is bound to change in HTML 5.
A new
tag.
The new
tag is probably the best addition from a SEO point of view. The
tag allows to mark separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine. It is expected that when articles are marked with the
tag, this will make the HTML code cleaner because it will reduce the need to use
tags. Also, probably search engines will put more weight on the text inside the
tag as compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.
A new
tag.
The new
tag can be used to identify separate sections on a page, chapter, book. The advantage is that each section can have its separate HTML heading. As with the
tag, it can be presumed that search engines will pay more attention to the contents of separate sections. For instance, if the words of a search string are found in one section, this implies higher relevance as compared to when these words are found all across the page or in separate sections.
A new
tag.
The new
tag (which is different from the head element) is a blessing for SEO experts because it gives a lot of flexibility. The
tag is very similar to the tag but the difference is that it can contain a lot of stuff, such as H1, H2, H3 elements, whole paragraphs of text, hard-coded links (and this is really precious for SEO), and any other kind of info you feel relevant to include.
A new
tag.
The
tag might not be as useful as the
one but still it allows to include important information there and it can be used for SEO purposes as well. The
and
tags can be used many times on one page – i.e. you can have a separate header/footer for each section and this gives really a lot of flexibility.
A new
tag.
Navigation is one of the important factors for SEO and everything that eases navigation is welcome. The new
tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages.

As you see, the new tags follow the common structure of a standard page and each of the parts (i.e. header, footer, main section) has a separate tag. The tags we described here, are just some (but certainly not all) of the new tags in HTML 5, which will affect SEO in some way. For instance, , or tags are also part of the HTML 5 standard and they will allow to further separate the content into the adequate categories. There are many other tags but they are of relatively lower importance and that is why they are not discussed.

For now HTML 5 is still far in the future. When more pages become HTML 5-compliant, search engines will pay more attention to HTML 5. Only then it will be possible to know how exactly search engines will treat HTML 5 pages. The mass adoption of HTML 5 won't happen soon and it is a safe bet to say that for now you can keep to HTML 4 and have no concerns. Additionally, it will take some time for browsers to adjust to HTML 5, which further delays the moment when HTML 5 will be everywhere.

However, once HTML 5 is accepted and put to use, it will be the dominating standard for the years to come and that is why you might want to keep an eye on what other web masters are doing, just to make sure that you will not miss the moment when HTML 5 becomes the defacto standard.

SEO and Web Hosting

2009-08-17T07:36:00.000-07:00

NOWHERE to be found on Search Engines ?

If you have submitted your site again and again to Search Engines but you are still unable to get it indexed, it MAY be your Web hosting provider who is responsible.
If the domain sharing your server and IP Address is penalized by a Search Engine on account of spamming then your website is also expected to be banned or penalized. This will happen if there is virtual shared IP hosting.

Another situation may arise if your website is residing on a server containing illegal adult content, and that site is on the black list of Search Engines your website will be banned. While you should never assume that your site is blacklisted, you should also take precautions. Even if your site is dismissed from the rankings temporarily, you can probably clear up the mistake by contacting the Search Engine.

To be safe its best to host with a reputed Web Hosting Provider.
Your Web Hosting provider should be up 24/7. For proper website service it must be up 100% of the time so that Users and Search Engines aren't faced with a blank page or a 404 error. Search engines have no specific schedules for crawling, so your website must be up at all times in order to maintain your Search Engine Ranking.

Reputed Web Hosting Provider

The Reputation of the web host should be good with Search Engines.
Although there is no clear way to identify them, web hosts that are very popular could be trusted.
Some of the popular SEO Friendly Hosting providers are

KVC Hosting
Directi
Interland
1and1
Enom etc.

Sites hosted by free web hosting providers do not usually rank well in Search Engines for competitive keywords.

Conclusion

You may benefit from sticking with the most popular hosting service providers, even if they are a little more expensive, rather than going for the best deal of a host with no reputation.
It is also preferable to have an individual IP address so that risk of index removal is minimized (Usually Hosting providers provide dedicated IP Addresses only with purchase of SSL).

Know About Google Sandbox

2009-07-28T06:15:00.000-07:00

Know About Google Sandbox

It's never easy for newcomers to enter a market and there are barriers of different kinds. For newcomers to the world of search engines, the barrier is called a sandbox – your site stays there until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club. Although there is no direct confirmation of the existence of a sandbox, Google employees have implied it and SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don't rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. For Google, the jailing in the sandbox for new sites with new domains is on average 6 months, although it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.

Sandbox and Aging Delay

While it might be considered unfair to stop new sites by artificial means like keeping them at the bottom of search results, there is a fair amount of reasoning why search engines, and above all Google, have resorted to such measures. With blackhat practices like bulk buying of links, creation of duplicate content or simply keyword stuffing to get to the coveted top, it is no surprise that Google chose to penalize new sites, which overnight get tons of backlinks, or which are used as a source of backlinks to support an older site (possibly owned by the same company). Needless to say, when such fake sites are indexed and admitted to top positions, this deteriorates search results, so Google had to take measures for ensuring that such practices will not be tolerated. The sandbox effect works like a probation period for new sites and by making the practice of farming fake sites a long-term, rather than a short-term payoff for site owners, it is supposed to decrease its use.

Sandbox and aging delay are similar in meaning and many SEO experts use them interchangeably. Aging delay is more self-explanatory – sites are “delayed” till they come of age. Well, unlike in legislation, with search engines this age is not defined and it differs. There are cases when several sites were launched in the same day, were indexed within a week from each other but the aging delay for each of them expired in different months. As you see, the sandbox is something beyond your control and you cannot avoid it but still there are steps you can undertake to minimize the damage for new sites with new domains.

Minimizing Sandbox Damages

While Google sandbox is not something you can control, there are certain steps you can take in order to make the sandbox effect less destructive for your new site. As with many aspects of SEO, there are ethical and unethical tips and tricks and unethical tricks can get you additional penalties or a complete ban from Google, so think twice before resorting to them. The unethical approaches will not be discussed in this article because they don comply with our policy.

Before we delve into more detail about particular techniques to minimize sandbox damage, it is necessary to clarify the general rule: you cannot fight the sandbox. The only thing you can do is to adapt to it and patiently wait for time to pass. Any attempts to fool Google – starting from writing melodramatic letters to Google, to using “sandbox tools” to bypass the filter – can only make your situation worse. There are many initiatives you can take, while in the sandbox, for as example:

Actively gather content and good links – as time passes by, relevant and fresh content and good links will take you to the top. When getting links, have in mind that they need to be from trusted sources – like DMOZ, CNN, Fortune 500 sites, or other reputable places. Also, links from .edu, .gov, and .mil domains might help because these domains are usually exempt from the sandbox filter. Don't get 500 links a month – this will kill your site! Instead, build links slowly and steadily.
Plan ahead– contrary to the general practice of launching a site when it is absolutely complete, launch a couple of pages, when you have them. This will start the clock and time will be running parallel to your site development efforts.
Buy old or expired domains – the sandbox effect is more serious for new sites on new domains, so if you buy old or expired domains and launch your new site there, you'll experience less problems.
Host on a well- established host – another solution is to host your new site on a subdomain of a well-established host (however, free hosts are generally not a good idea in terms of SEO ranking). The sandbox effect is not so severe for new subdomains (unless the domain itself is blacklisted). You can also host the main site on a subdomain and on a separate domain host just some contents, linked with the main site. You can also use redirects from the subdomained site to the new one, although the effect of this practice is also questionable because it can also be viewed as an attempt to fool Google.
Concentrate on less popular keywords – the fact that your site is sandboxed does not mean that it is not indexed by Google at all. On the contrary, you could be able to top the search results from the very beginning! Looking like a contradiction with the rest of the article? Not at all! You could top the results for less popular keywords – sure, it is better than nothing. And while you wait to get to the top for the most lucrative keywords, you can discover that even less popular keywords are enough to keep the ball rolling, so you may want to make some optimization for them.
Rely more on non-Google ways to increase traffic – it is often reminded that Google is not the only search engine or marketing tool out there. So if you plan your SEO efforts to include other search engines, which either have no sandbox at all or the period of stay there is relatively short, this will also minimize the damages of the sandbox effect.

How to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking sites

2009-06-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

Sites like digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com etc can bring you a LOT of traffic. How about getting 20,000 and more visitors a day when your listing hits the front page?
Getting to the front page of these sites is not as difficult as it seems. I have been successful with digg and del.icio.us (and not so much with Reddit though the same steps should apply to it as well) multiple times and have thus compiled a list of steps that have helped me succeed:

add to del.icio.us

1Pay attention to your Headlines

Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don't make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small.
Here are some examples to start with :-

Original headline : The Two Types of Cognition
Modified Headline : Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence

Original headline: Neat way to organize and find anything in your purse instantly!
Modified Headline : How to Instantly Find Anything in Your Purse

Here is a good blog post that should help you with your headlines.

2Write a meaningful & short description

The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.” visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based.

You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you'd better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.

3Have a great first paragraph

This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User's Attraction game, don't let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.

4Content is king

However, the first paragraph is not everything. Going further along the chain of drawing (and retaining) users' attention, we reach the Content is King Level. If your articles are just trash, bookmarking them is useless. You might cheat users once but don't count on repetitive visits. What is more, you can get your site banned from social bookmarking sites, when you persistently post junk.

5Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site

It is best when other people, not you, bookmark your site. Therefore, you must make your best to make it easier for them to do it. You can put a bookmarking button at the end of the article, so if users like your content, they can easily post it. If you are using a CMS, check if there is an extension that allows to add Digg, Del.icio.us, and other buttons but if you are using static HTML, you can always go to the social bookmarking site and copy the code that will add their button to your pages.
Here is a link that should help you add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to your pages.

6Know when to submit

The time when you submit can be crucial for your attempts to get to the front page. On most social bookmarking sites you have only 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. So, if you post when most users (and especially your supporters) are still sleeping, you are wasting valuable time. By the time they get up, you might have gone to the tenth page. You'd better try it for yourself and see if it works for you but generally posting earlier than 10 a.m. US Central Time is not good. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US Central Time. Also, workdays are generally better in terms of traffic but the downside is that you have more competitors for the front page than on weekends.

7Submit to the right category

Sometimes a site might not work for you because there is no right category for you. Or because you don't submit to the right category – technology, health, whatever – but to categories like General, Miscellaneous, etc. where all unclassified stuff goes. And since these categories fill very fast, your chance to get noticed decreases.

8Build a top-profile

Not all users are equal on social bookmarking sites. If you are an old and respected user who has posted tons of interesting stuff, this increases the probability that what you submit will get noticed. Posting links to interesting articles on other sites is vital for building a top-profile. Additionally, it is suspicious, when your profile has links to only one site. Many social bookmarking sites frown when users submit their own content because this feels like self-promotion.

9Cooperate with other social bookmarkers

The Lonely Wolf is a suicidal strategy on sites like StubleUpon, Digg, Netscape. Many stories make it to the front page not only because they are great but because they are backed up by your network of friends. If in the first hours after your submittal you get at least 15 votes from your friends and supporters, it is more likely that other users will vote for you. 50 votes can get you to the top page of Digg.

10Submit in English

Linguistic diversity is great but the majority of users are from English-speaking countries and they don't understand exotic languages. So, for most of the social bookmarking sites submitting anything in a language different from English is not recommendable. The languages that are at an especial disadvantage are Chinese, Arabic, Slavic languages and all the other that use non-latin alphabet. German, Spanish, French are more understandable but still they are not English. If you really must submit your story (i.e. because you need the backlink), include an English translation at least of the title. But the best way to proceed with non-English stories is to post them on where they belong. Check this link for a list of non-English sites.

11Never submit old news

Submitting old news will not help you in becoming a respected user. Yesterday's news is history. But if you still need to submit old stuff, consider feature articles, howtos and similar pieces that are up-to-date for a long time.

12Check your facts

You must be flattered that users read your postings but you will hardly be flattered when users prove that you haven't got the facts right. In addition to sarcastic comments, you might also receive negative votes for your story, so if you want to avoid this, check you facts - or your readers will do it.

13Check you spelling

Some sites do not allow to edit your posts later, so if you misspell the title, the URL, or a keyword, it will stay this way forever.

14Not all topics do well

But sometimes even great content and submitting to the right category do not push you to the top. One possible reason could be that your stories are about unpopular topics. Many sites have topics that their users love and topics that don't sell that well. For instance, Apple sells well on Digg and The War in Iraq on Netscape. Negative stories - about George Bush, Microsoft, evil multinational companies, corruption and crime also have a chance to make it to the front page. You can't know these things in advance but some research on how many stories tagged with keywords like yours have made the front page in the last year or so can give you a clue.

15Have Related Articles / Popular Articles

Traffic gurus joke that traffic from social bookmarking sites is like an invasion – the crowds pour in and in a day or two they are gone. Unfortunately this is true – after your listing rolls from the front page (provided that you reached the front page), the drop in traffic is considerable. Besides, many users come just following the link to your article, have a look at it and then they are gone. One of the ways to keep them longer on your site is to have links to Related Articles / Popular Articles or something similar that can draw their attention to other stuff on the site and make them read more than one article.

16RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing

RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing are all areas in which the traffic from social bookmarking sites can help you a lot. Many people who come to your site and like it, will subscribe to RSS feeds and/or your newsletter. So, you need to put these in visible places and then you will be astonished at the number of new subscriptions you got on the day when you were on the front page of a major social bookmarking site.

17Do not use automated submitters

After some time of active social bookmarking, you will discover that you are spending hours on end posting links. Yes, this is a lot of time and using automated submitters might look like the solution but it isn't. Automated submitters often have malware in them or are used for stealing passwords, so unless you don't care about the fate of your profile and don't mind being banned, automated submitters are not the way to go.

18Respond to comments on your stories

Social bookmarking sites are not a newsgroup but interesting articles can trigger a pretty heated discussion with hundreds of comments. If your article gets comments, you must be proud. Always respond to commends on your stories and even better – post comments on other stories you find interesting. This is a way to make friends and to create a top-profile.

19Prepare your server for the expected traffic

This is hardly a point of minor importance but we take for granted that you are hosting your site on a reliable server that does not crash twice a day. But have in mind that your presence on the front page of a major social bookmarking site can drive you a lot traffic, which can cause your server to crash – literally!
I remember one of the times I was on the front page on Digg, I kept restarting Apache on my dedicated server because it was unable to cope with the massive traffic. I have many tools on my site and when the visitors tried them, this loaded the server additionally.
Well, for an articles site getting so much traffic is not so devastating but if you are hosting on a so-so server, you'd better migrate your site to a machine that can handle a lot of simultaneous hits. Also, check if your monthly traffic allowance is enough to handle 200-500,000 or even more visitors. It is very amateurish to attract a lot of visitors and not be able to serve them because your server crashed or you have exceeded your bandwidth!

20The snowball effect

But despite the differences in the likes of the different social bookmarking communities, there are striking similarities. You will soon discover that if a post is popular on one of the major sites, this usually drives it up on the other big and smaller sites. Usually it is Digg posts that become popular on StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many other examples. To use this fact to your best advantage, you may want to concentrate your efforts on getting to the front page of the major players only and bet on the snowball effect to drive you to the top on other sites.
An additional benefit of the snowball effect is that if your posting is interesting and people start blogging about it, you can get tons of backlinks from their blogs. This happened to me and the result was that my PR jumped to 6 on the next update.

Difference between AdWords and Yahoo PPC

2009-06-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

I have been avoiding learning how yahoo works for some time. Today I decided to really get into it. Our agency has a Yahoo agency rep that helps us out a lot and I just spent a lot of time talking to him on the phone. Come to find out Yahoo is very different. Here are a few items I hope this turns into a big discussion.

1. Quality Score:
Google - Quality score is on an individual keyword and is figured out at time of search. You can have low and high QS keywords in the same ad group. Broad match and phrase match keywords only show the average QS. Only exact match shows a close to real QS and even then it is still an average since QS is based on things that happen at time of search.

Yahoo - Quality score is only shown at the ad group level. This means that everything in the ad group contributes to the QS. A bad QS keyword can drag down the others. They recommend that we organize ad group like in Google but then split up the ad group by traffic. This means that I get 3 times as many ad groups in Yahoo than I do Google.

2. Match Type.
Google Phrase, Broad, Eact, Negative Phrase, Negative Broad, Negative Exact. Broad is a wild card that will find all keywords with any of the keywords in your term plus synonyms, plurals, singulars and anything that could be remotely related. Phrase will take the exact match of what you put in the term and allow any other terms that have that exact phrase plus anything before or after the term. Exact is very exact nothing more nothing less. Negatives work the same way except they don't do any guessing. If you put in a singular you have to put in the singular as well. If you put in a negative match you can't have the exact match of the same term. Google considers a plural and singular keyword to be two different words. Negatives can be done at the Campaign and ad group level.

Yahoo - Advanced, Standard, Excluded Words. This has been very confusing to me. It seems that you have broad and really broad. Yahoo does not have an exact match. Advanced is just like Google Broad and standard is just like Google broad used to be. If you put in a negative match keyword it won't be excluded if you have it as a standard or advanced match. If you put in a singular it will also exclude the plural. Yahoo considers plural and singular keywords to be the same keyword there is no way to separate them. Negatives can be done at the account level and ad group level.

There are many other differences like campaign settings and geo targeting and so on but these are the 2 main things that are not obvious. I'm not saying that all this is true it is just my understanding. I hope we can talk about this and maybe clear up some of this stuff.

Best Free SEO Tools

2009-05-24T09:08:00.000-07:00

Best Free SEO Tools - Suggested By Jitendra Singh Jat

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

(https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox )

Keyword tool from Google that provides Specific and Similar keywords. It

provides you with 2 lists of words, specific keywords are those that

include your keyword that have been searched on Google and Similar

keywords that are relevant terms searched by uses that searched for your

keyword also.

Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool

(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ )

It allows you to enter a prospective keyword and it returns the related

keyword phrases and the number of times they have been searched in

the last month on Overture search engines such as Yahoo, MSN,

Altavista and Hotbot. You use this kind of data to help you choose the

keyword phrases you want to target. This tool is a "must use" as you

don't want to target keywords that no one is searching for! .

Google Suggest Tool

(http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1 )

It offer completions when you type in your keyword for searches.

It is very helpful in keyword mining.

Search Term Research

(http://www.keyworddiscovery.com)

This tool requires an username and password but it has lots of features.

They claim to have the biggest database, with over 9 billion searches

compiled from 37 sources that include major international, pay per click,

meta and regional engines. You can search on spell:keyword,

related:keyword, like:keyword and category:keyword. The tool will search

Overture's data from 16 different countries. There is just too much to list

here. Go sign up and get take a peek. It is a paid tool.

Keyword Search Tool

(http://www.nichebot.com)

It displays keyword data using Wordtracker and Google search

results. It shows for entered keyword and similar keywords the

number of times searched in 60 days according to WordTracker and

Google results and Google exact results page numbers.

Wordtracker Keyword Research Tool

(http://www.wordtracker.com)

Wordtracker compile a database of terms that people search for. You enter

some keywords, and it tell you how often people search for them, and also tell

you how many competing sites use those keywords. Wordtracker helps you

find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business, service

or product. It is a paid tool.

GoogleDuel Original

(http://www.googleduel.com/original.php )

It enables you to compare two different words to see which is more popularity

on the internet. This tool is a fast way to check you keywords to see where

plural or singular is the more common form used on the internet.

Keyword Density Tools

(http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/ )

(http://www.keyworddensity.com/)

(http://www.virtualpromote.com/tools/keyword-analyzer/ )

Keyword density is a measure of the "density" of the given keyword in a

body of text. The density percentage indicates what percentage of the total

text is made up of the specified keyword. This tool will analyze your entered

URL, and return a list of key phrases with their corresponding density values

for one, two, or three word key phrases. Keyword Density Analyzer gives you

keyword density in your title, meta description, meta keywords, visible text, alt

tags, comment tags, image tags, option tags, reference tags, linked text and

URL.

Ontology Finder

(http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/ )

It provides synonymous words of your keywords to consider for possible

keywords or just to add to your webpage.

Keyword Competition Analyzer

( http://www.redalkemi.com/search-engine-optimization-seo/search-engine-keyword-competition.php)

It displays the number of web pages on Google, Yahoo, MSN & HotBot that

contain the keyword you enter. A very nice tool that gives you all the numbers

in one shot!

Combine words script for PPC systems

(http://www.combinewords.com/)

It is a script is designed to combine lists of keywords for use in AdWords,

Overture and other Pay Per Click systems.

Advanced Google Search Methods

(http://www.algotech.dk/googlesearches.asp/ )

Enter domain and keyword and select numerous searches including allintitle,

allinurl, allinanchor, allintext, site, define, sponsored links and results with

sandbox penalty suspended.

Free Google Keyword Ranking Tool

(http://www.nichebot.com/ranking/)

Enter keywords, domain, depth of search (10-1000), any/all or exact phrase

and choose one of the 101 Google country sites to search from. It wouldshow

the position, number of Backlinks and total no. of pages indexed for the

domain.

Google Datacenter Watch Tool

(http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php)

It is a tool that will let you do a search on Google at all the different

datacenters. This shows whether the different datacenters are giving different

different Ranking results for the same key phrase.

Google One Line Results

(http://www.google.com/ie?q=&num=100&hl=en )

It enables you to view Google's search results with each entry on one liner with

anchor text the title.

Google Rank Position

(http://www.prsearch.net/ranking.php)

It allows you to enter a search term and the domain to search for. It returns

the position that search term has on Google WITH, the number of entries that

search term is indexed for, the PR of your home page, the size of file, the

number of inbound links the site has and lets you know if you are in the DMOZ

or Google Directory.

Google Rankings

(http://www.googlerankings.com/)

It searches for the entered URL and keyword in the first 1000 pages

Datacenter Quick Check

(http://www.mcdar.net/q-check/datatool.asp )

It lets you add you URL and check all Google datacenters for BackLinks, PR and

Ranking of keyword.

Future PageRank Tool

(http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/ )

It will query all of Google's various data-centers and display your Pagerank

value for each one. If queried during a Google update you will get a glimpse of

upcoming PR changes.

Page Rank Tool

(http://www.pageranktool.net/)

It shows PR on the different Google datacenters. Good for monitoring a PR

update.

Yahoo Search Rankings

(http://www.yahoosearchrankings.com/)

(http://www.prsearch.net/yahmass.php)

Enter URL/Keyword and searches for the entered URL and keyword in the

first 1000 pages.

MSN Ranking Tools

MSN Position Search

(http://www.prsearch.net/msnmass.php)

(http://www.devppl.com/msnbetarankings.php )

You can search up to 15 keywords for the entered domain and from the

top 100 to the top 500.

Robots.txt Tools

Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named "robots.txt" ( http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider (download). This system is called, The Robots Exclusion Standard. The format for the robots.txt file is special. It consists of records. Each record consists of two fields : a User-agent line which specifies the robot and one or more Disallow: lines which specify files and/or directories not be indexed by robots)

The format is: (#Robots.txt

User-agent: * (You may also use the wildcard character "*" to specify all robots)

Disallow: /cgi/ # keep robots out of the executable tree

Disallow: /temp/ # temp directory

Disallow: /stats/ # stats directory )

Robots.txt Generator

(http://www.123promotion.co.uk/tools/robotstxtgenerator.php )

It generates a simple robots file for your website allowing you to hide files

or directories.

Robots.txt Syntax Checker

(http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html )

(http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi )

It checks your robots.txt file and informs you of any errors that it finds.

Google Banned Tool

(http://123promotion.co.uk/tools/googlebanned.php )

This tool uses two methods to check to see if a URL you enter is in the Google

database. Its a great way to check to see if you have been banned by Google

for various reasons. If your site is quite new, you may also not show in the

Google database. This tool is aimed towards people who think that they have

been punished.

Meta Tag Generator

(http://www.123promotion.co.uk/tools/meta_tag_creator.php )

(http://www.searchbliss.com/free_scripts_metatag.htm )

It lets you fill in your web page title, description, and keywords and then

creates the meta tags for you.

Similar Page Checker

(http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php )

It helps you determine if the content of your web page's to similar as you can

be penalizes for having similar web pages on the same website.

Poodle Predictor

(http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go )

It shows you a spiders view of the text on your web page. Ignore where it

shows what your page will be displayed like on a Search Engine. Go into

the Diagnostics View and there you will see your page in text only with all

your alt, title, menu and copy displayed in the order the spider will see it.

Search Engine Spider Simulator

(http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php )

(http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml )

(http://www.searchwho.com/sw5-spider.html )

It shows you the content order of your webpage as the search engine

robot sees it. This will help you to verify that your keywords are at the

top of your page where they will be more relevant. It shows title, meta

description, meta keywords, page size, content text, word count, distinct

words, keyword density, links, and page in HTML.

Cool SEO Tool

(http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/ )

It provides Google, Yahoo, and MSN ranking, pages indexed in Google and

AltaVista, backlinks, allinanchor ranking, age of domain and phrase

on page.

Search Engine Index Checker

(http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex/default.htm )

It will display the number of your site pages that are in the database of

Alltheweb, AltaVista, Google/AOL and HotBot Search Engines. It also enables

you to enter up to 5 URLs of competing sites and compares your site to those

sites in a graph.

Check Yahoo WebRank

(http://www.webconfs.com/check-yahoo-webrank.php )

Allows you to check the Yahoo WebRank of up to 5 URLs at a time.

Search Engine Position Checker

(http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-position-checker.shtml )

(http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/se-pos.php )

It allows you to enter your keyword phrases and site URL and then displays the

top 50 position for those keyword phrases in Altavista, Excite, Google, Yahoo,

HotBot, MSN, WiseNut, Alltheweb and Teoma.

Search Results Compared

(http://www.yahoogooglemsn.com)

Search in all three major SEs at the same time and displays the results on a

single page.

Domain Directory Checker

(http://www.123promotion.co.uk/directory/ )

It checks your domain to see if it appears in 10 Internet Directory's i.e,

Business.com, DMOZ, Gimpsy, GoGuides.com, Jayde, JoeAnt, Skaffe,

Websavvy, Yahoo, and Zeal.

Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer

(http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php )

(http://www.555webtemplates.com/backlinks-tool.asp )

Backlink analyzer that provides a report of the URL and anchor text of up to

1000 of your backlinks that Google is showing. If you have more than one link

on the inbound page it show each of the anchor texts.

Link Popularity & Site Analysis Tool

(http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/site-analysis.html )

(http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-appeal.shtml )

(http://www.prsearch.net)

It shows your inbound links and pages in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, and

Alexa. Also shows PR, archive date (wayback machine), number of outbound

links on the page and whether the site is in Dmoz and Yahoo directory. Shows

the number of words and characters in the Title, meta keyword and meta

description and shows on a graph where the page has to many or to little.

Link Popularity Report

(http://www.reportbot.com)

(http://uptimebot.com/sql/one.php)

It reports, links and pages indexed from Google, Alltheweb, MSN, HotBot &

Yahoo, Tool PageRank, Alexa Ranking and checks where you are listed in

DMOZ - and it fast!

Link Exchange Tools

Broken Link Checker

(http://www.dead-links.com/)

It tests all links site wide and reports any broken links.

Reciprocal Link Checker

(http://www.recip-links.com/)

It checks the list of reciprocal you cut & paste into there form. It checks the

page, not the whole site and reports back the URLs that it found had a link to your

domain, the URLs that didn't have a link to your and any URLs that error out.

URL Rewriting Tool

(http://www.webconfs.com/url-rewriting-tool.php )

Generates Apache Mod-Rewrite code to help you convert dynamic URLs to

static looking URLs. Create a file called '.htaccess' and paste the code

generated into it.

Domain Age Tool

(http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php )

It displays the approximate age of a website on the Internet and allows you to

view how the website looked when it first started. It also helps you find out the

age of your competitor's domains, older domains may get a slight edge in

Search Engine Rankings.

Domain Stats Tool

(http://www.webconfs.com/domain-stats.php )

Provides domain information like Age, Yahoo WebRank, count of Backlinks and

number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Web CEO

(http://www.websiteceo.com/download.htm )

Web CEO is a suite of search engine marketing tools in one software program,

including a keyword generator, web page optimization analyzer, auto and

manual submitter, ranking monitor, top-ranked web page analyzer, HTML

editor, FTP client, and traffic counter and analyzer.

Webposition Gold

(http://www.web-positiongold.com/)

WebPosition Gold is a search engine software program that optimizes web

pages, submits to top search engines worldwide, and tracks your search engine

rankings and web site traffic.

Arelis

(http://www.axandra-link-popularity-tool.com/ )

Arelis is a link popularity software program for finding and managing reciprocal link

partners to increase web site link popularity ratings, which in turn improves search

Google Toolbar For IE for Google Search

(http://www.toolbar.google.com/)

It is a toolbar that installs on IE and shows you the Pagerank for each webpage

you visit. Beware - this tool bar will make you more PR conscience.

Search MSN Toolbar

(http://toolbar.msn.com/)

It is a toolbar that installs on Internet Explorer and has a popup blocker and a

number of other features.

Yahoo Toolbar For IE for Yahoo Search

(http://www.toolbar.yahoo.com/)

It is a toolbar that installs on Internet Explorer. Has pop-up blocker and Anti-

Spyware build in.

SEO and SEM Marketing as a Carrier

2009-05-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

Some Good Reasons to Choose SEO as Your Career

1High demand for SEO services

Once SEO was not a separate profession - Web masters performed some basic SEO for the sites they managed and that was all. But as sites began to grow and make money, it became more reasonable to hire a dedicated SEO specialist than to have the Web master do it. The demand for good SEO experts is high and is constantly on the rise.

2A LOT of people have made a successful SEO career

There are many living proofs that SEO is a viable business. The list is too long to be quoted here but some of the names include Rob fromBlackwood Productions, Jill Wahlen from High Rankings, Rand Fishkin from SEO Moz and many others.

3Search Engine Optimizers make Good Money !

SEO is a profession that can be practiced while working for a company or as a solo practitioner. There are many jobboards like Dice and Craigslist that publish SEO job advertisements. It is worth noting that the compensation for SEO employees is equal to or even higher than that of developers, designers and marketers. Salaries over $80K per annum are not an exception for SEO jobs.
As a solo SEO practitioner you can make even more money. Almost all freelance sites have sections for SEO services and offers for $50 an hour or more are quite common. If you are still not confident that you can work on your own, you can start a SEO job, learn a bit and then start your own company.
If you already feel confident that you know a lot about SEO, you can take this quiz and see how you score. Well, don't get depressed if you didn't pass - here is a great checklist that will teach you a lot, even if you are already familiar with SEO.

4Only Web-Designing MAY NOT be enough

Many companies offer turn-key solutions that include Web design, Web development AND SEO optimization. In fact, many clients expect that when they hire somebody to make their site, the site will be SEO friendly, so if you are good both as a designer and a SEO expert, you will be a truely valuable professional.
On the other hand, many other companies are dealing with SEO only because they feel that this way they can concentrate their efforts on their major strength – SEO, so you can consider this possibility as well.

5Logical step ahead if you come from marketing or advertising

The Web has changed the way companies do business, so to some extent today's marketers and advertisers need to have at least some SEO knowledge if they want to be successful. SEO is also a great career for linguists.

6Lots of Learning

For somebody who comes from design, development or web administration, SEO might look not technical enough and you might feel that you will downgrade if you move to SEO. Don't worry so much - you can learn a LOT from SEO, so if you are a talented techie, you are not downgrading but you are actually upgrading your skills packages.

7SEO is already recognized as a career

Finally, if you need some more proof that SEO is a great career, have a look at the available courses and exams for SEO practitioners. Well, they might not be a CISCO certification but still they help to institutionalize the SEO profession.

Some Ugly Aspects of SEO

1Dependent on search engines

It is true that in any career there are many things that are outside of your control but for SEO this is a rule number one. Search engines frequently change their algorithms and what is worse – these changes are not made public, so even the greatest SEO gurus admit that they make a lot of educated guesses about how things work. It is very discouraging to make everything perfect and then to learn that due to a change in the algorithm, your sites dropped 100 positions down. But the worst part is that you need to communicate this to clients, who are not satisfied with their sinking ratings.

2No fixed rules

Probably this will change over time but for now the rule is that there are no rules – or at least not written ones. You can work very hard, follow everything that looks like a rule and still success is not coming. Currently you can't even rely on bringing a search engine to court because of the damages they have done to your business because search engines are not obliged to rank high sites that have made efforts to get optimized.

3Rapid changes in rankings

But even if you somehow manage to get to the top for a particular keyword, keeping the position requires constant efforts. Well, many other businesses are like that, so this is hardly a reason to complain – except when an angry customer starts shouting at you that this week their ratings are sinking and of course this is all your fault.

4SEO requires Patience

The SEO professional and customers both need to understand that SEO takes constant effort and time. It could take months to move ahead in the ratings, or to build tens of links. Additionally, if you stop optimizing for some time, most likely you will experience a considerable drop in ratings. You need lots of motivation and patience not to give up when things are not going your way.

5Black hat SEO

Black hat SEO is probably one of the biggest concerns for the would-be SEO practitioner. Fraud and unfair competition are present in any industry and those who are good and ethical suffer from this but black hat SEO is still pretty widespread. It is true that search engines penalize black hat practices but still black hat SEO is a major concern for the industry.

So, let's hope that by telling you about the pros and cons of choosing SEO as your career we have helped you make an informed decision about your future

What is SEO and SEM

2009-05-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

SEO and SEM: Two Names for the Same Thing?
By most people's standards, the internet is still very young. New technologies and developments in existing technologies are appearing at an extraordinary rate. As technologies change, so does the terminology used to describe them.
I worked for three years as a webmaster. Ask a dozen people to define that term, and you'll get a lot of different answers. A webmaster may be the leader of a large team, including developers, writers, marketers, designers, usability experts, technical support people, and yes, search engine optimizers. Or s/he may perform all or some of those duties alone.
The same is true for search engine optimization. For many people, the term is a new one, and they have no idea what it is an SEO does. To others, SEO is synonymous with SEM -- search engine marketing. In my opinion, there is a big difference between the two.
Search Engine Marketing
I see SEM as a rather broad term. It's everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a web site and increasing its traffic, its "stickiness," and, in the case of sites that promote a business (or are a business), increase profits. SEO, therefore, would be a subset of SEM.
Aspects of search engine marketing which I would consider to be outside the realm of search engine optimization include the following:
Paid Inclusion
This is simply the practice of paying a search engine or a directory to add a site to its database immediately, rather than setting up that site so that it will be found by the search engine spiders on its own. In the case of some search engines and directories, paid inclusion is the only way to get listed. For others, it's presented as an option. If you're willing to pay, your site will be listed sooner. It's also a useful practice if you wish to make frequent changes to your content, because your site will be spidered more often and you will be able to test how changes affect your ranking.
Traditional Ads
This involves placing paid advertising on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Normally, these ads appear based on the keywords entered into the search engines, and one is charged based on the number of impressions, i.e. appearances, of the ad. In other words, you pay whether the ad sends anyone to your web site or not.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC ads are simple enough to look at. They're text-only. PPC ad campaigns are completely controlled by the advertiser. You decide which keywords should bring up your ads, you write the copy, and you decide how much you want to pay. And, as the name indicates, you only pay for an ad when someone clicks it and is brought to your site. There are two main networks of PPC ads, run by Google and Overture, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in both cases, one should be prepared to spend a great deal of time (and money) monitoring and adjusting such a campaign.
The Advantages of These Practices
In contrast to pure SEO, these SEM practices offer the advantage of immediacy. If you need to increase your traffic and your visibility right away, and you don't have a problem with spending a lot of money, this may be the way to go.
The Disadvantages
You knew this was coming, didn't you? Think about it this way: you've spent your time and money to bring people to your web site. What will they see when they get there? You've convinced them, at least for the moment, that your site is worth visiting, so they're expecting to find exactly the information they were seeking. Is it easy to find? Is it there at all? You only have a few seconds to convince them that your site can deliver what they want. Will your visitors, failing to find what they're looking for, click their browser's back button and try another site?
Your site has to be ready for your visitors. It needs to be written, structured, and coded in such a way that the information is clearly laid out and easy to find. If it isn't, your site will either be immediately forgotten by visitors, or worse, it will be remembered as one that fails to deliver.
SEO First
No SEM campaign is complete without SEO. Moreover, since the purpose of SEO is to make the site better for both search engines and users, you may find that it will suffice on its own. In any case, the advantages of SEO over the other aspects of SEM make it clear that, even if you are going to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site.

Google Ranking Experiment

2009-04-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

Google Ranking Experiment

In the past, people have been kind enough to share their experiments on WW and some have been quite helpful to us. Thought I'd post the results of our recent work. Roughly one year ago we created 2 sites targeting different sides of the same industry and worked them differently:

Site 1: Bought a brand new domain name that was brandable e.g. "widgets4you.co.uk" (the 4u and RUs thing is very popular in the UK!). - We built around 70 doorway pages i.e. pages on topics related to the widget being sold and wrote keyword full (not stuffed) articles. - We bought paid links from directories (e.g Yahoo) and other high PR sites. - We built a reciprocal (not three way) link directory on site offering link exchanges to anyone in any industry. - We hired 2 people and had them work full time finding reciprocal link exchanges on other people's sites that were mostly related to us ... though sometimes the connection was tenuous! - We wrote 10 articles and submitted them to article sites. - Anchor text was therefore controlled and total links as of last month was 7,151.

Site 2: Bought a 3-year aged domain name on Sedo. The domain was a keyphrase i.e. bluemetalwidgets.co.uk - We started off adding around 3 pages of unique and informative content a day aimed at our market, any keywords in there were all naturally occurring, not aimed for. After the first 6 months we reduced this to 1-2 pages per day. Again, each article was on current affairs, tips etc. for the industry, totally unique and between 400-800 words. - We developed press releases and submitted a total of 16 over the last 6 months through PRWeb, PRNewswire and BusinessWire. - We developed a blog. - We developed a video news channel now showing 22 videos. - We started a twitter service of main headlines. - We started an RSS/email subscription service to our articles. - We had no link building work, we relied on natural link occurrance (4,374 links as of yesterday) and natural anchor text.

The idea being that one would use regular SEO techniques (reciprocal link building, doorway pages etc.) whilst the other would use actual business methods (press releases, informative user-oriented content etc.) to see which did best.

Site 1: after just 3 months it was skyrocketing past some pretty hefty competition with traffic increasing well each month. The site was making £10,000+ a month for the last six months we had it and just sold for a rather nice figure.

Site 2: has struggled to rank anywhere, even for it's own name, and traffic has been stagnant since the outset - it made a loss for the first 8 months and made just under £3000 in it's best month which was last month.

I don't really want to state conclusions but I hope the information alone is though-provoking ... not least because the reciprocal and paid-link site was ranked in the top 3 consistently by Google (even above the 10 year old and government websites!) whilst the natural linked site never even got off the ground.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3889779.htm

Hot Top 20 Stealth Links

2009-04-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

Hot Top 20 Stealth Links

In another thread on Virtual Page Rank, we talked about ways that you can link to a site other than a direct http href link or links that may not show up on the link command radar.

Lets start a list of the ways sites can link, refer, or point urls to your pages other than direct hrefs. Mainly, we are after ways that SE's such as Google may run into and use urls they find:

another site links to your graphics ( img src=http://www.searchengineworld.com/gfx/logo.png )
a site links to your javascript files
a site links to your css files?
rss feeds and other xml feeds that people can link to without notice or referrals necc being generated.
links in email that some se's can read (yahoo mail, hotmail, Gmail)
links marked with noindex
links marked with nofollow
raw urls within javascript or js comments
raw urls within css or in css comments
urls within meta data of graphics and video files
urls within html comments
urls within the head section, meta data of a html page, or alternate html entities (alt, name, id, etc)
links or pages that maybe surfed while visitor has page rank engaged on the toolbar
the target of a constructed, obfuscated, or encrypted js url (hidden until executed)
links behind pay walls that Google can spider via webmaster tools
Domains that have been 301'd with links.
Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
non href'ed url's. (raw url on page http://www.webmasterworld.com/)
Links in any documents other than web pages e.g. .doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.
blocking a page in robots.txt should make it blocked from bots, but they still spider it.
Domain registrations/Whois and DNS data
Links in form data.
Links in other Google produced software (gadgets, widgets)
NonTraditional pages (irc, twitter, UseNet, Yahoo, or Google Groups.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3893713.htm

Google Analytics Launches Individual Qualification Program

2009-04-13T04:04:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics Launches Individual Qualification Program

Online Course and Test Promote Increased Understanding of Web Analytics

Google announced today the launch of a new skills qualification program, Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ), which allows individuals to demonstrate proficiency in Google Analytics. Google provides a free online course that covers web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools. Agencies and other organizations can have staff take the course as part of professional development.

While Google Analytics is easy to use for beginners, it’s most powerful in the hands of knowledgeable users. Qualified users will be effective at leveraging Google Analytics within their organizations and at helping others to do the same. The Google Analytics IQ program is tailored for agencies who want to retain and develop employees who are knowledgeable about Web analytics, and for individuals who seek ways to improve their job prospects or further their own personal development. Individuals do not have to be associated with an agency or organization to take the online course or test.

“Google is an important partner to both GroupM and its clients,” said Rob Norman, Director of Interactive at WPP agency GroupM Worldwide. “Google Analytics is an important resource in helping us to understand the opportunity that Google presents, and our participation demonstrates our continued commitment to gaining insight in all our key channels.”

There is also recognition among industry analysts of the need for more individual analytics certification. For example, in a September 8, 2008 report from Forrester Research titled, Sourcing Analytics Help, successful businesses “View Web analytics as a greenfield opportunity to propel their organizations forward. Although external consultants can feed new ideas and facilitate growth, ongoing improvement is only possible if internal staff members lead the charge and champion efforts from within.”

The Google Analytics IQ online course and a link to the Google Analytics IQ test can be found at ConversionUniversity.com.

For more information or to get started with Google Analytics, follow the sign-up instructions at: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20090303_analytics-iq.html

Google Announces Internet Availability of Proxy Materials for its 2009 Annual Meeting of Stockholders

2009-04-13T04:01:00.000-07:00

Google Announces Internet Availability of Proxy Materials for its 2009 Annual Meeting of Stockholders

Mountain View, Calif. -- March 24, 2009 -- Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the Internet availability of proxy materials for its 2009 Annual Meeting of stockholders under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Notice and Access rule. Google’s proxy materials can be found on its investor relations website at http://investor.google.com/proxy.html.

Pursuant to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Notice and Access rule, companies may satisfy their proxy materials delivery requirements by delivering a "Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials" to stockholders, providing Internet access to the proxy materials, and providing a printed set of proxy materials by mail to any stockholder who requests them. Google has elected to take full advantage of these rules in order to minimize impact on the environment and maximize cost savings relating to the printing of the proxy materials.

Google’s 2008 Annual Report on Form 10-K and proxy statement for its 2009 Annual Meeting of stockholders have been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and may be viewed on Google’s website at http://investor.google.com/proxy.html. Google’s stockholders may obtain hard copies of these proxy materials free of charge by following the instructions provided on its website or in the "Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials".

Google’s 2009 Annual Meeting of stockholders will be held on Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 2:00 p.m., local time, at Google’s corporate headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California 94043. For your convenience, we are pleased to offer a live webcast of the Annual Meeting and Google Moderator to allow you to propose questions for the question-and-answer portion of the Annual Meeting at http://investor.google.com/questions.

About Google Inc. Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Google Challenged over Electronic Book Database

2009-04-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

Google Challenged over Electronic Book Database

SAN FRANCISCO — The dusty stacks of the nation’s great university and research libraries are full of orphans — books that the author and publisher have essentially abandoned. They are out of print, and while they remain under copyright, the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.
Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian. Google has been scanning the pages of those books and others as part of its plan to bring a digital library and bookstore, unprecedented in scope, to computer screens across the United States.

But a growing chorus is complaining that a far-reaching settlement of a suit brought against Google by publishers and authors is about to grant the company too much power over orphan works.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/technology/internet/04books.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=global-home&adxnnlx=1238818817-l3/L7NNCVwWdBxR0l7VW5A

Online Marketing ( Search Marketing + Social Marketing + Display Marketing)

2009-04-08T02:54:00.000-07:00

Online Marketing (Search Marketing + Social Marketing + Affiliate Marketing)

Dear All, I would like share Some Upcomming "Online Marketing" Facts
Just think why Google Becomming More Local and what are they impacts on tradition Online Marketing.

I would like share Google Announcement FYR...

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-becomes-more-local.html

Online Marketing = Search Marketing + Social Marketing + Display Marketing

Introduction
Marketing has changed.
Traditional advertising does not work, brochure-like websites do not work, the web has given people ultimate freedom of choice and of goods. When there are no monopolies and constrictions, interrupting people's lives is not effective marketing anymore.

There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone. – Cluetrain Manifesto

“If the news is important, it will find me” – some random mySpace user

An online marketer now needs to find where people are congregating online and needs to engage them in a meaningful way. Be it in matching with what they are looking for, watching how they interact and understand what they’d like or listening to their natural opinions on your company or market and reacting to that.

Google Marketing
Google is the most used search engine and is used more each day. Google's share of the search market is growing, not declining. Each month Google is used by more and more people in the English speaking world and many are jumping shop from Yahoo! and Live.com to start using Google. People who already use Google start using it more frequently too. It is almost addictive.

Search engines themselves are changing. They are being used for more and more things. Website owners and bloggers find they are using Google to search their own properties as it is so effective. People are using Google as a spellchecker, as a calculator and as a unit converter. People search Google for the latest news. Google is the jumping point for web destinations but also as a Swiss army knife for non web actions such as spelling, as mentioned above.

Many Irish people instead of typing in Bebo.com in the address bar actually go to Google and search for Bebo and then click on the result to bring them to the site. Consider the amount of trust Google now has for people to do this.

It makes sense then to try and engage with people on Google since that's where they start so many of their digital actions. It’s a trusted place for them. You can react to someone’s searches by making sure your website ranks well in search results (SEO) but since you cannot rank well for every single search result, you can reach these people by advertising next to search results with relevant ads (Adwords)

Onsite TechniquesSearch Engines and Your Website

SEO (Search Engine Optimization a Part of Search Marketing)
One definition: Search Engine Optimisation is the process of streamlining the structure and content of a website to make it position well in search engine results.

Originally search engines were quite basic and you could do well for search phrases based just on the keywords that were on your website, nowadays with Google dominating, the ranking methodologies are far more complex and Google state there are about 200 factors that are considered by their search engine before you are given a placing in the results.

Some of these factors have more weight than others. Adjusting your website to take consideration of just one of these can create a positive outcome for your site in search placings. Combining all of them could mean that your website could jump from 60th place to 4th place or even 1st. It does all depend though on your competition and what they're doing to make sure they do well in Google too. As SEO becomes more popular, ranking sites does too but clever planning from the start will result in good placings.

Some factors to keep in mind:

Page Titles
The title of a page is the writing at the very top of a web browser. Google sees this almost like the title of a book. The more descriptive the title the better for Google results. Consider a book called "Dante's Inferno", it might be hard to decipher what the rest of the book contains; now compare this to "101 recipes using beef". One is far far more descriptive than the other.

Google puts weight into the title of a page and will point to the title when giving search results.

If your front page has a title of "Murphy's" then Google can't decipher much. If you have "Murphy's Crystal Goblet manufacturers" then they get more information. How many people will search for a company name in Google compared to a description of what they're looking for? This applies to every single page on your website, not just the front page.

The Title of each page can be changed in the source code of the page. This is what it would look like:
Gastronom.ie - Food and Drink in Ireland

Meta Description
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet.

Like the Title attribute, you can change or add a description to your page in the source code. This is what it would look like:

Body of the page
The body of each page on your website will be examined by Google too. It will compare the content here to the title of the page. If they match/suit each other then it will consider that the page and content are well structured.

Headers
Headers on a page are also important, treat them almost like chapters or section titles in a book. If you can be descriptive of the content of the trailing paragraphs, it's good for readers and it's also good for Google

Links
Google excels at automating processes and removing as many humans as possible from the mix, yet if it wasn't for humans, Google wouldn't have done so well. Google changed search forever when it stated that a site or webpage that gets a lot of links should get more attention from them and rank better. A link can be seen as a vote for a page. The more links, the more it probably should be seen as valuable/worthy. Websites that get a lot of links do well in search results. On closer inspection it is more in-depth in that though.

Volume of links
The number of links is good. Most links are good. More links, if Google trusts them is good for your site and lifts the boat in a way. However, if the links are more focused with their text and come from very trusted sites, your site can do better again.

Linking text
The text in a link pointing to your website or webpage is very very important. Your website can actually do well for search results for certain keywords even if they are not in your page title or in the body of your page. This can be done by other websites linking to you with keywords in the text of the link. This is why the Irish Communications Regulator (ComReg) ranks first in Google for "telecoms poodle" or why George Bush was number 1 for months for the phrase "miserable failure"

Link weight
In addition, a well ranking website will boost you more than websites that don't rank as well. A blog that nobody links to might not impact your search rankings if they link to you but if Trinity College (for example) links to your site then you might get a boost that's enough to push you up a place or two in search rankings.

Age of website
The older your website, the more Google will see it as having some weight or credentials. With the ease of registering and uploading a website, a website can appear online within minutes of a news event happening with keywords about that news event. Sites like these spring up in order to act like traps for people who will visit and will be directed to click on sneaky ads and make the site money. Google realises this and so does not give as much weight (and many times no weight at all) to new websites. Your new domain could very well end up in the Google "sandbox" for weeks or months until Google begins to trust it. If your site gets links from credible websites, the time in the sandbox can shorten quite a lot.

Freshness
Google lives and thrives on content and especially likes new content. If you update your website on a regular basis, Google will come and visit you on a more regular basis. Google is now apparently visiting sites every few minutes and content from some sites will appear in search results within 15 minutes of the content being created. Keeping your website updated and fresh will get rewarded by Google but in addition it will get rewarded by people who will also come back to you.

Google.ie/Google local
You may have noticed (In Ireland) that you are redirected to Google.ie when you go to Google.com. Google wants people to use the local version of their search engines as they see local content as being of more value to people in that geographic location. A lot of what people search for can be addressed by local websites and local businesses. To make it more valuable, Google guesses as to the Irishness of a website. If you have a .ie domain name like Mulley.ie then Google says you are probably Irish. In addition if the machine/web server where your website resides is owned by a known Irish entity then Google says you or your site are probably Irish too. What Google does then is reward you in Google.ie search listings. You get an extra nudge in the local versions of Google. You are not punished though in the Google.com listings.

You can also tell Google you are Irish or even part of your site is Irish using the Google Webmaster tools which you install/integrate with your website. That way, Irish sites who have special Spanish or German sections of their websites can do well in Google.ie for most of their site and do well for the Spanish section in Google.es and well for the German section in Google.de We don’t go into Google Webmaster Tools here as that’s an entire document in itself.

There is no secret to rank well but...
Google themselves tell you that writing good and engaging content without using dodgy shortcuts is what will get you traffic from them and they're correct. In addition, links, the currency of the web are given out by people, You can write content that is loved by Google and it being a machine might not spot it's gibberish but a human will and may not link to it and may not visit it. A site that doesn't get links and visits might alert Google to it being not so valuable, despite appearing to the machine as being well structured and written. Of course Google is probably not far off being able to spot human readable content...

A guide to print off and read is Google’s own SEO guide available here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

These are the basics, if you are already doing this and want to improve more it would be worth talking to an SEO expert.

Blogging
Free blog services: www.blogs.ie www.wordpress.com

www.IrishBlogs.ie is where you can see what bloggers are saying

Why Blog?
1. Search engine audiences
2. Getting recognition as an expert
3. Improves your message
4. Free R+D
5. Feedback on your space which you can guide

Blogging tips:
Pick a niche, become the authority
Network – IrishBlogs.ie
Put your blog on existing website
Host the website in Ireland
Regular posts – 1 per week for a year
Examples: BubbleBrothers.com IceCreamIreland.com

There is a companion Business Blogging document that comes with this document and provides much more information on this subject area.

Offsite Techniques:
Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is bookmarking items in public. You share with people what you are bookmarking and people can subscribe to what you bookmark. Your bookmarks are stored online, not on your computer.

“Jill is an interesting person so I want to see what she bookmarks”

For Example: Delicious.com

You can see how many subscribe and who get updated when I save a bookmark on Delicious:

Social Bookmarking sites are: Digg.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com

Digg allows people to vote on your bookmark. The American Idol of social bookmarking.

Adding Social Bookmark buttons to your blog posts and pages allow people to easily share their bookmarks. Instead of 1 person reading your page and that’s it, if they bookmark it now, 30 or 100 or 1000 people might see the page.

Online advertising: Search Marketing

Google Adwords
Google allows you to interact with searchers with their Adword system.

Google’s own guide to their Ad system is required reading for all those who want to advertise effectively. It’s advised to read this and the below summary: http://www.google.com/adwords/insider/Insiders_Guide_to_AdWords.pdf

For some really good insights from an Irish company see this blog post http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/10-ways-to-increase-your-adwords-quality-score-a-mini-case-study/ and all blog posts in this category from RedFly: http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/category/ppc-marketing/

You will see Adwords on the top and side of Google search result pages. Google however expect the ads to be relevant to what people are searching for, the same way search results are as relevant as they can be. Your ads will show up in search result pages only if what people are searching for correlate to keywords you have chosen.

On top of that you cannot actually bid for first or second place, instead, like webpages, Google will decide where you ad should place based on the way people value your ad. The more they click, the higher it will place. This encourages people to write ads that users see as being valuable. This sometimes makes it difficult for some traditionalists to write these ads where over-the-top promises won't get clicks but to-the-point messages instead win the day.

There are now professional copywriters out there who specialise in Google Ads.

A company should not be looking to run ads that are based on their company name unless the name is very generic. Why would you pay money for ads based on your company name when you should be ranking well or first on Google for your company details?

Adwords Auction System
Choose keywords, bid for them with maximum price you'll spend, see the results

Tools to use for choosing keywords

Google will show you roughly the volume of searches for the keywords you choose and the average price that is paid for these keywords. This allows you to budget for ads if you want to go with those words/phrases.

Specialised landing pages
It makes sense to have pages created especially for ad traffic. That way you can measure the impact of the ads and see what people do on your website once they've reached you. Additionally, landing pages should be all about the sale and that specific product. Give the people doing the searches what they want, based on their search. Uncluttered landing pages end up with better sales than noisy ones with lots of opportunities to click away and get distracted.

Rarely should you have ads that just bring people to your frontpage unless that page contains the best data about your product. For any company that has more than one service or product, there should be pages for each ad.

Also landing pages that have been optimised for the Google Ad in terms of copy will see the click rate at a lower price. Google rewards a landing page that is in synch with the Google Ad. Again, meaningful ads bringing people to meaningful websites means Google has happier repeat customers.

Geotargeting Ads
Google allows you to target your ad to people (based on their computer address) so you can target Irish people or UK people or even break it down by their county. If you just target Irish people you can both save money (as the market for Irish attention is not as competitive) but also you might be able to rely on brand recognition in the local market.

Google Content Network
Google opened up their ad system so their ads can be shown on other pages and sites apart from search results pages. Taking the same technology as the contextual ads on search results, you can target ads to show up on websites owned by Google like Blogger.com and Blogspot.com or owned by other people. The ads that are served are based on the keywords that Google finds as it searches all the pages. Since a website or webpage can contain so many disparate phrases, sometimes the ads don't fit well with the actual content of the webpage. As a result clickthrough rates for ads here are not as high as on Google search results.

Timing of ads
Ads can now be timed to go out at different times of the day. The benefit of this? Ads could be based around certain events during the day, perhaps you want to make sure those you target are businesses and if your ads only run during business hours then it avoids a little more people that are not using Google for business purposes. If you have a limited daily budget, pushing your ads out during certain hours may be of benefit or perhaps you are advertising daily deals which expire by 2pm etc.

Google Trends
Google Trends www.google.com/trends allows you to see volumes of search words and phrases people are carrying out using Google and this can be broken down geographically from worldwide to Ireland, to even local counties. Given the way that computer addresses are allocated by Irish Internet providers, the breakdown by city or county is often wrong with people from Cork being shown as being from Waterford or Dublin, depending on where their connection to the Internet has been routed. Google Trends allows you to compare terms and their volumes too so you can ride the wave of popular search terms or find ones with a little less volume but the cost of showing ads next to them might be considerably cheaper.

Google Trends for Websites
Google Tends for websites http://trends.google.com/websites also gives you a rough estimate on how popular websites are and you can compare most websites to each other and break it down by Geographic location. This is a handy way of seeing how popular you are compared to your competitors or what other sites get visited by the audience that visit your site and those other sites.

Google Adplanner
Google Adplanner – www.Google.com/adplanner is another tool from Google that gives you rough traffic statistics and demographic data for most online websites apart from the sites that Google own.

A worthwhile aspect of this tool is that you can submit a website to it and the Adplanner will give you back other websites that are visited by the same people. This is important if you are only targeting specific demographics and want to reach as many of them as possible. Adplanner will show you all the other sites that are in that same bracket. In addition if a site you'd like to target does not take ads, you can still target other sites that do take ads and have a crossover audience.

Many times Adplanner will probably introduce you to other websites you may never have known about because of their niche but who might be of extreme value to you.

Social Networks:

The most searched for term on search engines? Bebo. The most used website in Ireland apart from Google and other search engines? Bebo. The average Bebo user spends 23 minutes a day on that website. There are over a million Irish Bebo profiles. Consider that there are less than a million Irish people on broadband in Ireland. Over 100% penetration rate.

While seen as a place where young people congregate, many over the age of 18 are on Bebo too. Many have said they joined because their friends were on it and only joined because they were missing out on what their peers were doing. Being seen as a place for kids, a messy place, full of noise and yet those saying that still join the service is a testament to the drawing power of Bebo.

You can engage with people on Bebo through various means. You can create a profile for your brand/company/product and stick it up there and hope people will connect with it and see what you're up to. You can create a "Skin" for your product and share it with everyone. But for your profile and skin you are competing with millions of others and 100s of 10000s of skins. You can enlist Bebo however to promote both so that your profile can be a highlighted profile and your skin can be a highlighted skin. This does not come cheap.

A recent example of this is the Pat the Baker profile and Skin. The profile now has 1000s of friends, has "whacky" competitions getting people to sing the theme and submit photos of themselves with Pat the Baker sliced pans. The look of the profile changes frequently which someone probably considered was a way of keeping people's attention. It won't.

Why Pat the Baker thought Bebo was a way of getting more people to buy sliced pans is a mystery. Brand recognition? Kids don't buy sliced pans and in the world of pester power they probably use their quota to have other items bought.

LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a business focused social network where you can upload the equivalent of your CV and share it with others. One of the features of LinkedIn is that you can send a message to 10 contacts at a time or send it in the form of a question to everyone at once and they in turn can forward that on to everyone else.

While it might harp back to email chain letters, the profile of LinkedIn means that it is very possible to reach a good deal of potential ProductX buyers via CompanyA staff and their supporters sending a message to all their contacts asking to spread the word about ProductX.

Facebook:
Facebook has gone from 7000 Irish users in January 2007 to 400,000 Irish users in January 2009. Facebook started off as a network for college kids and the core look of the site is of a very clean interface which focuses more on information that the look. Most profiles on Facebook look almost the same with the only places on the profile where people can express themselves is on the Wall and in various applications that people can add. There are 150 Million users of Facebook worldwide.

Creating a Facebook Page

Facebook encourages companies not to create a Facebook profile for their brand, product or company but instead to create a Facebook Page which will give a company more control than a profile and can assign ownership of it to multiple people. If you create a Facebook Profile for your company or brand it will get nuked by them quickly enough and with it all the work you put into it. Register yourself on Facebook using a Profile, register your company with a Facebook Page.

One of the advantages a Facebook page has over a normal profile is that you can get statistics on usage of the page. In addition you are able to send a message to everyone that is a “Fan” of the page without everyone being able to reply all. Something a profile does not offer.

Creating a Facebook Page is very easy. Simply to go the Facebook Page section of Facebook and choose Create Page or else use this direct link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

This will bring you to the creation page. Choose what area of business you want your page listed under or click Brand or the Artist option. Here we want to create a Fan Page for the Grapefruit Moon Café:

Once you fill in the options, the page is now created but is not yet published. You can not add details to the page such as text, photos and videos.

You can change ownership of the Page and add more admins. You can become a fan too if you want.
A very handy option is that if you have a blog, using the Notes option, you can add a blog feed:

The blog contents will be imported as you update the blog, meaning you can bring in external content to feed your page.

How to advertise on Facebook
So you want to run ads on Facebook for your business, whatever that business is? Thanks to Social Ads from Facebook you can target 400,000 people in Ireland that currently use the service in the same way that Google’s Ad system allowed you to target ads but even better than Google you can almost be sniper-like on how you target the ads. You can target by age, gender, work status, relationship status, college education and interests.

In this walkthrough, let’s pretend to advertise to UCD folks. All you need is a credit card and to spend a minimum of five dollars on your ad campaign.

1. You need to decide what your ad is going to be. We’re going to advertise jobs in McDonald’s to those in UCD.
2. So first go to Facebook.com/ads
3. Click on the big green button!
4. Choose what website address you want to be clicked. Here it’s the job page on www.McDonalds.ie
5. From here choose your audience. We picked 18-25 year olds that attend UCD.
6. It said there were circa 1380 people from UCD on Facebook:
7. Then write your ad and you can also include an image. The McDonald’s logo was chosen.
8. You can also see a preview of what the ad will look like:
9a. After this you can choose how much is to be spent and what times the ad will be shown. You can also pay per click or by views:
9b. If you choose pay per views you have the option of also displaying the ad in the News Feed of people, something which will probably get you a lot more clicks and views since people actively scan and read their News Feed.
10. Finally, review the campaign and pay up and off you go.
Remember though that just because you can advertise and target specific people does not mean that you will get a lot of click throughs. You have to work hard on writing good copy and using good images to get the attention of a Facebook public that doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to ads. A Facebook user is different to a Google searcher is different to someone that responds to TV or newspaper ads.

Measuring Facebook Campaigns
Check your website stats:
While Facebook is a walled garden and you can’t see inside it without logging in, they still send a lot of traffic out to websites. If you have set up a Facebook Profile, a Page, a Group or run Facebook “Social Ads” then they can all send users from Facebook to you. In addition so can anyone else in Twitter if they’re talking about you. For a marketing campaign you should have special website addresses tailored for the campaign so you know only your campaign elements are sending that traffic to your site. Google Analytics or any of the clones will allow you to measure incoming traffic from Facebook and you can tell if they are coming from profiles, ads, pages or groups.

Facebook Lexicon
Facebook Lexicon allows you to see what Facebook users have been discussing. It’s a keyword trend program that doesn’t show the number of times a keyword is mentioned but the number of people who mentioned the keyword one or more times over a certain period of time. More details on Facebook Lexicon here. For companies you can get an estimate of the number of times your brand or product is mentioned. Ideal to see are there jumps around the time you start a campaign. You can also compare up to five different keywords at the same time. But there’s a big but, it doesn’t give raw numbers so it’s just a rough estimate but it’s still good. Maybe you can purchase them from them though? Big marketing companies would probably pay for that.

Facebook Pages
I recently created a Facebook “Page”. The Page was called “Gnéas” as a joke. When you become a fan, your friends also see you’ve become a fan of it as it shows up in their news feed. So a few people saw “Damien is a fan of Gnéas” and the viral element would have encouraged others to join too. The stats that are provided to Page owners are fairly good.

This is the Insights Control Panel (Everyone calls the stats pages Insights these days):
This is a graph of sign-up activity:
Some demographics of the Fans:

Facebook Social Ads
Read this Blog Post on how to run Social Ads. Like Pages there’s a whole section on statistics for your ads.

This is the Ads control panel. Note that the ads for the Gnéas page got canned because the Facebook prudes deemed the ads inappropriate:
Here’s how you can export all your data to Excel and add more calculations:

Facebook Apps
Many marketing campaigns will include the creation of special applications to get people to learn more about your brand/product. If you have an application created, Facebook will give you a whole load of information about installations and usage. Who, what, where, when etc. Data once again can be exported and presented to you.
Messy Measuring - Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups can be created by anyone and some do well and some stagnate. It takes a lot of work to keep activity going and Facebook really prefers if you use Facebook Pages to do marketing. They supply nice stat tools as mentioned above for Facebook Pages but nothing at all for Groups unless you pay a considerable sum for a sponsored Group. But you can manually check your group and measure it. Measuring it is a case of seeing how many have signed up for the Group and what the activity is like. So for example, the Bertie, Take Enda With You group:
You can see how many members there are. Then you can see what kind of activity is happening by counting the number of discussions, photos and videos that have started/ were added.
And you can also look at the Wall activity.

Other measurements to take into account are the number of people that respond to messages that you send to the whole Group. See what the response rate is like. Don’t be surprised if it’s very very low.
YouTube:
Measuring your Internet Marketing campaign on YouTube
YouTube now has “Insights” for your videos. They supply some fantastic stats now that shows you how many viewed the video, where they came from, how they came to find it, their gender and age groups etc. With all these details you can give se exactly how effective you were and even amend live campaigns due to the data.

Here are some stats on my David Lynch on an iPhone video, 20k views and YouTube breaks it down for me which is great:
The four tabs for stats:
Stats the public can also see:
Graph goodness:
There’s a lot more stats too so log in and have a look. The Google Blog gives more details about YouTube Insights. This is a good Washington Post article on how marketing companies use it too.

Actively Listening:
Listening and community relations:Online marketing is more than just broadcasting and interacting on your blog or website or forum. With new tools and the two-way and multi-way conversations that technology has brought, more and more companies are monitoring the web for mentions of their name and products and are then interacting with potential customers where their name is mentioned. Mostly this is happening on blog and discussion forums.

I would recommend, subject to resources, to use Google Alerts and Technorati Alerts to run continuous searches for “CompanyA” and “ProductX” so it can be gauged what the level of discourse online is for the competition but as well as that if a blogger or website owner is asking questions or needs clarification, the answer can be brought to them. This could convert many that are sitting on the fence about products.

Who’s saying what about you?
http://www.google.com/alerts

Google alerts allowing you to run constant searches on your name, your company name and anything else you want searches for. When a new website or webpage comes online and mentions these keywords, their details are emailed to you. If you use a tool like Google Reader, iGoogle or Bloglines you can subscribe to an RSS(news feed) of these results.

Listening on Twitter
Twitter is the latest “social network” type service with about 2 Million very very active users. Twitter is like Facebook with everything except the status update removed. With Twitter you can update a set of people who “follow” or subscribe to your messages in 140 character bursts. You can also subscribe to other people on this network and they do not need to give you permission to do so. You could follow 10 people on Twitter and have 1000 followers.

Twitter can be used as a snapshot of the most active users of the online population and is a great way of seeing what the zeitgeist that minute, hour, day or week is. Using the search facility on Twitter at: http://search.twitter.com you can run searches for your company name or product name or your competitor, business area etc.

This video from Niall Harbison gives a real world example: http://www.niallh.com/increase-sales-twitter/

This blog post from Peter Tanham shows you how to listen and engage only to people that are near you (based on their profile details): http://petertanham.com/2009/01/finger-on-the-pulse/

Listening on discussion forums
Like Twitter, you can listen/read and monitor online chatter about your, your business, your products and your competitors on thousands of discussion forums worldwide. A service called BoardTracker - http://www.boardtracker.com/ allows you to search a lot but not all these forums at once.

Unlike Twitter, interacting with what people are saying is much more difficult and sometimes impossible. The rules for each forum will vary and you will have to adhere to each one. Even if you cannot interact directly, you might be able to target ads to that discussion forum using Google Adwords.

Miscellaneous:

Website Statistics

www.statcounter.com

For monitoring who is coming to your site, to what pages and what search terms they are using, a website statistics software package is needed. Irish website StatCounter.com does it all for you and all you need to do is install a small piece of your code on

Finding Royalty Free Images Online

Jazzbiscuit
http://www.jazzbiscuit.com/blogCCsearch/
Copy and paste code on to your blog or website after searching for images that you want

URL.ie
Shorten very long web addresses into much shorter ones with www.URL.ie
Ideal for emails when addresses get split over two or more lines

About "Jitendra Singh Jat"

2008-12-26T04:27:00.000-08:00

“It was a pleasure to work with Jitendra. He is very particular in the operations that he manages. I could find that he had exceptional talent for both organic SEO and Paid Search Engine Marketing. Amongst all his qualities, the two i liked best were; 1. His attitude on the quality delivered in optimization. He never made any compromise in the same and ensured that all the SEO recommendations are strictly implemented. 2. His regular, though informal interaction with the team that kept him really in the middle of things happening. This obviously helped him a lot as a manager and the SEO team members to learn from him. We are not working in the same company now, but I know that i would love to work with Jitendra again. He is highly recomended for any company that is running/considering a serious and critical Search Marketing campaign.”
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2006-09-20T03:07:00.000-07:00

Jitendra Singh Jat