SEO Tips | ON Page Optimization Techniques

Google announced new feature in sitemaps

2012-02-11T18:59:00.000-08:00

By Navjot Singh

Google Webmaster Tool’s new Sitemaps feature gives you feedback on your submitted Sitemaps, like how many Sitemap URLs have been indexed, or is there any errors in your submitted sitemaps.

Sitemaps page displays details based on content-type. Now statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News are featured prominently. This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted (if any), and for some content types, Google also show how many items have been indexed.

Another improvement is the ability to test a Sitemap. Unlike an actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to Google as it only checks it for errors. Testing requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are not be caught by the test.

Also Google have got a new way of displaying errors which better exposes what types of issues a Sitemap contains. In addition Google have changed the way the “Delete” button works. Now, it removes the Sitemap from Webmaster Tools, both from your account and the accounts of the other owners of the site. Be aware that a Sitemap may still be read or processed by Google even if you delete it from Webmaster Tools. For example if you reference a Sitemap in your robots.txt file search engines may still attempt to process the Sitemap. To truly prevent a Sitemap from being processed, remove the file from your server or block it via robots.txt.

Find my blog on Google Search Engine

2012-02-09T09:44:00.000-08:00

Guys, Find me and my blog on Google search engine with following keywords. i love to add more and more SEO related updates and posts for your help.

Update to Top Search Queries Data

2012-01-25T22:08:00.000-08:00

By Navjot Singh Recent Post by Google

Starting today, we’re updating our Top Search Queries feature to make it better match expectations about search engine rankings. Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in.

An example
Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.

We anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link's position in Google Search results should be reported.

How will this affect my Top Search Queries data?
This change will affect your Top Search Queries data going forward. Historical data will not change. Note that the change in calculation means that the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, as we will no longer be averaging in lower-ranking URLs.

Check out the updated Top Search Queries data in the Your site on the web section of Webmaster Tools. And remember, you can also download Top Search Queries data programmatically!

How to Auto-Forward Gmail Messages in Bulk

2012-01-19T02:30:00.000-08:00

By Navjot Singh navjot singh

Gmail offers an easy mail forwarding option that lets you auto-forward incoming messages to another email address. You define a rule (or filter) and any incoming mail that matches the filter is automatically forwarded to another address.

There are however some limitations in Gmail’s auto-forwarding feature:

1. You cannot auto-forward old emails. For instance, if you have a bunch of old emails that you would like to send to your EverNote or Instapaper account for archiving, you’ll have to manually forward them one-by-one as auto-forward only works for new incoming emails.

2. You cannot auto-forward to a non-verified email address. When you set up auto-forward in Gmail, it sends a verification message to the other email address before you can forward messages to that account.
Gmail Auto-Forward with Google Docs

If you would like to auto-forward Gmail messages (including the older emails) to another email address in bulk, or if you would like to forward them to another address without confirming, Google Docs can help you overcome those limitations very easily.

The trick is simple. You set up a trigger in Google Docs that watches some of the labels in your Gmail Inbox and as soon as it finds a message, it auto-forwards it to a designated email address. You just have to set it once and it then runs in the background without requiring any manual input.

Gmail Auto Forward
Setting up Mail Forwarding – Step by Step

Create a copy of this Google Sheet in your Google Docs account and fill the columns A and B. You should put valid Gmail Label Names in column A and the corresponding auto-forward email address in column B.

Go to Tools –> Script Editor –> Triggers –> Current Script’s Trigger and Add a new Trigger. Set the Event as Time-Driven and choose either Minutes or Hours for the duration. If you want near-instant mail forwarding, set the timer to Every Minute.

Since you are running this Google Docs sheet for the first time, you’ll have to authorize it to access your Gmail account. Just follow the authorization prompts to grant Google Docs access to your Gmail.

That’s it. You can close your Google Docs sheet and it will magically forward your Gmail messages that are in particular labels. Once the message has been forwarded, the label will be removed automatically.

Better page titles in search results

2012-01-14T21:44:00.000-08:00

By Navjot Singh
navjot singh
Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.
We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.

Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML. For example, a title using simply the word "Home" is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations.

Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.
For more information about how you can write better titles and meta descriptions, and to learn more about the signals we use to generate alternative titles, we've recently updated the Help Center article on this topic. Also, we try to notify webmasters when we discover titles that can be improved on their websites through the HTML Suggestions feature in Webmaster Tools; you can find this feature in the Diagnostics section of the menu on the left hand side.

Essential SEO Tips & Techniques

2012-01-14T03:12:00.000-08:00

By Navjot Singh
navjot singh
1.. Commit yourself to the process. SEO isn’t a one-time event. Search engine algorithms change regularly, so the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. SEO requires a long-term outlook and commitment.
2. Be patient. SEO isn’t about instant gratification. Results often take months to see, and this is especially true the smaller you are, and the newer you are to doing business online.
3. Ask a lot of questions when hiring an SEO company. It’s your job to know what kind of tactics the company uses. Ask for specifics. Ask if there are any risks involved. Then get online yourself and do your own research—about the company, about the tactics they discussed, and so forth.

4. Become a student of SEO. If you’re taking the do-it-yourself route, you’ll have to become a student of SEO and learn as much as you can. Luckily for you, there are plenty of great web resources (like Search Engine Land) and several terrific books you can read. (Yes, actual printed books!) See our What Is SEO page for a variety of articles, books and resources.
5. Have web analytics in place at the start. You should have clearly defined goals for your SEO efforts, and you’ll need web analytics software in place so you can track what’s working and what’s not.
6. Build a great web site. I’m sure you want to show up on the first page of results. Ask yourself, “Is my site really one of the 10 best sites in the world on this topic?” Be honest. If it’s not, make it better.
7. Include a site map page. Spiders can’t index pages that can’t be crawled. A site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site, and help the spider understand your site’s hierarchy. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu. If your site is large, make several site map pages. Keep each one to less than 100 links. I tell clients 75 is the max to be safe.
8. Make SEO-friendly URLs. Use keywords in your URLs and file names, such as yourdomain.com/red-widgets.html. Don’t overdo it, though. A file with 3+ hyphens tends to look spammy and users may be hesitant to click on it. Related bonus tip: Use hyphens in URLs and file names, not underscores. Hyphens are treated as a “space,” while underscores are not.
9. Do keyword research at the start of the project. If you’re on a tight budget, use the free versions of Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, both of which also have more powerful paid versions. Ignore the numbers these tools show; what’s important is the relative volume of one keyword to another. Another good free tool is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, which doesn’t show exact numbers.
10. Open up a PPC account. Whether it’s Google’s AdWords, Microsoft adCenter or something else, this is a great way to get actual search volume for your keywords. Yes, it costs money, but if you have the budget it’s worth the investment. It’s also the solution if you didn’t like the “Be patient” suggestion above and are looking for instant visibility.
11. Use a unique and relevant title and meta description on every page. The page title is the single most important on-page SEO factor. It’s rare to rank highly for a primary term (2-3 words) without that term being part of the page title. The meta description tag won’t help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing. Related bonus tip: You can ignore the Keywords meta tag, as no major search engine today supports it.
12. Write for users first. Google, Yahoo, etc., have pretty powerful bots crawling the web, but to my knowledge these bots have never bought anything online, signed up for a newsletter, or picked up the phone to call about your services. Humans do those things, so write your page copy with humans in mind. Yes, you need keywords in the text, but don’t stuff each page like a Thanksgiving turkey. Keep it readable.
13. Create great, unique content. This is important for everyone, but it’s a particular challenge for online retailers. If you’re selling the same widget that 50 other retailers are selling, and everyone is using the boilerplate descriptions from the manufacturer, this is a great opportunity. Write your own product descriptions, using the keyword research you did earlier (see #9 above) to target actual words searchers use, and make product pages that blow the competition away. Plus, retailer or not, great content is a great way to get inbound links.
14. Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally. Anchor text helps tells spiders what the linked-to page is about. Links that say “click here” do nothing for your search engine visibility.
15. Build links intelligently. Begin with foundational links like trusted directories. (Yahoo and DMOZ are often cited as examples, but don’t waste time worrying about DMOZ submission. Submit it and forget it.) Seek links from authority sites in your industry. If local search matters to you (more on that coming up), seek links from trusted sites in your geographic area — the Chamber of Commerce, local business directories, etc. Analyze the inbound links to your competitors to find links you can acquire, too. Create great content on a consistent basis and use social media to build awareness and links. (A blog is great for this; see below.)
16. Use press releases wisely. Developing a relationship with media covering your industry or your local region can be a great source of exposure, including getting links from trusted media web sites. Distributing releases online can be an effective link building tactic, and opens the door for exposure in news search sites. Related bonus tip: Only issue a release when you have something newsworthy to report. Don’t waste journalists’ time.
17. Start a blog and participate with other related blogs. Search engines, Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there’s no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links. Related bonus tip: Put your blog at yourdomain.com/blog so your main domain gets the benefit of any links to your blog posts. If that’s not possible, use blog.yourdomain.com.
18. Use social media marketing wisely. If your business has a visual element, join the appropriate communities on Flickr and post high-quality photos there.

Google Announces “Megasitelinks,” Image Search Improvements & Better Byline Dates

2012-01-13T07:56:00.000-08:00

navjot singh
Megasitelinks (Localized, Too)

By Navjot Singh That’s Google’s internal project name for what the post say is an algorithmic improvement for selecting sitelinks. Google’s post doesn’t offer much color about why the name “Megasitelinks” was chosen for this update, but it does share one interesting new implementation: localized sitelinks.

“…we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.”

Google has been making a fair amount of updates to its Sitelinks in recent months. We’ve noticed them showing up not only on home pages, but also more frequently on sub-pages. Sitelinks have also expanded to include Google+ data in certain cases, as we reported back in November. And last summer there was the addition of the 12-pack of sitelinks.
I’ve yet to find a query that produces localized sitelinks, but not for lack of trying. (Feel free to leave a comment below if you’ve found/seen one.)

Image Search Improvements

There are two items related to Google Image Search in today’s post:

1. Improved quality signals — Google says its image search algorithm is not only looking for relevant images, but also “linking to the highest quality source pages.” Landing page quality is now an algorithmic signal for image search.
2. Spam detection — Google says it’s applying the spam detection algorithm from its main search results into Image Search.

Byline Dates

Google says it’s now showing “more accurate byline dates” after making some changes to how it determines what date to assign to a web document. There’s no extra detail provided — so I can only speculate that this is part of the change — but I just noticed last night on a search for “blog directories” that Google was showing two old blog posts but with their most recent “updated” dates:

Both of those are at least several years old, but show 2011 as the byline date.

Other Google Changes

There are several other changes mentioned in Google’s blog post:

The company says it’s doing a better job of determining where web documents are from, so that its country-restricted search results are more accurate.
Google says it’s improved what it calls “soft 404″ detection, which is when websites/servers are configured to send the wrong response code to Google’s spiders.
There are two changes mentioned on the topic of related queries, including one that makes the algorithm “more conservative and less likely to introduce results without query words.”

You can see read Google’s blog post for the full list of 30 changes that were made in December.

Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World

2012-01-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

navjot singh
By Navjot Singh

Google’s search results are undergoing their most radical transformation ever, as a new “Search Plus Your World” format begins rolling out today. It finds both content that’s been shared with you privately along with matches from the public web, all mixed into a single set of listings.
The change is live now, though not everyone will see it until it fully launches over the next few days. It’s only for those signed-in to Google.com and searching in English. You’ll know when it happens, because Google will alert you with a message like this above your search results:

The new system will perhaps make life much easier for some people, allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search twice using two different systems.
However, Search Plus Your World may cause some privacy worries, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (it is not). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially intended.
The new format and features will also likely cause Google to come under renewed fire that it is leveraging its search engine to favor its own content and crowd out competitors.

Spring Cleaning out of Session

2011-12-26T21:12:00.000-08:00

Announcement by Google
• Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.

• Desktop: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.
• Fast Flip: Fast Flip was started to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices. For the past two years, in collaboration with publishers, the Fast Flip experiment has fueled a new approach to faster, richer content display on the web. This approach will live on in our other display and delivery tools.
• Google Maps API for Flash: The Google Maps API for Flash was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications. Although we’re deprecating the API, we’ll keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash and we’ll focus our attention on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
• Google Pack: Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps, we will discontinue Google Pack today. People will still be able to access Google’s and our partners’ software quickly and easily through direct links on the Google Pack website.
• Google Web Security: Google Web Security came to Google as part of the Postini acquisition in 2007, and since then we've integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although we will discontinue new sales of Google Web Security, we’ll continue to support our existing customers.
• Image Labeler: We began Google Image Labeler as a fun game to help people explore and label the images on the web. Although it will be discontinued, a wide variety of online games from Google are still available.
• Notebook: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. We’ll be shutting down Google Notebook in the coming months, but we’ll automatically export all notebook data to Google Docs.
• Sidewiki: Over the past few years, we’ve seen extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative. So we’ve decided to discontinue Sidewiki and focus instead on our broader social initiatives. Sidewiki authors will be given more details about this closure in the weeks ahead, and they’ll have a number of months to download their content.
• Subscribed Links: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Although we'll be discontinuing Subscribed Links, developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people's search results.
• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.
• In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won't be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.
• Jaiku, a product we acquired in 2007 that let users send updates to friends, will shut down on January 15, 2012. We’ll be working to enable users to export their data from Jaiku.
• Several years ago, we gave people the ability to interact socially on iGoogle. With our new focus on Google+, we will remove iGoogle's social features on January 15, 2012. iGoogle itself, and non-social iGoogle applications, will stay as they are.
• The University Research Program for Google Search, which provides API access to our search results for a small number of approved academic researchers, will close on January 15, 2012.
• Google Bookmarks Lists—This is an experimental feature for sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends, which we’re going to end on December 19, 2011. All bookmarks within Lists will be retained and labeled for easier identification, while the rest of Google Bookmarks will function as usual. As Lists was an English-only feature, non-English languages will be unaffected.
• Google Friend Connect—Friend Connect allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. We're retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.
• Google Gears—In March we said goodbye to the Gears browser extension for creating offline web applications and stopped supporting new browsers. On December 1, 2011, Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers, and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download. This is part of our effort to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, and we’ve made a lot of progress. For example, you can access Gmail, Calendar and Docs offline in Chrome.
• Google Search Timeline—We’re removing this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page. Additionally, users who wish to see graphs with historical trends for a web search can use google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search/ for data since 2004. For more historical data, the "ngram viewer" in Google Books offers similar information.
• Google Wave—We announced that we’d stopped development on Google Wave over a year ago. But as of January 31, 2012, Wave will become read-only and you won’t be able to create new ones. On April 30 we will turn it off completely. You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround.
• Knol—We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.
• Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal - This initiative was developed as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy, with an REpublished our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts. We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies.

Google Removes Author: Search From Google News

2011-12-19T22:15:00.000-08:00

By Navjot Singh
navjot singh
You can no longer search for articles from specific authors in Google News.

As Barry Schwartz reported this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, using the author: firstname lastname command at Google News brings up no results now, and Google has disabled it on purpose. If you think it has something to do with the rel=author movement, it seems that you’re correct. Here’s what a Google employee named Erik explained in the Google News help forum:

The author: search operator is no longer available. For author-specific Google News content, I would recommend use of the Authorship capabilities in Google News, introduced last month. Integration with Google+ circles means easier following and engagement between authors and readers.

The main problem here, as Barry points out on SER, is that rel=author markup rarely seems to show inside of Google News search results.

Google Adds Author Stats To Webmaster Tools

2011-12-19T01:48:00.000-08:00

By Navjot Singh

Google has introduced a new report in Google Webmaster Tools named “Author Stats.”

Author Stats shows you how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page. This will show up under Google Webmaster Tools in the “labs” section in Webmaster Tools. It shows the impressions and clicks of the stories found in Google and shows up when you associate your content with your Google Profile.

Here is a picture:

Google said if you have issues with it, you can email them at authorship-pilot@google.com.

What Is “(Not Provided)” in Organic Search Traffic Keywords on Google Analytics?

2011-11-30T20:44:00.001-08:00

For about two months we’ve noticed a (Not Provided) item on Google Analytics traffic reports under “Traffic Sources/Google Organic” section. This is an article that has done a good job explaining it. The basic answer is that the keywords surfers used to find this particular site were not shown because the searchers were logged into their Google account when conducting the search.

Google wants to further protect their users’ privacy by encrypting their search results pages (through https://www.google.com).
In Nov. our site received 1,144 visitors from organic Google search which their search keywords were not shown (see below). This is 19.6% of our total Google organic search traffic.

The numbers are similar across the board for our other clients. The fact that we are running blind for about 20% of our total Google organic search traffic is creating a bit of frustration for our team. Mainly because we’re unable to show our clients (or our team) what keywords were used when the site was found on Google organic search traffic with 100% certainty (as we did prior to Oct.).
However, since the total number of organic search traffic has not been effected, we can use the other keywords to get a clear understanding of what keywords people search to find a particular site.
My opinion is that Google needs to find a way to fully show the keywords people use in finding sites. Otherwise, we may have to use other software to monitor our clients’ traffic.

Raising awareness of cross-domain URL selections

2011-11-17T02:13:00.000-08:00

A piece of content can often be reached via several URLs, not all of which may be on the same domain. A common example we’ve talked about over the years is having the same content available on more than one URL, an issue known as duplicate content. When we discover a group of pages with duplicate content, Google uses algorithms to select one representative URL for that content. A group of pages may contain URLs from the same site or from different sites. When the representative URL is selected from a group with different sites the selection is called a cross-domain URL selection. To take a simple example, if the group of URLs contains one URL from a.com and one URL from b.com and our algorithms select the URL from b.com, the a.com URL may no longer be shown in our search results and may see a drop in search-referred traffic.

Webmasters can greatly influence our algorithms’ selections using one of the currently supported mechanisms to indicate the preferred URL, for example using rel="canonical" elements or 301 redirects. In most cases, the decisions our algorithms make in this regard correctly reflect the webmaster’s intent. However, in some rare cases we’ve also found many webmasters are confused as to why it has happened and what they can do if they believe the selection is incorrect.
To be transparent about cross-domain URL selection decisions, we’re launching new Webmaster Tools messages that will attempt to notify webmasters when our algorithms select an external URL instead of one from their website. The details about how these messages work are in our Help Center article about the topic, and in this blog post we’ll discuss the different scenarios in which you may see a cross-domain URL selection and what you can do to fix any selections you believe are incorrect.

Common causes of cross-domain URL selection

There are many scenarios that can lead our algorithms to select URLs across domains.
In most cases, our algorithms select a URL based on signals that the webmaster implemented to influence the decision. For example, a webmaster following our guidelines and best practices for moving websites is effectively signalling that the URLs on their new website are the ones they prefer for Google to select. If you’re moving your website and see these new messages in Webmaster Tools, you can take that as confirmation that our algorithms have noticed.
However, we regularly see webmasters ask questions when our algorithms select a URL they did not want selected. When your website is involved in a cross-domain selection, and you believe the selection is incorrect (i.e. not your intention), there are several strategies to improve the situation. Here are some of the common causes of unexpected cross-domain URL selections that we’ve seen, and how to fix them:

Duplicate content, including multi-regional websites: We regularly see webmasters use substantially the same content in the same language on multiple domains, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes to geotarget the content. For example, it’s common to see a webmaster set up the same English language website on both example.com and example.net, or a German language website hosted on a.de, a.at, and a.ch.Depending on your website and your users, you can use one of the currently-supported canonicalization techniques to signal to our algorithms which URLs you wish selected. Please see the following articles about this topic:
- Canonicalization, specifically rel="canonical" elements and 301 redirects
- Multi-regional and multilingual sites and more about working with multi-regional websites
- About rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
Configuration mistakes: Certain types of misconfigurations can lead our algorithms to make an incorrect decision. Examples of misconfiguration scenarios include:
1. Incorrect canonicalization: Incorrect usage of canonicalization techniques pointing to URLs on an external website can lead our algorithms to select the external URLs to show in our search results. We’ve seen this happen with misconfigured content management systems (CMS) or CMS plugins installed by the webmaster.To fix this kind of situation, find how your website is incorrectly indicating the canonical URL preference (e.g. through incorrect usage of a rel="canonical" element or a 301 redirect) and fix that.
2. Misconfigured servers: Sometimes we see hosting misconfigurations where content from site a.com is returned for URLs on b.com. A similar case occurs when two unrelated web servers return identical soft 404 pages that we may fail to detect as error pages. In both situations we may assume the same content is being returned from two different sites and our algorithms may incorrectly select the a.com URL as the canonical of the b.com URL.You will need to investigate which part of your website’s serving infrastructure is misconfigured. For example, your server may be returning HTTP 200 (success) status codes for error pages, or your server might be confusing requests across different domains hosted on it. Once you find the root cause of the issue, work with your server admins to correct the configuration.
Malicious website attacks: Some attacks on websites introduce code that can cause undesired canonicalization. For example, the malicious code might cause the website to return an HTTP 301 redirect or insert a cross-domain rel="canonical" link element into the HTML or HTTP header, usually pointing to an external URL hosting malicious content. In these cases our algorithms may select the malicious or spammy URL instead of the URL on the compromised website.In this situation, please follow our guidance on cleaning your site and submit a reconsideration request when done. To identify cloaked attacks, you can use the Fetch as Googlebot function in Webmaster Tools to see your page’s content as Googlebot sees it.

Ten recent algorithm changes

2011-11-15T00:58:00.000-08:00

Ten recent algorithm changes by Google.com

Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.

Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.

Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.

Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.

Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.

Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.

Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.

Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.

Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Should I Change My URLs for SEO?

2011-10-20T04:18:00.000-07:00

Written By Navjot Singh Mail to Navjot
Every SEO eventually gets fixated on a tactic. Maybe you read 100 blog posts about how to build the “perfectly” optimized URL, and you keep tweaking and tweaking until you get it just right. Fast-forward 2 months – you’re sitting on 17 layers of 301-redirects, you haven’t done any link-building, you haven’t written any content, you’re eating taco shells with mayonnaise for lunch, and your cat is dead.
Ok, maybe that’s a bit extreme. I do see a lot of questions about the "ideal" URL structure in Q&A, though. Most of them boil down to going from pretty good URLs to slightly more pretty good URLs.

All Change Is Risky

I know it’s not what the motivational speakers want you to hear, but in the real world, change carries risk. Even a perfectly executed site-wide URL change – with pristine 301-redirects – is going to take time for Google to process. During that time, your rankings may bounce. You may get some errors. If your new URL scheme isn’t universally better than the old one, some pages may permanently lose ranking. There’s no good way to A/B test a site-wide SEO change.
More often, it’s just a case of diminishing returns. Going from pretty good to pretty gooder probably isn’t worth the time and effort, let alone the risk. So, when should you change your URLs? I’m going to dive into 5 specific scenarios to help you answer that question…

(1) Dynamic URLs

A dynamic URL creates content from code and data and carries parameters, like this:

It’s a common SEO misconception that Google can’t read these URLs or gets cut off after 2 or 3 parameters. In 2011, that’s just not true – although there are reasonable limits on URL length. The real problems with dynamic URLs are usually more complex:

They don’t contain relevant keywords.
They’re more prone to creating duplicate content.
They tend to be less user-friendly (lower click-through).
They tend to be longer.

So, when are your URLs too dynamic? The example above definitely needs help. It’s long, it has no relevant keywords, the color and size parameters are likely creating tons of near-duplicates, and the session ID is creating virtually unlimited true duplicates. If you don’t want to be mauled by Panda, it’s time for a change.
In other cases, though, it’s not so simple. What if you have a blog post URL like this?

It’s technically a “dynamic” URL, so should you change it to something like:

I doubt you’d see much SEO benefit, or that the rewards would outweigh the risks. In a perfect world, the second URL is better, and if I was starting a blog from scratch I’d choose that one, no question. On an established site with 1000s of pages, though, I’d probably sit tight.

(2) Unstructured URLs

Another common worry people have is that their URLs don’t match their site structure. For example, they have a URL like this one:

...and they think they should add folders to represent their site architecture, like:

There’s a false belief in play here – people often think that URL structure signals site structure. Just because your URL is 3 levels deep doesn’t mean the crawlers will treat the page as being 3 levels deep. If the first URL is 6 steps from the home-page and the second URL is 1 step away, the second URL is going to get a lot more internal link-juice (all else being equal).
You could argue that the second URL carries more meaning for visitors, but, unfortunately, it’s also longer, and the most unique keywords are pushed to the end. In most cases, I’d lean toward the first version.
Of course, the reverse also applies. Just because a URL structure is “flat” and every page is one level deep, that doesn’t mean that you’ve created a flat site architecture. Google still has to crawl your pages through the paths you’ve built. The flatter URL may have some minor advantages, but it’s not going to change the way that link-juice flows through your site.
Structural URLs can also create duplicate content problems. Let’s say that you allow visitors to reach the same page via 3 different paths:

Now, you’ve created 2 pieces of duplicate content – Google is going to see 3 pages that look exactly the same. This is more of a crawl issue than a URL issue, and there are ways to control how these URLs get indexed, but an overly structured URL can exacerbate these problems.

(3) Long URLs

How long of a URL is too long? Technically, a URL should be able to be as long as it needs to be. Some browsers and servers may have limits, but those limits are well beyond anything we’d consider sane by SEO or usability standards. For example, IE8 can support a URL of up to 2,083 characters.
Practically speaking, though, long URLs can run into trouble. Very long URLs:

Dilute the ranking power of any given URL keyword
May hurt usability and click-through rates
May get cut off when people copy-and-paste
May get cut off by social media applications
Are a lot harder to remember

How long is too long is a bit more art than science. One of the key issues, in my mind, is redundancy. Good URLs are like good copy – if there’s something that adds no meaning, you should probably lose it. For example, here’s a URL with a lot of redundancy:

If you have a “/store” subfolder, do you also need a “/products” layer? If we know you’re in the store/products layer, does your category have to be tagged as “featured-products” (why not just “featured”)? Is the “featured” layer necessary at all? Does each product have to also be tagged with “product-“? Are the waffles so tasty you need to say it twice?
In reality, I’ve seen much longer and even more redundant URLs, but that example represents some of the most common problems. Again, you have to consider the trade-offs. Fixing a URL like that one will probably have SEO benefits. Stripping “/blog” out of all your blog post URLs might be a nice-to-have, but it isn’t going to make much practical difference.

(4) Keyword Stuffing

Scenarios (3)-(5) have a bit of overlap. Keyword-stuffed URLs also tend to be long and may cannibalize other pages. Typically, though a keyword-stuffed URL has either a lot of repetition or tries to tackle every variant of the target phrase. For example:

It’s pretty rare to see a penalty based solely on keyword-stuffed URLs, but usually, if your URLs are spammy, it’s a telltale sign that your title tags,copy, etc. are spammy. Even if Google doesn’t slap you around a little, it’s just a matter of focus. If you target the same phrase 14 different ways, you may get more coverage, but each phrase will also get less attention. Prioritize and focus – not just with URLs, but all keyword targeting. If you throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, you usually just end up with a dirty wall.

(5) Keyword Cannibalization

This is probably the toughest problem to spot, as it happens over an entire site – you can’t spot it in a single URL (and, practically speaking, it’s not just a URL problem). Keyword cannibalization results when you try to target the same keywords with too many URLs.
There’s no one right answer to this problem, as any site with a strong focus is naturally going to have pages and URLs with overlapping keywords. That’s perfectly reasonable. Where you get into trouble is splitting off pages into a lot of sub-pages just to sweep up every long-tail variant. Once you carry that too far, without the unique content to support it, you’re going to start to dilute your index and make your site look “thin”.
The URLs here are almost always just a symptom of a broader disease. Ultimately, if you’ve gotten too ambitious with your scope, you’re going to need to consolidate those pages, not just change a few URLs. This is even more important post-Panda. It used to be that thin content would only impact that content – at worst, it might get ignored. Now, thin content can jeopardize the rankings of your entire site.

Proceed With Caution

If you do decide a sitewide URL change is worth the risk, plan and execute it carefully. How to implement a sitewide URL change is beyond the scope of this post, but keep in mind a couple of high-level points:

Use proper 301-redirects.
Redirect URL-to-URL, for every page you want to keep.
Update all on-page links.
Don’t chain redirects, if you can avoid it.
Add a new XML sitemap.
Leave the old sitemap up temporarily.

Point (3) bears repeating. More than once, I’ve seen someone make a sitewide technical SEO change, implement perfect 301 redirects, but then not update all of their navigation. Your crawl paths are still the most important signal to the spiders – make sure you’re 100% internally consistent with the new URLs.
That last point (6) is a bit counterintuitive, but I know a number of SEOs who insist on it. The problem is simple – if crawlers stop seeing the old URLs, they might not crawl them to process the 301-redirects. Eventually, they’ll discover the new URLs, but it might take longer. By leaving the old sitemap up temporarily, you encourage crawlers to process the redirects. If those 301-redirects are working, this won’t create duplicate content. Usually, you can remove the old sitemap after a few weeks.
Even done properly and for the right reasons, measure carefully and expect some rankings bounce over the first couple of weeks. Sometimes, Google just needs time to evaluate the new structure.

Yahoo traffic data into Bing Webmaster Tools reports

2011-10-15T04:42:00.000-07:00

Written By Navjot Singh Mail to Navjot
Bing Webmaster Tools will now be showing integrated data from Yahoo within certain areas and reports. Given the combined effort the Search Alliance represents, it makes sense to showcase relevant data from both engines within a webmaster account. Most areas and data within the accounts will not be affected. The short list of areas you will notice changes in are as follows:

On the Traffic Tab: Traffic summary report and Page Traffic reports will be impacted as follows:

Impressions – will go up based on combined data numbers
Clicks – will go up based on combined data numbers
Click Through Rates (CTR) as appropriate from above (change only due to the mathematics involved in the first two items)

Impressions data will rise because we will now be showing you combined impressions for your listings across both search engines. For each query term in the list within the report, your impressions represent the combined number of times your result showed, based on queries initiated by searchers at both Bing and Yahoo. Clicks data will follow the same pattern. CTR data is a factor of the first two items, and will rise or fall based on searcher click activity at each search engine.
The changes affect the numbers shown only. No actual rankings will be affected by the combining of data within Bing Webmaster Tools. As a visual reminder that data is now combined, you will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages.

At this time the data will be combined, not selectable. The data will also update in any market where Bing is powering Yahoo search.

Yahoo! Rolls Out Redesign for Search Results Pages

2011-09-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

Written By Navjot Singh

At Yahoo!, we’re always looking for ways to make the Yahoo! Search experience even more organized and streamlined while serving the most relevant content. We have been working to unify the search experiences across web, multimedia, and vertical search results pages with a design that is clean and intuitive. Today, we are pleased to bring the latest design changes to life across various search results pages!

The following changes are available now on the Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports search results pages:

Clean and Simple – A cleaner and simplistic look and feel that helps you find what is most important to you and to enable you to take action faster.
Automatic Tabs – Easily accessible tabs will automatically appear right below the Search box to give you the specialized content you may be looking for on our other vertical search results pages. The tabs that may appear, based on the search results content, are Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports.
Left Filters – Filters on the left side of the results will appear, for sorting results by time and related searches.

The query-aware tabs make it easier for you to dive into a specific vertical search experience, such as the Sports search results page example below. The related athletes filter on the left, combined with sports videos results on the right, also enhance this results page.

The improved News search results page will also include filters on the left for news sources, as well as news videos to the right of the search results.

Since last month’s Image Search update, we have made the above changes to the Image search results page, plus we have added:

A larger pool of Facebook images to also include public profiles and fan pages
A richer “Latest” pictures experience from across even more Yahoo! content
Better recommendations at the end of galleries

Below is an example of the Image search results page for the “President Obama” query, which brings you the latest, most relevant pictures to the top, and indicates how long ago each image was published.

Twitter Web Analytics

2011-09-16T02:02:00.000-07:00

Written By Navjot Singh | Mail to Navjot

Twitter is a powerful platform for websites to share their content, and drive traffic and engagement. However, people have struggled to accurately measure the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to their websites, in part because web analytics software hasn’t evolved as quickly as online sharing and social signals.

Today we’re announcing Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July.

The product provides three key benefits:

Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network
See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration

Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks. We’re also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products.

Canonical Tags- Get the credit you deserve!

2011-09-05T21:04:00.000-07:00

Written By Navjot Singh

Does copied content within your own site hamper your site’s ranking? How do you authorize others to use your content and still make sure that you get the search engine credits for the same? These are some of the questions which our SEO experts often face and we have tried to answer these questions here.

Google introduced the concept of the Canonical Tag way back in 2009. It intended to eliminate problems arising due to self-created duplicate content. Web site owners would be able to, by utilizing canonical url tags, give hints to search spiders on which pages to consider original and index higher.

How does it work for you?

The canonical tag is a link that is placed in the HTML header of a web page.

For eg:

This link is to be placed on the copied page. On encountering this link on a web page, search spiders would treat this page as a copy of the original namely http://www.myseopandit.com All the link metrics now flow to the original page. By using this tag, you can ensure that the right content is treated as original and gets the necessary credits for the same.

How is it different from 301 redirects?

Even 301 perform a similar function except that it redirects the visitor to the original page. Canonical tags, however, keeps the visitor on the same page while transferring the link metrics to the original page. In short, 301 redirects both visitor and search engine spider while canonical tag only redirects the spider.

Also from a technical perspective, 301 needs the expertise of a developer while canonical tags only need a basic understanding of HTML.

A word of caution:

DO NOT USE CANONICAL TAGS TO TRANSFER THE LINK CREDITS FROM YOUR INTERNAL PAGES TO YOUR HOMEPAGE. It is not at all a very SEO friendly decision. Your Home Page ideally should not be the only important page on your site
While placing the canonical link in your code, ensure correct formatting and double check the url of the original web page. A wrong url may do a lot of damage.

And now coming back to where we started, you can add canonical links to the copied pages on your site and advice search spiders not to crawl those pages but transfer all link credits and link juices to the original page. You can allow others to publish your content provided they are ready to add canonical links on their site page transferring all link credits to your page.

For more questions on canonical tags, you can post your query as a comment and we would be happy to explore the topic further together!

Google expands search results to include deeper site links

2011-08-23T22:58:00.000-07:00

Written By Navjot Singh Mail to Navjot

Search engine result page element, Google sitelinks has been pushed forward with an extension for showcasing major webpages' popular sub-pages. It would therefore mean that the size and number of the sitelinks are on the rise.

Browsers can now dig deeper into the websites showcased in search engine results, thanks to Google adding more details of sub-pages within popular sites in its rankings.

The move will especially boost searches for particular products or brands, because such searches will now showcase results from deeper within a particular site.

Listings of sub-pages displayed in this way include a title and a snippet of the meta description for each page. The more certain Google is that the site presented is the one being searched for, the more deep-page links will be presented – up to a maximum of 12, according to some site

The sitelinks will also group together results from pages from the site concerned which would normally appear lower in the search rankings.

More detailed sub-page listings will improve the service offered to searchers who know approximately what they're looking for. "When Google predicts your target site accurately, the sitelinks work as a quick access point to the core elements of the site,"

Meta descriptions and titles would now be of much more importance which is a point worth noting. The optimization of the said aspects for the space provided would even be a point to think of as a googler.

A new beginning Bing Webmaster Tools

2011-08-08T04:50:00.000-07:00

Bing announced the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how it could improve the webmaster tools. User wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes their sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing.

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

create a wikipedia page

2011-07-20T04:50:00.000-07:00

Before creating an article you should search to check that there is no suitable article that already exists. In the search box near the top right of a page, type the title of the new article, then click Go. If the Search page reports "You may create the page" followed by the article name in red, then you can click the red article name to start editing the article. The very first thing you should write in a new article is a list of the source(s) for the information in it.

Create article for Wikipedia page

Ø Consider creating the article on your user page first. Also make sure that an article does not already exist on the subject, perhaps under a different title. If you find an existing article on your subject, it is best to redirect the name you were thinking of onto the existing article.

Ø Gather references both to use as source(s) of your information and also to demonstrate notability of your article's subject matter. References to blogs, personal websites don't count—Extra care should be taken to make sure that articles on living persons have sources -- articles about living people without sources may be deleted.

Ø Do not create pages about yourself, pages that advertise, personal essays or other articles you would not find in an encyclopedia.

Ø Be careful about copying things, controversial material, extremely short articles that are just definitions, and local-interest articles about places like schools, or streets that are of interest to a relatively small number of people.

Ø If your article will require multiple edits or a significant amount of time to properly list references or make presentable, it is recommended that you place the template {{newpage}} on top of the page to signify to other editors that it's a work in progress. Another option is to start creating the new article in a subpage of your user page. This allows you to take as long as you need to complete a presentable article

Ø Keep making improvements

Ø Add references and External links sections at end of this page.

Meta Refresh VS 301 Redirect

2011-07-20T01:42:00.000-07:00

Why use the Meta Refresh Tag?

Many people use meta refresh tags to tell the search engines that their pages moved. It is not the most elequent way to do so though.

What does the Meta Refresh Tag Look like?
Place in the head of your page copy. The number is a measure of time to redirect the browser to the new location.

What is the problem with using a Meta Refresh Tag?

One of the bigger problems with this is that it is a common spam technique. Some people suggest setting the meta refresh to at least 5 seconds to avoid any ranking penalty.

What is a 301 Redirect?
A 301 redirect is a perminant change of location code. It tells a search engine spider that a page or website has moved.

What does a 301 Redirect look like?

Redirect permanent / http://www.newurl.com/cool/

The 301 redirect code goes inside a .htaccess file either at the root level or in a local level. You can also use a 301 redirect to move just a single page.

Redirect permanent /oldpage.htm http://www.newurl.com/cool/

Let's Get Social Comparing Facebook Like vs. Google +1

2011-06-23T00:18:00.000-07:00

Google’s new +1 feature was one of SMX Advanced Seattle most engaging sessions and, as a speaker, I have received a wide variety of feedback and questions. It seems this feature has fomented a great deal of speculation and inquiry. Here is a bit more food for thought.

Like vs. Google +1: What Are The Main Differences?

As Google product manager Daniel Dulitz mentioned, Google +1 is an annotation system which reinforces the interactions between organic and paid results, web pages, and your Google contacts.

That being said, your Google contacts are not necessarily your friends… and, you need to have a Google account to fully utilize the +1 feature. As a result, Google +1 acts as a collective rating system helping results be more trustworthy, but not adding the social infrastructure.

While Google’s +1 feature does draw upon a user specific network, it does not have the same social connotations of Facebook’s network. The +1 feature does function as a validity creating mechanism but does not contribute to the same social infrastructure that accompanies Facebook.

The Facebook Like is different in practice on several levels. Any website that is liked on a Bing search result is propagated into Facebook and vice versa. This means that something liked in Facebook will be shown on Bing despite any user interaction with the search platform.

This gives Bing/Facebook two avenues in which likes can be accrued as well as two ways to view the information. Additionally, Bing’s system is already privy to a year’s worth of information stemming from Facebook Like data giving Bing/Facebook a significant jump over Google.

Bing also brings forth popular pages based on global anonymous Facebook Like data – meaning that some anonymous Likes show even though searchers are not connected to Facebook, and makes it easier to go to Facebook after seeing a search result to have a “conversation” about that search query.

Note that you need a Facebook account to be able to see all these interactions; but unlike Google +1, you can create a Facebook account using any kind of email address.

Strictly Business Eleven Tips For Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines

2011-05-20T04:59:00.000-07:00

The SEO purist may argue why anyone would ever want to use PDF content on a website for search purposes. The reality, however, is that many businesses have a lot of PDF assets. These may include sell sheets, brochures, white papers, technical briefs, etc. The purist simply says why not convert these to html? In the real world, not everyone has the time, budget, and expertise to do that. There may also be other “marketing” reasons. Perhaps a company wants its prospects to experience the content along with all the other brand elements inherent in its print materials. Whatever the reason, there are lots of PDFs available on the web, and you can optimize PDFs to get high-ranking search results. Here are some tips on the right way to do it.

1. Make sure your PDFs are text based.
2. Complete the document properties.
3. Optimize the copy.
4. Build links into PDFs.
5. Pay attention to the version.
6. Optimize the file size for search.
7. Pay attention to placement.
8. Influence meta descriptions for PDFs.
9. Specify the reading order.
10. Tag your PDFs .
11. Pay attention.

10 Top SEO Facebook Strategies

2011-05-10T23:58:00.000-07:00

Facebook is more and more becoming a "second home page" for organizations on the web and has recently developed a number of innovative options for Pages to get increased traffic through the tried and true techniques of search engine optimization. Making use of important web optimization tactics on your Facebook Page can help you to progressively acquire more Facebook devotees. Search engine optimization reveals your Facebook Page to Facebook's total user base. In fact, Facebook has taken big steps to improve its own web optimization in recent weeks and months, increasing its own worth and creating opportunities for Page managers to benefit immediately.

Listed below are TEN SEO techniques and tactics every Facebook Page user will need to understand:

1. Decide on the Best Title for Your Facebook Page - and Don't Ever Change It

Choosing the right identity on your Facebook Page is crucial. For instance, if your name appears too spammy, people will probably be less likely to talk about it with their associates on their own page and more likely to conceal your updates from their Facebook feed. Secondly, don't give into the temptation to choose a completely common page title. Facebook's intention for Pages is that they legitimately characterize businesses and brand names, as well as stars. Recently, Facebook has been disabling updates for common Pages.

The bottom line: Work with your corporation's true title as the name of the page and when you choose your Page's name, don't alter it. Facebook makes use of your Page name in the title of the Page, and considering that Google dings webpages when their particular titles change, changing your Facebook Page's name can cost you SEO points.

2. Select the Very Best URL for Your Facebook Page

Facebook recently provided the flexibility to choose a title for your Facebook Page, just about the most important SEO option on Facebook to date. Facebook wants Pages to legitimately stand for the identities of businesses. Brand names with commonly used titles have had their rights suspended previously.

The soundest solution would be to decide on a username which authentically presents your online business or company. As soon as you select a Facebook username/URL for your Page, it cannot be altered. So, look for a username you are going to be at ease, and satisfied, with for the future. If you have a company that specializes in replica watches, make the URL something to do with replica watches.

Listed below are TEN SEO techniques and tactics every Facebook Page user will need to understand:

1. Decide on the Best Title for Your Facebook Page - and Don't Ever Change It

Choosing the right identity on your Facebook Page is crucial. For instance, if your name appears too spammy, people will probably be less likely to talk about it with their associates on their own page and more likely to conceal your updates from their Facebook feed. Secondly, don't give into the temptation to choose a completely common page title. Facebook's intention for Pages is that they legitimately characterize businesses and brand names, as well as stars. Recently, Facebook has been disabling updates for common Pages.

The bottom line: Work with your corporation's true title as the name of the page and when you choose your Page's name, don't alter it. Facebook makes use of your Page name in the title of the Page, and considering that Google dings webpages when their particular titles change, changing your Facebook Page's name can cost you SEO points.

2. Select the Very Best URL for Your Facebook Page

Facebook recently provided the flexibility to choose a title for your Facebook Page, just about the most important SEO option on Facebook to date. Facebook wants Pages to legitimately stand for the identities of businesses. Brand names with commonly used titles have had their rights suspended previously.

The soundest solution would be to decide on a username which authentically presents your online business or company. As soon as you select a Facebook username/URL for your Page, it cannot be altered. So, look for a username you are going to be at ease, and satisfied, with for the future. If you have a company that specializes in replica watches, make the URL something to do with replica watches.

3. Use the "About" box to Place Key Phrase-Thick Content at the Top of the Page

One critical SEO approach that needs to be utilized in your Facebook Page whenever achievable is inserting key phrase-thick content as close to the top of the Page as it can be. Since Facebook restricts exactly where Page managers can place substantial sections of textual content on the Wall of Facebook Pages, the "About" box basically is the best location in the CSS structure of the page to incorporate custom content. You will find there's 250 character restriction, so choose your words and phrases sensibly.

4. Use the "Info" Tab to Add Extra Critical Key Phrases, Content, and High Precedence Backlinks on Your Page

Facebook creates an "Info" tab for each Facebook Page which has fields made up of important illustrative data about the Page. It's imperative that you complete all these fields, for the reason that they provide the option to add keyword phrases, content, and hyperlinks that may improve the content material rating within your Facebook Page for many kinds of Google queries. The specific fields existing could differ based on the type you choose for your Page whenever you create it, so pick out the class which most effectively meets your business needs.

5. Develop "Static FBML" Boxes and Tabs to Place Lengthy Content Material Plus More Static Backlinks on Your Page

While chances to place substantial blocks of textual content on the default tab of the Facebook Page tend to be quite restricted, Facebook enables Page managers to set-up supplemental boxes or tabs which could carry any type of subject matter, including text, images, and hyperlinks. Adding content boxes or tabs to your Page could be a terrific way to supercharge the score of your Page.

6. Publish Direct Backlinks Aimed at Your Website Inside Your Page's Stream

Status updates offer a highly effective solution to place direct backlinks at the top of your respective Page. Since Google boosts ranking for webpages which link to relevant internet sites - and penalizes pages which link to irrelevant web pages or that add a great number of inbound links too suddenly - posting hyperlinks in status updates can be quite an effective and reliable approach to better rank your Facebook Page.

You can find 2 methods to submit hyperlinks:

a. Including the URL within the text of the status update itself.

b. Using the "attach link" function.

7. Add Pictures with Captions, Activities with Descriptions, and a Conversation Discussion Board

This almost goes without saying, yet it's crucial that you regularly spread useful subject matter on the Facebook Page, along with always making use of all offered illustrative fields on every single kind of content shared. When posting images apply lengthy and key phrase-thick explanations. Use the resources Facebook provides for your entire gain.

8. Create Inbound Links to Your Facebook Page from the Internet by Posting Backlinks to Your Page on All Your Websites

Just as a good number of inbound links from high-authority web pages can help improve PageRank for regular internet websites, acquiring inbound links for your Facebook Page may improve its PR as well. You can accomplish this with text backlinks, but Facebook has also developed a badge which it encourages Page managers to utilize.

9. Get Intra-Facebook Inbound Links by Simply Acquiring More Facebook Supporters

The more fans you get, the more backlinks you will have to your own Page inside of Facebook. For Pages with thousands of supporters, the volume of backlinks mounts up.

10. Reinforce Intra-Facebook Linking by Getting Followers to Review and Like Content in Your Stream

Whenever supporters comment or like content in your Facebook Page's stream, Facebook links their name back to their own Facebook profile page. Subsequently, once the profile stubs of those supporters who've put up feedback and likes on your own Page are listed, Google will discover more reciprocal links between your Page and your Page's followers, which it will see to be a much better relationship. This results in a cycle of enhanced link weight from the listed profile page stubs to your Page.

Contextual Advertising

2011-05-05T00:03:00.001-07:00

Contextual advertising is a form of advertising that dynamically appears on a Web site or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on what the user is viewing. Contextual advertising also is used by search engines to display ads on their search results pages based on what word(s) the users has searched for. Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites.

Service Providers

Google adsense was the first contextual service provider network.

5 Easy Steps to Create a Contextual Advertising Solution Campaign

Ø Getting Started - First select either a Contextual Targeting or URL Targeting campaign. Create your contextual advertising campaign name for your advertising solution, and set the maximum CPC/CPM/CPV/CPI bid price. The bid price affects your advertisement’s average traffic delivery, position, and clicks.

Ø Design/Upload Your Campaigns - Fill your advertisement information which allows actual website users to land on your ads.

Ø Select Additional Targeting Features - Choose from nearly 40 countries. You can even target your ads to specific cities!

Ø Target By Keywords/Phrases - Enter a list of keywords or phrases on which you would like to bid. You can also target your ads to over 150 channels.

Ø Launch Your Campaign - After your campaign has been approved, we will be able to connect globally to a target location, and demographic of your desire.

Subscribed Links

2011-04-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services, products for your customers, provide news and more.

What to do with Subscribed Links

Ø Create search results specific to product or service.

Ø Design a basic subscribed link.

Ø Build a dynamic version using XML or RSS files or feeds.

Ø Include images in subscription links

Why to use Subscribed Links

Using Subscribed Links, users can add information created by providers they trust to their Google search results pages. Whenever user search on Google in an area of their expertise, User will see a custom result from those providers in his search results. Subscribed Links are associated with your Google Account.

Design a basic subscribed link

Ø Add Keywords to trigger on.

Ø Add Title of product.

Ø Add some text lines that define the product.

Ø Add URL.

Ø Save this Subscribed Link file and download this file in XML format.

Ø After this upload Subscribed Link file.

Ø Create description page so that your visitors can learn more about you before subscribing.

Ø Add Subscribed button into your coding.

How Subscribed Links Looks

For seeing custom result, user has to sign in to his Google Account.

Google Algorithm Change February 2011 Losers & Winners

2011-03-03T21:02:00.000-08:00

Google’s algorithm change on or around February 25th saw 12% of all search rankings change, which means sites either lost a lot of rankings, ie Millions of dollars and some sites gained. So who were the biggest losers and winners?

Biggest Losers

Biggest Winners

Blocking user-agents

2011-02-22T22:23:00.000-08:00

The Disallow line lists the pages you want to block. You can list a specific URL or a pattern. The entry should begin with a forward slash (/).

To block the entire site, use a forward slash.
Disallow: /To block a directory and everything in it, follow the directory name with a forward slash.
Disallow: /junk-directory/ To block a page, list the page.
Disallow: /private_file.html

To remove a specific image from Google Images, add the following:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg

To remove all images on your site from Google Images:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

To block files of a specific file type (for example, .gif), use the following:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$

To prevent pages on your site from being crawled, while still displaying AdSense ads on those pages,

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

Do the Little Things in SEO Make a Big Difference?

2011-02-21T02:17:00.000-08:00

Do the Little Things in SEO Make a Big Difference?

Many companies and professionals in the SEO sphere often make “best practices” recommendations to clients that include items like:

* Switch from underscores to hyphens to separate words in the URLs
* Employ the H1 tag for page headlines
* Use H2s and H3s for subheadlines
* Use the keyword you’re targeting on the page in bold/strong at least once
* Change your internal links to contain the anchor text you’re targeting on the page
* Move the keywords to the front of the title tag
* Reduce the code to content ratio
* Apply relevant alt tags to images & photos
* Nofollow links to pages like login, register and legal disclosures

Tips to Optimize Images

2011-02-17T03:02:00.000-08:00

1. Use a unique, attractive image which can earn natural links from other websites. Just copying an image from another website and optimizing it properly may not help you all that much.
2. Put relevant keywords in the file name of the image.
3. Describe your image via the ALT tag, including relevant keywords. It i best to describe the image with some text around the keyword, to make it look more natural.
4. Create some text surrounding the image which is relevant and contains keywords relevant to the image.
5. Optimize the page containing the image. I f your page is well optimized for the targeted keyword, then your image has a better chance of appearing in the search results. For best results, make sure that the targeted keyword appears in the page title tag.
6. Try to acquire quality links, with correct anchor text, both to the image and to the page itself.
7. Don’t make your image too large or too small
8. Use a PNG, JPEG or GIF format.
9. Make sure that your URL is not in any way suggestive of "adult" themes. E.g. if you want your image to be optimized for Women's Gifts and you have just the keyword women in the URL, this may give Google that the idea that your website is somehow related to porn, which may cause it to be filtered it and from the safe search results. You can read more about this issue here.
10. Create an image sitemap and follow all other guidelines and best practices provided by Google for image optimization. Last but not least, share your image on various social media platforms such as Twitter and Flickr, to give them more visibility in Google's eyes.

Ten Controversial Search Engine Optimization Techniques

2011-02-10T21:07:00.000-08:00

1. Duplicate Pages

In general, search engines ignore duplicate pages. In extreme cases, they may ban a site.

2. Invisible Text

Search engines consider the use of text that is the same color as the background color as spam. So stay clear of using invisible text.

3. Keywords In Comment Tags

Hardly any, if any, of the major search engines index comment tags, so don't waste time adding them for optimization purposes.

4. Keywords In Hidden Value Tags

Keywords in hidden value tags are considered spam by all of the major search engines, so don't waste time with this practice.

5. Keywords In Style Tags

Very few search engines index the content of Link Farms And Link Exchange Programs

Search engines consider link farms and link exchange programs as spam, as they have only one purpose - to artificially inflate a site's link popularity, by exchanging links with other participants.

Do not confuse link farms and link exchange programs with reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking is the exchange of links with individual sites, and certainly an accepted technique for improving your site's link popularity.

7. Links Only Pages

I recommend adding text descriptions to link pages and site maps. Some search engines have been known to kick out links only pages.

8. Meta Refresh Tags

In general, meta refresh tags set for under 30 seconds are considered as spam by search engines. As such, most search engine optimizers use JavaScript redirects.

Are you confused? I certainly am!

So to be on the safe side, I suggest sticking with JavaScript redirects, until there is conclusive proof that search engines accept meta refresh tags.

9. Tiny Text

Many of the major search engines consider tiny text (i.e. font size 1) as spam. Some use of tiny text is fine. Search engines don't like web pages that use a lot of tiny text. The reason is because some webmasters have used it to fool search engines by "hiding" dozens of keywords in a web page.

10. Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of serving search engine optimized pages to search engine spiders, while at the same time serving un-optimized pages to site visitors.

Cloaking is one of the most controversial strategies in search engine optimization. Major search engines publicly state that they consider all cloaking to be spam. However, many professional search engine optimizers have been using cloaking for years, with much success.

Until there is conclusive proof that search engines do indeed ban sites that use cloaking, I suggest you take care if you decide to use cloaking.

About SEO

2011-01-19T04:56:00.000-08:00

Search engine optimization or SEO has been one of the major and useful tools in web marketing. Today, it plays a big role and will continue to be so in the future especially with a stiffer competition for online visibility. Its main function of improving traffic to websites through search engines is what makes it a standout among the other web marketing tools available on the internet.

Through the years, the SEO process has continually experienced upgrades to suit the advancing needs of web users. And this trend is just fitting because of the growth of the technology industry and the sprouting of SEO companies. Various additional tools have popped out to enhance SEO results and surely, more will come out in the coming years. There are so many free downloadable software today that web owners can rely on if they lack funds while companies who can afford can turn to the paid tools. As SEO campaigns become more effective, SEO firms are also adjusting to technology by adapting to new formats of search results. Of course, you have noticed that apart from the plain-text content, other forms of media like images, video and audio or the podcasts are now included in search engine result pages. The common goal here is to achieve the targeted visibility and eventually more traffic volume to websites. For the past ten years since the SEO technology attained its popularity, strategies in applying quality SEO has also improved although the basics are still the same. For one, the SEO process has become more personalized in an effort to be more effective. For example, Google is now providing varied search results to users depending on their location. If a web user searches for information within its locality, he or she can readily get results by clicking his own country. In addition, search engines are faster in detecting the speed at which a website obtains links. If your site is new and instantly shows a big amount of high PageRank pages, search engines will think that you are mainly dependent on link buying or link renting and will not give you a high ranking for those links.

Undoubtedly, Google remains the most popular search engine in most countries. It sticks to its rules including privacy policy which have become more rigid and continues to draw more users because of its being unbiased in its search results and SEO process. And despite the fraudulent moves taken by some people against this famous search engine, Google always comes out with a good solution. For more than a year now, Google has acknowledged a hacking technique aimed at destroying a websiteג€™s ranking. The technique is known as proxy hacking. Proxies are actually servers that function s a relay for internet requests. These web proxies enable people to surf the internet in an anonymous manner by forwarding their requests for content and delivering the requested content to web users. It is just like sending mail to another person by coursing it through the post office without any return address or information from the sender. A final tip: always be updated on the latest trends in search engine optimization. Do this by visiting forums and blogs on a regular basis and subscribing to some worthy SEO ezine or newsfeeds. Donג€™t be left behind because you will surely be missing a lot if you wonג€™t do your homework.

Page speed tool family

2011-01-18T04:04:00.000-08:00

Page Speed is an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source Firefox/Firebug add-on and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools.

Page Speed tool family

Page Speed is a family of tools for optimizing the performance of web pages.

The Page Speed Firefox/Firebug add-on allows you to evaluate the performance of your web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
The mod_pagespeed Apache module automatically rewrites pages and resources to improve their performance.

The Page Speed extension runs performance tests based on a set of best practices known to reduce page load time.
mod_pagespeed, the Apache module automatically optimizes resources on a web page.

E-mail marketing

2011-01-07T21:39:00.000-08:00

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers, and
sending e-mails over the Internet, as e-mail did and does exist outside the Internet (e.g., network e-mail and FIDO).

Advantages

E-mail marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:

An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. E-mail marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.^[2]
Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them.
Over half of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day.^[3]
E-mail is popular with digital marketers, rising an estimated 15% in 2009 to £292m in the UK.^[4]
E-mail allows marketers to reach out to consumers with personalized, relevant, dynamic messages.
Transactional e-mails allow businesses to respond automatically to important consumer events like purchases or shop-cart abandonment.

Disadvantages

A report issued by the e-mail services company Return Path, as of mid-2008 e-mail deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate e-mail servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.^[5]

Companies considering the use of an e-mail marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM),^[6] the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.

Source : wikipedia

Market your business on the internet

2011-01-04T20:28:00.000-08:00

If you are not already marketing your business on the web, then you really need to start. Just about every business out there could benefit from internet marketing. It is very affordable to advertise your company on the internet, and it gives you the the chance to reach a much broader audience.The value of online marketing is just one of many reasons why lots of business owners are moving their advertising efforts online. Advertising online is extremely affordable, especially when you think of how many potential clients a business can reach with a good online advertising campaign. Most methods of online promotion are very affordable and a lot of them are totally free. One excellent way to advertise your company online for free, is to participate in forums related to your business, and having a link to your site in your signature that is displayed below your posts. Just be sure to be respectful and post informative posts so you earn the respect of the other forum users.The sheer size of the potential target audience is an excellent reason for any company to start marketing online. Chances are, you have a good idea of what your target audience is, and when advertising offline, you are forced to focus on these people. However, there may be many other groups of people who would be interested in your service or product, who would never find you offline. By advertising on the internet, you are able to reach a much larger audience, potentially open your business up to new markets.In addition, there may be members of your core target audience from around the world who would not have found your business off line. By moving online, you are no longer a local company, but a worldwide enterprise!Not only does the internet drastically broaden your reach, but it also increases your effective business hours. While your company might only be open Monday through Friday from 9 to 5, your website is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a week. Your business hours are now more than quadrupled, but without paying additional employees.If you run a business, and do not have a strong online presence, then you really need to begin learning more about online marketing. It is vital in this age of technology, and if your competitors are advertising on the internet, they are gaining a distinct advantage over you, and are becoming more appealing to potential customers. Before they dominate your market, it's time to market your business on the internet so you can keep up with the competition.

What is Viral Marketing?

2010-12-29T01:22:00.000-08:00

Viral marketing is a marketing strategy that relies on individuals rather than traditional campaigns to pass along a message to others. It usually refers to marketing on the Internet. Viral marketing is so named because of the tendency for messages to use "hosts" to spread themselves rapidly, like a biological virus.

The term "viral marketing" first became prominent when used to describe a marketing campaign for the e-mail service Hotmail.com. When the company launched, every outgoing message contained an advertisement for Hotmail and a link to its website at the bottom of the e-mail. As people e-mailed their friends and colleagues, they were also advertising the service. Recipients could simply click on the link and sign themselves up, and as they e-mailed friends from their new account, the message spread within existing social networks and was passed along with little effort from the company.

This example demonstrates all the key elements of viral marketing. Its cost to the advertiser is minimal. Instead, it takes advantage of existing resources by making everyone who uses the product an involuntary spokesperson. It exploits common behaviors, such as sending an e-mail.

Viral marketing uses communications networks that are already in place. In the case of Hotmail, it implies endorsement from a friend. People who received an e-mail from a friend using the service learned that the product works and that their friends use it. And most importantly, viral marketing offers the ability to spread a message exponentially faster and to more people than conventional third-party ad campaigns.

There are different types of viral marketing, all using the same fundamental principles. Pass-along messages encourage users to send them along to others, such as e-mails with instructions to forward at the bottom or humorous video clips. Incentive-driven messages offer rewards in exchange for providing e-mail addresses. Undercover viral marketing presents messages in an unusual page or false news item without any direct incitement to pass it along, in the hopes that word-of-mouth will spread the message. Gossip or buzz marketing seeks to get people talking about something by creating controversy.

Viral marketing has come under criticism from consumers, privacy advocates, and marketing pundits because of concern over unsolicited e-mails. The best campaigns, however, use the principles of viral marketing tactfully to avoid negative reactions and ensure a high pass-along rate - the number of recipients that will pass the message to others. Much like the common cold, effective viral marketing uses people to unwittingly transmit a message within their social network. It takes the concept of word-of-mouth and enhances it with the instant global communication afforded by the Internet.

PPC beat Long tail keywords

2010-12-27T22:42:00.000-08:00

After most years of selling upon a internet, we have come to comprehend which a most creative selling plan is PPC advertising. Adwords Pay Per Click however has it’s drawbacks. If you have been new marketing with really small believe of keywords, you mount a possibility of losing a lot of money. It is utterly a plea perplexing to contest for same keywords with a some-more knowledge marketers who have a income to outbid their competitors. That is a reason we indicate expanding your horizons by regulating prolonged tail keywords for improved formula with PPC.

Long tail keywords have been shady treasures which most home commercial operation entrepreneurs mostly fail to notice. A lengthened tail keyword is a password as against to a singular word. Instead of regulating a keyword related to topic, you can put together to have a prolonged tail keyword such as how to get topic. Long tail keywords have been really in effect since not all people simply dig for a singular word, in actuality most internet searches will be a mixed word search.

Living in renouned make make use of of prolonged tail keyword word in your PPC ad campaign, regulating keyword collection such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool and SEO Book. These supports have been now used for working out a volume of a competitors to a stream buzzword. You will additionally be means to find out how most searches per month for any keyword word is created. In further to assisting you win a Keyword Tool PPC promotion costs for a due series of keyword phrases to urge your campaign.

Using prolonged tail keyword not usually assistance me to beat a price of PPC promotion though it additionally assistance me to get front page chain with my blogs and articles. Long tail keywords has been obliged for branch my PPC campaigns in to an online income creation machine. Before you give up upon regulating Pay Per Click promotion we indicate you cruise regulating prolonged tail keywords in your campaign.

It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like SEO for Xmas Time

2010-12-24T01:57:00.000-08:00

While the weather outside may be frightful, launching new SEO campaigns for the Holidays can be incredibly delightful. And like any other marketing campaigns, competition for keywords can be fierce. Here are a few tips on how to get your site ready for the Holidays.

Cater Campaigns around Special Offers

Speak to your affiliate manager to find out about the Holiday promotions they have going on. Once you know what you have that you can market that is going to be competitive, you can begin to research keywords to use and create content around those things.

Do Your Research

It should come as no surprise that Holiday search terms are very competitive. Competition for phrases like “Christmas gifts” is high, and with some terms, getting even more generic ups the ante just that much more. So, how does one beat those Christmas keyword blues? Specialize your keyword phrases, but be very specialized. Phrases like “unique Christmas gifts” face even tougher competition, but if you were to get even more specialized, then the competition is lessened. The bottom line here is that the research is key to your Holiday campaigns. Find out where you can compete, and go for it.

Embrace the Seasonal Flu Virus and Get Viral

Not every video will, or even can go viral. If you can get your video to do so, you have staged a major coup. And even if you can’t, people love helpful videos. Product reviews and helpful tips will help you create buzz, and if you have these videos embedded on your site, you have a chance to engage your audience for a little while longer than you would with text.

Provide Value

The name of the game, no matter what time of year it is, is still relevance and uniqueness. Provide surfers with something that they’re not going to find somewhere else. Give them a really good reason to read your content. A really big reason for people to read content during the Holidays is savings. Use terms like discount, sale, or savings in your copy along with the keywords that you are optimizing for. You should, however, never forget that content is king, and always will be.

Get Meta

If you are using Meta Keywords, all you are doing is telling your competition what keywords you are after. It has been quite a while since search engines have looked at this at all. What they do look for, and what your potential visitors will see, is the Meta Description. This gives you 150 characters to reach your audience. Use the keywords you have optimized the page for in this description, and make sure that you are using copy that convinces people to click. This is your first introduction to surfers, and first impressions are everything. Make sure you’re giving the searchers what the searchers want.

Get Social

If you’re not using social media as a way to reach out to your potential customers, the only question at this point is, why not? This is an excellent way to grab your customers’ attention and keep them engaged. And if you can provide special sales or incentives for people to follow you via social media venues, then you are sure to find that people will be even more likely to sign up.

Google Ad Planner

2010-12-16T05:14:00.000-08:00

A new free tool called Google Ad Planner to potentially increase its already widespread influence.

It’s a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications.

So, with Google Ad Planner, you can:

Define audiences by demographics and interests.
Search for websites relevant to your audience.
Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

The Google Ad Planner account interface consists of:

An audience definition tool, where you define your audience by language, age, and other criteria.
A list of sites matching your criteria. The site list includes traffic, reach, and other key data for each site to help you make informed decisions about where you might advertise. To make your research more efficient, Google Ad Planner automatically refreshes the site list when you enter, remove, or edit audience definition criteria.

With Google Ad Planner, you can choose to research sites only or create a media plan to save a list of your desired sites and placements for future use.

How does Google Ad Planner work with Google AdWords?

Google Ad Planner can help you identify appropriate sites to target through Google AdWords. First, filter your Google Ad Planner results to display sites in the Google content network and export the appropriate list of sites to a .csv file.

You can then take any of the following actions in your AdWords account:

Create a Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
Edit an existing Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
Use Google AdWords Editor to add placements to your ad groups: You won’t need to create a new spreadsheet, because Google Ad Planner has already done it for you. Simply copy sites from your .csv file directly into AdWords Editor.

Excellent Firefox Plugins/ Add-one for SEO

2010-12-15T21:01:00.000-08:00

Which browser do you use? Which is the best browser? These are some of the common question which many people asked me.

Well as a SEO specialist my answer is very obvious…”FIREFOX” , though all browsers are important for graphic & web designers as they have to check their design, work & functionality on each & every browser. They have to check the compatibility of the site on each.

Anyways..I really like FireFox because it has many great Plugings that makes my work easy & helps in quick SEO analysis.
If you are an expert or just starting to learn SEO, these Firefox plugins are great. I use the majority of these SEO Firefox plugins on a daily basis, if not more often.
Here’s a listing of the best plugins available for SEO work:

Mahalo Share: Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks.

Clipmarks: Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.

SeoQuake: Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. General set of parameters consists of such parameters as:

Google PR (Google PageRank of current page)

Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version)

Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain))

And similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

LinkChecker: Check the validity of links on any webpage.

SEOpen 0.8: Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization, including Google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar.

Search Synchronizer 1.3.0.3: Synchronizes the firefox searchbox 16 default search engines, and the ability for you to add more!
So when you search for something from the google website, for example, the firefox searchbox shall automatically show that search. Works with:
-Google
-Yahoo
-MSN
-Ask.com
-and 12 others!

SearchStatus 1.25: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

RankQuest SEO Toolbar 3.9.2: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensure the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

FireFTP 0.99.1: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

About This Site 1.1: One-click access to web site metadata – traffic, related and linked pages, and more – added to the Tools menu and context menu.

Page validator 0.3.3: Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages.

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.3: Adds display of PageRank, linktext and nofollow links to external links in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal

Google Global 2.0.1: Google Global allows users to see organic and paid Google search results as they appear in different countries, cities, regions, ZIP codes and IP addresses.

Google Pagerank Status 0.9.3: Display the google pagerank in your browser’s status bar.

Web Developer 1.1.6: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

StumbleUpon 3.23: With StumbleUpon you can also connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector 0.6.4: Detects Duplicate Bookmarks when bookmarks are added and specify where the previous URL is. You can also search and delete duplicates URL already in your Bookmarks.

del.icio.us Complete 1.3: del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

This extension is not only a sidebar it provides an excellent post dialog as well.
Social Media for Firefox : A submission on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or Delicious is sometimes a good candidate for submission to the others. This add-on makes saves you the time of checking if an item has already been submitted by showing vote counts right on the home pages of these social bookmarking sites.

In addition, vote counts are shown in the Firefox status bar as you move from page to page again saving you the trouble of going through the bookmarking process if someone has beat you to it.

Compete.com: The Compete Toolbar automatically creates three alerts for every web site you visit:

Trust Scores: help you experience a safer web by warning you of potentially malicious (spyware, phishing) web sites

Site Profiles: tell you how popular the web site is, its rank, and how fast it is growing

Deal Light: automatically lights up if there are any special promotions or coupons that can save you money on the web site.

I am sure these plugins will increase your SEO efficiency.

Improve Alexa Ranking of Your Website

2010-12-09T02:12:00.000-08:00

Alexa provides traffic statistics for the websites. You can measure the number of visitors on your website using this ranking tool but to track the count of visitors using this tool, it is essential that this tool should be already installed on the visitors' browser. Unluckily, most of the visitors don't have this toolbar pre-installed on their browsers. Due to which we can't say that Alexa Rank is a true indicator of visitors count on your website, it's just a subset of your visitors.Looking at this, Alexa addresses some of these concerns as:• Traffic rankings of one lac and above should not be regarded as authentic one.• The closer a site gets to #1, the more trustful its traffic ranking becomes.So we cant say that Alexa ranking is an accurate ranking system, it is important only if you plan to monetize your website. Instead, you may use some way outs to improve the Alexa rank of your website.Append An Alexa Rank Widget To Your WebsiteSetting up this widget on your website will help in increasing its rank. Using this widget, all the visitors of your website could be tracked. If, sometimes, loading of a page takes time with a widget added on that page, to still retain its benefits preferably place it at the very bottom of your website, or at the end of your source code.Install Alexa Toolbar in Your Browser tooJust set your website as your homepage. Doing this way, you can increase the rank of website's traffic rank because your visits to your website will also be reflected in your rank.Spread the word to Install the Alexa ToolbarTry to make aware everybody, your visitors as well as your friends, that installing Alexa toolbar helps to give correct number of visitors to any website.Use Alexa Auto-Surfing WebsitesThis approach is workable only if your Alexa rank is too poor, but these websites sends visitors to your website that have this toolbar installed for sure.Look for WebmastersGenerally, web developers and tech-savvy people have installed the Alexa toolbar in their browsers. So, if you visit discussion groups, or forums, you may ask for feedback on your website, thereby increasing website visits.Therefore, it's crystal clear that Alexa traffic rank is not a true indicator of your website's visitors. It can count near to real visitors, only if considered along with other performance metrics. Hitherto, using above mentioned tips, you can improve Alexa rank of your website, thence the value of your website could be enhanced in front of potential consumers.

Worried About why Google is not showing ads on Google Search results

2010-12-01T21:40:00.000-08:00

Many people have this common query that “why Google is not showing our ads on Google Search or content results, though we are running Ad-words Ad Campaign”….

Here, I am listing out the most common or possible reasons:

No Billing Information:

Your Ad-words ads can’t begin running until you enter valid billing information in your account. If you pay with credit card or other post pay option, your account will be activated once you submit billing information. Depending on the processing time associated with your payment option, your ads may begin showing and accruing costs immediately. If you pay with bank transfer or another form of prepayment, your ads won’t run until we receive and process your first payment. This can take 8-10 days (and occasionally more) after you’ve submitted your billing information and made your first payment. To enter your billing information, sign in to your AdWords account and click the My Account tab. Then click the Billing Preferences link and enter your billing information.

Campaign Daily Budget:

If your daily budget is lower than the system’s recommended amount, Google will show your ad when it has the highest demand, depending on traffic patterns. For example, Google might show 70 percent of your daily budget in the morning if the demand is higher at this time, and 30 percent in the afternoon if demand is lower at this time. This way, you’ll have a better chance of reaching advertisers when they’re searching for you. To make sure your ad shows for all relevant searches, you can increase your daily budget to the recommended amount.

Campaign settings:

Check your campaign settings also. You might have running Ad Scheduling for your campaign & stopped your ad for a particular time period.

Also, take care of your Ad Delivery method under “Budget Options” of campaign setting tab.

If your daily budget is lower than the system’s recommended amount & you have chosen the “Accelerated: Show ads as quickly as possible”, option then Google will show your ad continuously until your budget will not consumed completely for that day. In that case your ad will not run throughout the day.

So please make sure about your campaign settings!!

No ad/ Inactive Ads:

Make sure that there is an active ad in your Ad Group. If you have not created any ad for your ad group or if all ads within your Ad Group are currently paused or deleted, this means there are no ads running for your keywords.

Ad disapproved:

Make sure that all of your ads are following the Google’s guidelines. If an ad doesn’t meet Google’s Editorial Guidelines, Google will stop your ad from running, and you’ll see the word “Disapproved” listed below that ad in your account. Once you’ve made the appropriate edits, simply save your changes to automatically resubmit your ad for review.

Maximum CPC exceeds daily budget:

If you’re running a keyword-targeted campaign, your ad won’t show if your maximum CPC for an Ad Group is higher than your campaign’s daily budget. Because your daily budget could be exceeded in one click, Google recommend that you lower your maximum CPC or raise your daily budget, so that your daily budget is more than your maximum CPC.

Ad Rank:

Your ad might not appear on the first page if your Ad Rank isn’t high enough to place it in one of the top slots. Google don’t show the same ads on each page, so your ad might be appearing on one of the next pages. To see additional pages of ads, click ‘Next’ at the bottom of the page, or click the ‘More Sponsored Links’ link below the column of ads.
If you’d like your ad to appear on the first page, you can increase your CPC and/or refine your ad text and keywords to help increase your Quality Score.

Keyword Performance:

If a keyword underperforms, it may become inactive for search and stop triggering ads on the search network. Keywords typically become inactive when they are very general and therefore do not perform very well. Your ads may also only be showing on certain variations of your broad or phrase matches due to a low Quality Score. To monitor your keyword’s performance, check the keyword status column on the ‘Keywords’ tab of your Ad Group Details page. Or, to get a detailed view of performance and Quality Score, visit the Keyword Analysis page by clicking the magnifying glass icon beside the keyword you’re interested in.

Geo-Targeting:

You can target your campaign to specific languages, countries and territories, regions, and cities. If you don’t target your own geographical area and the language of your Google interface, you won’t be able to see your ad. (For instance, if you’re in London and you’ve targeted your ads to Tokyo only, you won’t see your ad when you search for it in London.) If you’re targeting a region or city, Google shows ads based on a user’s internet protocol (IP) address. Sometimes Google is unable to obtain IP information. In this case, Google would be unable to identify the user’s location and therefore wouldn’t recognize which regional ads to deliver. If Google can’t determine the user’s location, it will show nationally-targeted ads instead of regionally-targeted ads.

Language Targeting:

You can view your Google interface language setting by clicking the ‘Preferences’ link to the right of the Search Box on the Google homepage. If your Google interface language isn’t included in your campaign language targeting selection, you may want to edit your campaign language targeting in order to see your ad. You can also edit your Google interface language setting by selecting the appropriate language from the dropdown menu and clicking ‘Save Preferences.’

Google Network:

Your ad will not show on sites and products in the content and search networks until it has been reviewed and approved according to our advertising policies. Therefore, image ads, video ads, and other multimedia ads won’t begin running until after review and approval. Your ad may not appear on Google Network sites if its Ad Rank is too low. In this case, improving your Quality Score through optimization, or raising your CPC or CPM bids, can help increase your Ad Rank. In addition, some sites in Google network may restrict advertising or keywords based on their own policies regarding content and editorial standards. In this case, your ad may not appear on a content or search site even if you have chosen keywords which seem to match it.

Image Ad:

Image ads will only run on content network sites, and must be reviewed and approved before they will appear. The format of the ad you’re running must match the size and format accepted by each website. For example, if you’ve uploaded a 160×600 wide skyscraper ad, make sure the site you’re looking for your ad on runs ads in that format.

Placements:

If you are targeting placements in your campaign, and your campaign setting is ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target’, your ad will appear only on the websites you specify. Those websites must be part of the Google Network. Make sure you’re looking for your ad on one of the sites you selected. In addition, your bid may be too low to win impressions on the site or sites you have chosen. This is especially likely if you have targeted popular sites that many other advertisers may also have targeted. Raising your bids may help your ad appear more often. It’s also possible that your ad simply isn’t showing at the moment you view the page.

You can use the Ads Diagnostic Tool to learn the exact reason why you can’t see your ads.

City of PPC never sleeps

2010-11-17T04:44:00.000-08:00

What can we expect to happen with the quantity and quality of PPC traffic in the not-so-distant future? Has the genesis of the machinery that creates, controls, and disperses traffic reached its plateau, and everything that can be invented has already been invented? It may appear so on the surface.

Consider Overture. The company currently has the widest reach, extending to 80 percent of Internet users, 67,000 active advertisers, and last quarter revenues of $152M. "Key factors that will ensure our continuing leadership position are our long-term contracts with distribution partners, state-of-the art proprietary technology that allows us to operate the business on this scale, and having a very strong international element," said Overture's Wax.

Have the industry leaders become complacent? Make no mistake. "We not only believe that someone smaller than us, or someone currently not in our space, can come up with a great idea that could change our industry and FindWhat.com's standing within the industry," said Thune. "We assume it will happen. And it has recently, with Google's entrance into pay-per-click paid listings."

Currently, the large and small PPC players alike rely on anecdotal evidence of their traffic effectiveness, as provided from time to time by cooperating advertisers - though many advertisers themselves rely on quite unscientific traffic-to-sales conversion information.

To address these issues, 7Search has recently introduced a feature that in the long run can produce a huge impact on the whole traffic industry. The company created an "ROI feedback tool" that sends information on advertisers' sales back to the search engine, where it is used to gauge the quality of affiliate traffic.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of 7Search's approach. Just think, for example, what it can do to the Google's Ad Words program relevancy and rankings algorithms?

"There's targeted traffic, and there's more targeted traffic," said Prestipino. 7Search is also implementing a patent-pending technology dubbed "predictive search" to increase relevancy of advertisers listings appearing as a result of the search.

Search123 works along similar lines, integrating the technology that will assist in matching keyword-based search queries and phrases with users' intentions. "Understanding the dynamics between the buyer and the seller", explains Beriker, "is what it will take to be the leader in this industry."

Search123's website sums it up best: "We're obsessed with traffic quality."

And so are all of us in the business of buying and selling, measuring and analyzing, loving and hating, going broke and making a killing on Internet traffic.

Common PPC Mistakes

2010-11-16T05:09:00.001-08:00

As I manage quite a few PPC campaigns I always notice the silly and sometimes not so silly mistakes that advertisers make with their PPC programs.

Mistakes when creating PPC ads, click fraud detection, and lack of testing are just a few of them. Fixing each of these mistakes could mean an extra 70% of revenue or a savings of thousands of dollars every month.

Below is a list (we all love those lists don't we?) of the most common mistakes marketers make with their paid search (PPC) advertising campaigns.

1. Bidding Broad - It's important to not be lazy when setting up that campaign of yours. Every industry has their giant keywords that bring the most traffic but there are many more variation of keywords that are being searched. The more you focus on the "long tail keywords", the less you're going to pay per click. Furthermore, your ads will be ranked higher if the keyword is closer matched. Take your 100 keywords and make them into 200 by just looking at your own web statistics for exact keyword variations people use to search for your product.

2. Fighting for #1 Spot - Most of the time (from my experience), being #1 ad in paid search results is not the brightest strategy, especially if you're paying a lot per click and the keyword is broad. I found that one of THE best ranks in paid search is being #3 (top left side for Google). Look, most people do research before they buy online. Being #1 could mean that you'll attract visitors who might have not used the right keyword for their search or ones that are just starting their research and thus you'll be remembered last when they are ready to buy.

3. Avoiding Geo-targeting - Even if what you sell works all over US or world, people are still more keen on using a local provider or at least a company that recognizes "their state". It's just a psychological thing. Google and other search engines allow you to geo-target your PPC ads by state. Create 50 ads and drop in the state name inside the ad. You will surely get a higher click through rate (CTR) and thus a lower CPC. Furthermore right from the start, your visitor will know that you "recognize" their location.

4. Losing Relevance on Landing Page - Whatever you say in your ad repeat it on the landing page where you're taking the visitor! If you are advertising an 80% sale in your ad, you can be sure that people are looking for it when they land on your landing page. If they don't see it they leave. It's kind of like a scent they pick up on when they read your PPC ad and look for when they land on a page you take them to.

5. Getting Rid of Fraud Networks - Every paid search engine, be it Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc, has a network to which they distribute your ads. Unfortunately, many of these networks are fraudulent and do not refer quality traffic. Look into your web statistics and find domain names that bring you traffic with a high bounce rate. Usually it will be around 90%. Google allows you to drop these domains into a "negative excluded sites" folder while Yahoo and others make you call them to address the problem. Doing this will prevent you from paying for garbage traffic.

6. Being Boring - I still see marketers go online, search for a keyword, look at the advertisers (competition) and create ads to fit in with the "community". Silly right? Unfortunately, very true. Anytime you create a paid ad you MUST look at what is already being said by the advertisers and come up with something unique and yet relevant. It's a tough one but you have to identify what is unique about you and why people should buy from you. Just make sure that it's what your target market wants and cares about.

7. Using Telephone Numbers - Using a telephone number within your PPC ad is an eye catcher that's all. Not many people will pick up their phone and dial your number if they see your ad. So what you're doing is just wasting space that can be used for a good message. Tests have been done and this was proven quite a few times get rid of that phone number in the ad.

8. Not Bidding for Your Name - If your competition is targeting your company name as a keyword I'd suggest taking legal actions (if applicable). In our company we send out those legal letters at least every other month to a competitor. If you're in a different situation bidding for your keywords will mean more traffic and another real estate space devoted to you on that search results page. I'd even bid for the company name if there were no competitors at all. You will pay around 0.05 to 0.10 cents per click and see the amount of searches (impressions) that are done for your brand name. A little of extra statistics that shows you the possible growth of your company.

9. Lack of Affiliate Control - The company name is usually the highest converting keyword. Your affiliates know this and advertise under your company's name in paid search. What happens is that not only do you now have to pay your affiliate for the sale "they" brought in, but you've already paid your due with your own advertising methods for that customer to know your name before the search. Be sure to prevent your affiliates advertising in paid search for your company's name. All they are doing there is collecting the cash from your own advertising.

10. Not Separating Content Match from Search Results - This is a mistake 101. Yes it takes time, but any campaign should separate their regular search advertising from content match. This will allow you to get better reporting, set different cost per click, different budget and overall have a cleaner look at both of these campaigns. Just separate into 2 campaigns. Both will have same keywords but one campaign will be created only for "search" and the other one for "content match".

11. Ignoring the Seasonal Copy - It works. Including a seasonal discount or a "holiday special" in your ad copy is a great way to increase your CTR and get more sales. Furthermore, your ad will clearly stand out from the rest. Make it a Christmas special, Spring special, Summer blow out, etc. Make it relevant to "today".

12. Lack of "Exact Tracking" - You must be able to track every visit to your site from PPC advertising by the exact keyword, campaign and ad group used. To do so you can set variables (yourcompany.com/?keyword) or integrate your PPC campaigns with your website analytics software. This is the only way you can really calculate the effectiveness of every keyword you use to get traffic.

13. Paying for Negative Keywords - Google and other search engines allow you to report keywords for which your ads should not be shown. If you're paying for "broad match" keywords, you'll see a lot of visits from people who've typed your keyword with a word "free" or "stock" or "jobs". Do you want to pay money for visitors who're looking to pay $0 for what you sell? Do you want to pay money for visitors who are researching stock info on what you sell? Be sure to use that "negative keyword folder" to get rid of these worthless clicks.

14. Mistaking CTR with conversion rate when testing ads - We love to test and that's great, but what should marketers look for when choosing which ads to keep and which to delete? Looking only at the CTR (click through rate) is a false indication of a better performing ad. If you add a word "FREE" to your ad, you'll see a jump in your CTR but what good will it do?

15. Not Using Keywords in Ad Copy - This is a simple one. Put keywords into your ad copy for which you are serving the ad. Not only will your ad be more relevant but the keywords in it are going to be bold.

16. Not Calling Google - Ok, I am not a fan of being a "rat" or telling on someone, but my friend when it comes to business and playing fair, you have every right to raise a flag when you see a competitor engaging in bad techniques. You'll notice some of your competitors creating multiple accounts and having 2 ads simultaneously on the Google PPC results page. Google has a policy against this. Call Google and let them know if your competitor is doing anything that's against the rules of the search engine. You'll be amazed how quickly they take care of the problem.

17. Avoiding Brand Name Keywords - It is unfortunate, but many companies do not take advantage of their competitors. How do you do this? Bid on their brand / company name. Think about it anyone searching for your competitor could easily be your customer instead. Why not have your ad show up under that keywords? What if they are still shopping around? What if they are searching for your competitor's name because they saw their TV or radio ad. Bottom line is, bid on your competitor's brand names. Most of the time the ROI on those keywords is excellent. If you get a "legal letter" from the competitors and it holds water, I'd suggest comply with it.

Submit a Podcast

2010-11-11T21:48:00.000-08:00

List of sites that accept podcast submissions.

Podcasting Station - submit podcasts to the podcasting directory
Podcast Alley - submit podcast title, website, xml feed, and description.
Podcast Bunker- recommend a podcast, only high quality podcasts will be added.
Podcast411- add a podcast
AllPodcasts - index a podcast (an RSS 2.0 feed with an audio enclosure), enter the URL for the RSS feed into the field below and click "Index".
RSS Network - submit to podcast category
Podcast Pickle - submit to podcast category
Plazoo - submit to podcasts or vlogs
Singing Fish - submit music/video directory
Digital Podcasts - add podcasts to the digital podcast directory
PodFeed - podcast submission
Podcast Charts - chart podcasts (requires membership)
iPassages - Christian podcast submissions
PodBlaze - small podcast directory
GetAPodcast - post podcasts and rss feeds
Syndic8 Podcast - post podcasts and rss feeds
Podcast Shuffle - post podcasts
idiotvox - submit a podcast feed
Pod Lounge - The Pod Lounge relies on user submissions to help build the database and we appreciate any additions you can provide
iTunes - submit your iTune podcasts
Amigo Fish - submit a feed/podcast
Every Podcast - submit podcasts
Fluctu8 - submit podcasts
Get a Podcast - submit podcasts
HardPodCafe - submit podcasts
Podcast Pup - submit podcasts
Religious Podcasts - submit religious podcasts (only accept religious casts)
Educational Podcasts - submit educational podcasts
Feedshark - automate submissions to 10 podcast sites
Pluggd - podcast submissions
Canadian Podcasts - submit podcasts
GODcasts1000 - submit Christian podcasts
Realty Feeds - submit real estate podcasts or feeds
Podcast Directory - submit all podcasts (fee for submissions)
Medical Feeds - submit medical podcasts
Sports Podcasts - submit medical podcasts
PodcastLikeThat - add podcast feeds
Sports Podcasts - Submit sports related RSS feeds and podcasts.
Political Podcasts - Submit political feeds and podcasts.
Government Podcasts - Submit podcasts and feeds ONLY from government agencies. Feeds from both Local and federal governments are accepted.
iBiz Radio - Submit podcasts (only submit business podcasts)
Podcast Blaster - Submit podcasts
Educational Podcasts - Submit educational podcasts and feeds.
Blubrry Podcasts - login to submit podcasts.
Podcast Like That - submit podcasts.
Mirpod - submit podcasts.
Women in Podcasting - submit podcasts.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE PODCASTS
01Podcasts - submit French language podcasts
ElPodio - submit spanish language podcasts
Lusocast - submit portuguese language podcasts
VIDEOCASTS
Videocasting Station - submit videocasts and vodcasts
Podcast Salad - submit video podcasts
Search for Video - submit video podcasts
meFeedia - add a videoblog or podcast feed
GoTube - submit audio or video
Atom - upload video
Break - upload videos
ClickCaster - upload videos
Clipmoon - upload video content
ClipShack - upload video content
DailyMotion - upload video content
SevenLoad - upload video content
Flurl - upload video content
Crackle - upload video content
Meta Cafe - upload videos
MotionBox - upload video contents
Butterscotch - upload video contents

Great Ways to Kill Your SEO Progress

2010-11-10T21:10:00.000-08:00

There are many ways that you can really hurt your search rankings in today’s search space and it is important that if you are planning on doing anything online you consult with a professional especially if you base your livelihood on your organic rankings.

Website Overhaul
If you are doing a large sweeping website overhaul and you are planning on changing everything including URL structures and content you will see a dip in rankings. The proper way to change URL structures is by implementing a 301 redirect on the old webpages you are converting. This is common as websites do often times change technology platforms. Removing all old content can also pose a problem. Rather than changing content completely try just updating the old content so it is not such a drastic change in the eyes of the search engines.

Black Hat SEO
Black hat results might look appealing from the quick rankings you could receive but remember those rankings will not last long and if Google pings you as a black hat spammer you could find yourself with a search penalty so large you have to start an entirely new website. Imagine how fun that would be? Don’t fall into this trap because you will regret it when you lose all your rankings.

Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a huge no-no and if the search engines catch up to you and find you have any on your website you could find yourself with a penalty. Always write unique content across your website in order to stay away from any potential problems.

Not Enough Marketing (Link Building)
The bottom line is that simply optimizing your website in many niches and categories is not going to be enough to acquire those search rankings you are looking for. You have to proactively link build your website and your internal web pages in order to achieve those desired rankings.

Try reading through all the helpful google webmaster guidelines online on how to stay within range of the search engine firing squads so you don’t find yourself on the losing end of the search results, or page 193.

Fundamentals of Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2010-11-08T22:23:00.000-08:00

If you already have a mobile site, it’s important to understand the nuances involved in managing SEO for your mobile presence. If you do not have a mobile site and are starting the process of developing your mobile strategy, this webinar will share insights and potential hurdles you’ll want to avoid when optimizing your mobile presence for search engines.

Siteworx SEO Practice Manager Gregg Wyland will address:

-How search engines differentiate mobile searches from Web searches
-You’ll learn how to direct Google to use your actual mobile site as the default location for those searching from a mobile device
-Key differences in how users approach mobile search
Most mobile users will search based on location (where I am) and a need to find a person, place or thing
-Mobile SEO best practices
We’ll identify steps to ensure your mobile URLs are viewable on a mobile device
-The advantages of supporting location-based search results
Tools to review your mobile SEO performance
Registration is free and our 30-minute format maximizes your return on time invested (ROTI).

To learn more, visit http://www.siteworx.com/Company/Thought-Leadership/Webinars/Managing-Search-for-Your-Mobile-Presence. For regular updates, subscribe to Siteworx news (http://www.siteworx.com/e-news) and follow @Siteworx on http://www.Twitter.com/siteworx.

SEO for Dummies – Demystifying Optimization

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

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is so often kicked around and many times misunderstood. Business people and marketers actively using the web as a source for promoting their products know of it, but not all are sure how to “optimize” their site. Now I’m no SEO guru, but I’ve had a bit of experience working with SEO programs and have attended a few conferences on the topic, including the recent show in San Francisco which I found invaluable. The common question is, “How the hell do I get my site to rank high on Google?” Ranking high on Google means having your site appear on the first page when a user on the net types a keyword relative to your business. This is referred to as a “natural” search, as oppose to a “paid” search where you pay Google for your text ad to appear each time your choosen keyword is typed in. A recent study that I blogged about found that natural searches were just as effective in generating lead traffic as paid searches. To me, this further underlines the importance of adopting SEO practices.

Amongst all the different strategies I’ve heard, some so convoluted I wouldn’t know how to repeat, one thing holds true… CONTENT IS KING. The more relevant and useful your site content is to users searching on your keywords, the more traffic you will generate to your site. And the more traffic you generate, the more popular your content can become (measured by users linking to your site and bookmarking it), the higher your ranking on Google. This is a simple way of viewing SEO, but there are some things you can begin doing to optimize your site. Here are a few:

1. Include White Papers and Tips Related to Your Area of Expertise -Users interested in your products and services want to know how to use them to better their business, so give it to them. Your site should include white papers, tips, articles, and any other written material that users would find useful. The more useful the content, the more often they will come back for more. Return traffic is great in helping your rankings.

2 . Keep Your Content Fresh – Google is looking for fresh and relevant content related to keywords. Ensure you have content that is “dynamic” (regularly changing or updated), especially on your home page. This can include new press releases, articles, case studies, product announcements, and service enhancements.

3. Include Your Keywords in Your Browser Title – By doing this, you make it easier for Google to find you during a keyword search. You also want to repeat these keywords on many pages of your website, wherever applicable (it should not appear forced). This repetition also helps in increasing your relevance to the keywords.

4. Focus on 1 to 2 Keywords Per Page – The content of each page on your site should have a focused topic and use 1 to 2 keywords that are repeated throughout the page, starting with the page title, headlines, and body. The more focused and repeated the content is, the more searchable the page becomes.

5. In-bound Links and Bookmarks – Other sites linking to your website is one big way Google and other search engines measure the popularity of your website. There is a whole cottage industry within the SEO business that focuses on generating as many in-bound links as possible to a site. Google has gotten wise on it and has changed its algorithm to detect such blatant practices. From what I understand, Google measures the relevance of both your content as well as the site linking to your site. If both sites appear to be relating to the same topic, the more relevant it is and better the ranking. This increases even further when a third site (and more) links to both and also shares the same topic. If you have more than one web site, ensure they are linking to one another. This can be done by having the links appear on every page in the footer in small, light grey text. Also, use sites like Digg . com to submit your white papers and articles and see if the community “diggs” your content. The more diggs, the more traffic to your page(s), the higher it will appear through Google searches.

Command Structure Enhancing Traffic

2010-11-07T23:08:00.001-08:00

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Facebook New Security Feature Launched Yesterday

2010-10-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

Two new security features on Facebook are welcome signs that the company takes privacy and security seriously, but for me they raise as many questions as they answer.
The main change is the addition of optional one-time passwords (OTP). If you're on a computer you don't trust, such as a kiosk or in a cafe, and you don't want to enter your password, you can request a one-time password (by texting "otp" to 32665 from a US mobile phone). The OTP is returned as a reply text message. Then user can then log in from any computer and the OTP is good for 20 minutes.
On the one hand I am impressed and tempted to ask why Facebook is able to do this when none of the major US banks can. On the other hand, there's a good reason why US banks don't implement one-time passwords exactly this way: If you were to lose your phone, even for a brief period, your account could be compromised.
Here's how it works: You go away, maybe to the bathroom, and leave your phone behind. Someone who knows your e-mail address picks up your phone and requests a one-time password. They can then log into your Facebook account from any computer for 20 minutes.
The theory behind one-time passwords in most cases is to add a second factor to authentication, not to replace the one factor with a different single factor. In security terminology the OTP adds something you have (your phone) to something you know (your password). Facebook is doing this to save you from having to enter your password on a strange computer, not to strengthen authentication.
They could mitigate the problem of lost phones by always issuing a challenge question, what they call your Security Question on the Account Settings page. Facebook hasn't yet responded to my questions about it. I'd test it myself, but one-time passwords are being rolled out gradually and haven't reached my account yet. (I'll update this entry if they reply.)
The other thing about the OTP setup in Facebook is that after you do it, you're set up by default to receive numerous other notifications via text message. Here's a notification for Facebook management: When users adds their mobile numbers on an account-recovery page, it's sleazy and self-serving to assume they want to be texted about non-security issues." Hear, hear, Rob.
The other major new feature is that you can disconnect other open Facebook sessions by going into your Account Settings-Account Security page. There you will find a list of sessions, potentially opened weeks ago on computers far, far away. It's possible for someone else on the computer to take control of that session and, thereby, your Facebook account.

Now you have the option of disconnecting those sessions, but I'm disturbed to find that they don't disconnect automatically after some fairly brief period. Being able to disconnect sessions is great, but mostly this change exposes the other poo security decisions by Facebook.
The last change Facebook announced is that they will regularly remind users, when they log in, to update their security information, such as their security question, mobile phone number (for identification in case the password is lost) and e-mail addresses (for the same reason).
But respecting the first two, more interesting changes, I have to agree with Rob Pegoraro again when he says that "...they suffer the generic defect of all optional security features: The people most likely to take these extra steps are often the ones less likely to get hoodwinked by a hack."

Webmaster Tools - Links to your site updated

2010-10-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

The "Links to your site" feature in Webmaster Tools is now updated to show you which domains link the most to your site, in addition to other improvements. On the overview page you'll notice that there are three main sections: the domains linking most to your site, the pages on your site with the most links, and a sampling of the anchor text external sites are using when they link to your site.Who links the mostClicking the “More >>” link under the “Who links the most” section will take you to a new view that shows a listing of all the domains that link to your site. Each domain in the list can be expanded to display a sample of pages from your site which are linked to by that domain.The "More >>" link under each specific domain lists all the pages linked to by that domain. At the top of the page there is a total count of links from that domain and a total count of your site's pages linked to from that domain.Your most linked content If you drill into the “Your most linked content” view from the overview page, you’ll see a listing of all your site’s most important linked pages. There's also a link count for each page as well as a count of domains linking to that page. Clicking any of the pages listed will expand the view to show you examples of the leading domains linking to that page and the number of links to the given page from each domain listed. The data used for link counts and throughout the "Links to your site" feature is more comprehensive now, including links redirected using 301 or 302 HTTP redirects.Each page listed in the "All linked pages" view has an associated "More >>" link which displays all the domains linking to that specific page on your site.Each domain listed leads to a report of all the pages from that domain linking to your specific page.We hope the updated “Links to your site” feature in Webmaster Tools will help you better understand where the links to your site are coming from and improve your ability to track changes to your site’s link profile.

Facebook Marketing

2010-10-12T23:27:00.000-07:00

Why Facebook Marketing??

First and foremost, Facebook, like other social media, is a phenomenal way to become more visible and successful by making a face for yourself online.

Facebook is now the largest social network on the planet with over 500 million active users, long ago surpassing former social networking giant MySpace—and it continues to grow at 1 million new users a week.

Considering those numbers, you have to ask yourself—do you think your target market might be there? And if you’re not there, what might you be missing?

Facebook pages are great for a number of reasons:

Pages allow you to keep your personal info separate from your business info.
Pages are public, which means that they are visible to the search engines and are not behind a login like personal profiles are (so be sure to use keywords pertaining to your business in the title of your page if you can—Facebook is ranked very highly in the search engines and you can benefit from this!).
Pages are great for communicating with your supporters (formerly “fans”) and listening to, answering and updating them.
Pages help spread viral awareness of your brand and business—a key aspect is that when people who “like” your page interact with it, this activity shows up in the news feeds of all of their friends.
I Have a Page. Now What?

Ok, now that you know why they’re important, how do you use a page successfully?

Here are just a few ways:

Keep your page updated with content, such as pulling in your blog posts and sharing links.
Ask open-ended questions and engage your supporters whenever possible.
Treat your supporters to “exclusive” offers and content that not everyone else gets. Make them understand that they’re getting something special by supporting your business or brand on your page.
Add the Static FBML application to create a simple form on your page for people to sign up for your newsletter, free report or seminar.
Let your friends know about your page by clicking the link that says “Suggest to Friends” under your picture.

Best Practices for Search-Optimized Flash Development

2010-10-05T04:58:00.000-07:00

In spite of what you may have heard, it is possible to have both engaging Flash content and happy search engine spiders.

For several years, there has been tension in the web design and development community regarding search engine optimization (SEO) and the use of Adobe Flash for site content and applications. Flash naysayers have and still do argue that you should almost never use the platform if you care at all about search engine performance and site traffic. Meanwhile, Flash aficionados argue that the user experience is more important than Google experience.

So which is it? Who’s right? In this post, I am going to:

1. Explain why both naysayers and aficionados make valid points
2. Describe the state of Flash indexability, and
3. Share several Flash development best practices that you can begin using in your projects right away.

All told, I hope this post eases tension and encourages more developers to consider using the powerful Adobe Flash platform in a way that is good for both users and spiders.

Given search engine capabilities plus a desire to both make site content indexable and to create good user experiences, there are some best practices that will help ensure search engines and people alike are getting the most out of your Flash applications.

Use external XML or text files. XML offers search engines a structured and semantic format for indexing site content. And it makes it easier to implement multi-language versions of an application. By keeping your content layer separate from your presentation layer you’ll have a better overall application.
Create Unique URLs for Important Sections. “Creating unique URLs for important sections of your SWF file, based on the keywords for which you want to optimize, will help search engines navigate into your SWF application and provide targeted results for the most relevant content,” wrote SEO expert Damien Bianchi, in a March 2009 article. To create these unique links, you may want to employ SWFAddress or UrlKit.
Use the HTML noscript Tag. It can be a good idea to put important site or application content in side of HTML noscript tags, which effectively puts your content into a search engine spider’s favorite language. If you are using external XML, files, you can even load the content dynamically on the server-side.
Use XSL When Feasible. XSL can define XML formatting and presentation, so you can use it to single XML source to control both Flash content and HTML content, like navigation. You’ll make the entire site’s content searchable and you will be using an effective site development strategy.

Improving Your Website’s ROI with PPC Advertising

2010-10-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

Pay per Click advertising provides a fantastic opportunity to attract targeted traffic to your website. But with great rewards come equally large challenges. So what can you do to make sure your PPC campaigns succeed? When it comes to marketing your website, you are almost spoilt for choice. Deciding what is the most effective search engine marketing strategy certainly isn’t as straightforward as it may seem, particularly when also looking to maximise Return On Investment (ROI). Search engine optimisation is a traditional favourite. It builds the strength of a site and improves its authority within search engines, all in an effort to improve rankings. Social media is a contemporary alternative. By engaging with customers through websites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can reach a huge audience; building traffic and enhancing your reputation in one fell swoop. Completing the modern online marketing triumvirate is Pay per Click advertising. Like SEO, PPC relies on search engine results pages to gain visibility. These sponsored ads ordinarily feature to the right of the organic results and occasionally in the top banner. As with the organic results, they also rely on keywords for success.Unlike SEO and social media marketing, Pay per Click requires ongoing investment. In terms of ROI, this can pose an issue. PPC is an expense, which if not managed correctly, can work against your return on investment. How Much Does PPC Cost? The cost of Pay per Click advertising is largely based on its success. First of all you have to determine what keywords you are going to target. Again, like SEO, making sure that your adverts are appearing for the right search phrases can make all the difference when it comes to attracting clicks and gaining conversions. With your optimised ad copy written, you have to determine how much you are prepared to bid for your keywords. This, understandably, is an important step. Unlike SEO, where positions can’t be bought, you can use the bidding process to get a leg up on the competition. This might mean paying over the odds, but it will gain you visibility. The amount you bid though will be the sum you are charged each time your advert is clicked on, so recklessness is not advisable. Budgeting your PPC Campaigns Going hand in hand with your bid prices is your budget. You need to set a budget that will allow you to gain maximum traffic, but won’t significantly impact your ROI. Starting low and building your budget, along with your confidence, is always recommended for anybody new to PPC. The budget is a balancing act. As with the old business adage, sometimes you do have to speculate to accumulate. However, the time to start pumping money in isn’t necessarily at the start with a fresh campaign. Often it is best to wait for your adverts to mature. Optimising Pay per Click Ads PPC advertising campaigns need to be continuously optimised. Before you set it live and unleash your ads onto the search engines, you have to build a solid list of keywords and negative keywords [see: What Are Negative Keywords]. Whilst the keywords make sure you are seen on the most targeted pages, negatives will stop you appearing on those with little or no relevance [see: How Negative Keywords Can Make Your PPC Budget Go Further]. If you are going to really maximise your ROI and get the most from PPC, you need to monitor your campaign regularly. Negative keywords can appear at any time; when they do, you need to be able to act fast. The more impressions your site receives without earning a click, the less relevant you will appear to the search engines. This lack of relevance will work against you, leading to higher bid prices and greater costs. A good enough reason to regularly optimise your campaign, eradicating costly irrelevant clicks and impressions. Conversely, the better your Click through Rate, the higher your Quality Score [see: Ways to Improve Quality Score] will be and the lower your bid cost becomes. When you’re paying less for clicks, your budget goes further and your potential for conversions increases – another trio of good news.Making Your Budget Go Further To really get the most from your adverts and stretch every financial sinew of your budget, then you need to produce targeted campaigns. To add focus you can ensure that your adverts only appear at the most popular times of day or within a certain locality. Geographical targeting allows you to go after certain cities, counties or countries, ensuring that you don’t appear for searchers anywhere else. Ad scheduling will mean that you can pinpoint times that your ads are active to within 15 minutes. Both will help etch out a little extra ROI. When it comes to choosing how your ads are distributed there are three basic choices; broad match, exact and phrase. Broad requires the most optimisation and incurs the most risk [see: The Dangers of Broad Match in PPC Advertising]. Exact and phrase match ensure that your ads only appear on SERPs that are related to your specified keywords – very much the safe options. The Danger of Click Fraud One other significant danger to your PPC campaign and ROI is click fraud. Essentially this is where malicious elements deliberately click on your adverts to drain your budget. As you can imagine, this gets very costly, very quickly. We have covered this in the past with our post: Do You Suspect Click Fraud? Here’s a Simple Solution… If you do find suspicious behaviour on your account, make sure you locate it and pass on your concerns to the search engine in question. They should then isolate the culprit and make sure they are unable to click on your adverts in future. There are many financial benefits of online marketing. With greater focus, variety of campaigns and exposure comes the opportunity to improve your website’s ROI. By integrating PPC with your current Internet marketing work, you can make sure that your site is being seen where it counts the most and bring more customers to your pages. Optimise PPC, Boost ROI Pay per Click advertising isn’t without its risks. However, when properly managed and professionally maintained, your campaigns can flourish. To get you off on the right foot, you might want to check out these 11 tips to improve your AdWords campaign. So if your website is in need of a little extra targeted traffic and you want to improve conversions, give PPC a try. Done properly , you could well see a major surge in your ROI as a result.Source: Improving Your Website's ROI with PPC Advertising

Expand your PPC Reach

2010-09-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

Over the past 6 or 7 years, One of My friend consumed a lot of training materials on Pay Per Click advertising. He’ve seen some really great stuff and a lot of not so great stuff too.

One thing that has bugged him is the constant rehashing of the same material. Just to get everyone up to speed. However, he felt like most people who’ve done a fair bit of PPC in the past would already know 90% of the course material. It’s the 10% they don’t know that they are buying the course for.

Which is why we’ve created a 14 part (2 week) Advanced PPC Bootcamp.

They set out to create a course that tries to switch these numbers around. So giving you more of that 10% part, and less of the stuff you already know.

Each video is anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour plus long. They’ve designed them to be thorough and cover the material with specific examples. However, They’ve tried to ensure that they are fluff free and cut to the chases as quickly an efficiently as possible.

These are designed for intermediate to advanced users.

few day back they’re putting together a big package to celebrate SpeedPPC turning 3. they’re planning on giving this course away during this birthday week as a free bonus (plus some other stuff). Look out for more details soon!

How to improve Google’s Quality Score to decrease costs and increase ROI

Google AdWords Quality Score is the single most powerful influence on whether your campaign makes it or not. With a poor quality score rating, your campaign will be stopped in its tracks. Find out the different types of quality scores, how they’re calculated for Search and Content Networks and most importantly, how you can harness it to significantly cut your costs and increase your return on investment. If your Quality Score card is currently low or needs improving, then pick up some practical tips on how you can get back into Google’s ‘good books’. Make or break your campaigns now.

SEO Is Far From Dead

2010-09-29T03:06:00.000-07:00

The search engine optimization industry is quite crazy at times when you take a step back and really take a look at things. If you have been in the industry for quite a while you will know that SEO has changed drastically from what it once was back in the day.

For a very long time the search engines have been significantly trying to eliminate those who spam the search engines only to increase short winded search results that might have worked a few years ago but might not be so potent in today’s business world. Search engine marketing is a very dynamic form of marketing and is always going to be changing which is actually quite a good thing.

It is an industry that is set to evolve and not become stagnant leaving entrepreneurs and innovators coming up with new and exciting ways to spread a message on the web. As quick as the internet is moving forward there are some things that are just never going to change when it comes to building your business online.

1. Being A Marketer: Being a marketer is something that is always going to be necessary when approaching the online space. I have said this before that it will be even more important in the near future to be wearing a marketing hat when trying to spread your message online. This is something I feel very strongly about when it comes to search engine optimization. Software programs and science like approaches are not going to put you into the shoes of your audience. Efforts like conducting keyword research are going to require a person to be able to get inside the head of their audience and anticipate what type of words they might use in order to find you.

2. Communication: I don’t care what business you are in if you cannot communicate with your target audience your business will simply never grow online. You can’t build a business brand online without communicating your message which is why good quality communication will be even more important as time goes on. Shoving your website URL into 1,000 directories is not quality communication, writing 500 articles with the hopes of them making it into search results is not communication either.

Personally I like the direction the SEO industry is taking right now. I can see it slowly cleaning itself up little by little. In the grand scheme of things the search engine marketing industry is unbelievably young compared to other forms of marketing and advertising like newspapers. We are still on the nose end of things and there is plenty of time to really weed out the bad apples. The SEO is dead claim is simply not true; businesses large and small are simply trying to approach it at different angles while incorporating new elements. I think what is happening is that the commerce world has realized that rankings are not the end all be all. At the end of the day they are important to the overall success over your business but they are simply one ingredient to your whole marketing plan. If others want to claim that SEO is dead because some of us are incorporating many new efforts into our marketing plan than call it what you want. The reality is that you, your business and your message have to visible in more areas than just the search results. The reality is that if you are not branching out into many other path ways it will take your business a little longer to spread its message.

Customers and clients want to see you in as many areas as possible trying to reach them tastefully with a variety of sources and efforts. For some of the larger branded keywords search results are just infiltrated with other items that SEO will never be able to really fight. You now have image results, and live social feeds along with stock ticker symbols and a variety of other industry specific information that no matter what you do with search engine optimization you are not going to appear. Take the time and put together a tasteful SEO approach and your business will grow the right way with substance.

Different Types of Links

2010-09-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

Types of links and how to get them

Using a arbitrary ficticious example of an informational site about real estate law. **I do not currently work with any sites of this type.

1. Authority links
How to obtain them: Start with your related category in the Google Directory
What to look for:
-Top rankings for big terms - city or state + real estate, vertical category + lawyers
-Sites that currently offer links out
-Sites that would benefit from offering users your content

2. Directory links
How to obtain them: Pony up some cash
What to look for: Generally easy to find niche directories, don’t go overboard with more than a few directories per month, quarter, etc.

3. Reciprocal links
How to obtain them: Make some friends - Don’t go overboard
What to look for: Strong links that are complementary to your site.

4. Run of site links
How to obtain them: Easy to buy
What to look for: Sites that are highly on topic to you.

5. One way links from friends or related sites.
How to obtain them: Go to conferences and tradeshows, e-mail folks and make friends, offer something useful in return.
What to look for: People in complementary niches

6. Edu and .Gov links
How to obtain them: Be nice to future interns. Offer some career assistance and/or advice.
What to look for: .edus and .gov TLD extensions - Da ‘hoo recently changed some things to use siteexplorer, so most the good tools broke (sorry, I’m not a developer), but you can still used advanced search to restrict searches to these TLD types.

7. Radio station, television, magazine, or newspaper links
How to obtain them: Buy ‘em, or find a journalist
What to look for: Local news or someone looking to write a story.

8. Press release links
How to obtain them: Find sites that offer press release submission services and submit your NEWS (*note - this does not mean any crap you just want to link stuff)
What to look for: People in your niche who want news as content.

9. Article bio links
How to obtain them: Write a few articles, or have some written for you. Rinse, repeat.
What to look for: Industry authority sites that accept submissions from guest writers

10. RSS/ Blog aggregated links
How to obtain them: Pretty easy - start your blog and aggregate - also known as scraper links.
What to look for: Blog and RSS directories to submit to, and tagging sites.

11. Presell Page Links
How to obtain them: Obtaining presell pages takes link negotiations to a whole new level. Good luck outsourcing this. There are opportunities to purchase presell pages.
What to look for: Sites open to advertising that aren’t going crazy with it. Look for the happy medium.

Google's ranking formula

2010-09-27T04:26:00.000-07:00

Google uses about 200 ranking factors to determine the position of a web page in the search results. Unfortunately, Google does not reveal the list of ranking factors and how exactly they are weighted.

Google's ranking formula is a business secret. The problem is that your web pages must have all of these 200 elements if you want to see your pages on Google's first result page.
The web pages that are listed on Google's first result page for your search terms obviously have all the ranking elements that are needed to get a top 10 position on Google for that search term.

If you want to be listed for the same search term, it makes sense to analyze the top ranked pages.

In which page elements do they use the search term? How many links do the top ranked pages have? How many of these links contain the search term? How often should you use the search term in the different web page elements and the links?

Analyzing the top 10 pages will help you to greatly improve the rankings of your own web pages for your search terms.
The easiest way to analyze the top 10 ranked pages and your own web pages is to use IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.

Google SEO Report Card

2010-09-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

Google ran search engine optimization audit on its own websites/products and compiled a report – Google’s SEO Report Card. From the SEO Report Card, Google’s search engine optimization audit can be categorized in three major SEO subjects:
>>Search Result Presentation: Title tag formats and lengths, description meta tag use, Google sitelink triggering and effectiveness, and main page result clearness on Google
>>URLs and Redirects: Directory forms, subdomain forms, 301s, canonicalization
>>On-page Optimizations: Heading tag use, H1 tag use, logo image link destination, logo image alt text, and descriptive internal anchor text
The 100 Google’s websites/products that have gone through the rating process in the SEO Report Card, include:
Advertising and publishing systems: Google Adwords and Google Adsense
Users’ search trend tools: Google Insights for Search, Google Trends
Blogging / feed management tools: Blogger and Feedburner
Personal profile: Profiles
Site search features: Google Site Search and Google Custom Search Engines
Product Tools: Google Store and Google Products
Other tools / services: Picasa Web Albums, Google Finance, Map Maker, Fast Flip, Knol and more

Google Instant - a fundamental shift in search

2010-09-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

Google is already one of the fastest search engines on the planet — but apparently that isn’t fast enough.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s top search executive, announced a “fundamental shift” in how search operates with the launch of Google Instant at a press event in San Francisco Wednesday morning.
Google Instant still looks like the search engine’s home page people are accustomed to, but the results begin streaming in real time as a user starts typing out a search. When a user types in “SFM,” a search result for SFMOMA — the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the event is being held — appears before the full search query is even typed.
A Google engineer later showed search results for local weather appearing after typing just the letter “W”.
Clicking on the search button or hitting “Enter” makes Google Search behave the way it always has — it brings up search results for your specific request.
Mayer said Google has spent a lot of time optimizing search on Google’s servers, bringing response time down to about 300 milliseconds, and on the network, though the latter depends on individual Internet connections.
But that’s just one second typically. Humans take 9 seconds to enter a search query and 15 seconds to select a result — that’s 24 out of the 25 seconds spent o the average search. So, Google has been focusing on how to optimize the “physical” aspects of search — the typing and the thinking that a user does when searching. She said she expects users to save anywhere from 2 to 5 seconds per search.
“We want to make search fast, fun and interactive,” Mayer said.
Google Instant will be rolling out starting today for Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 8. The service will roll out internationally throughout the week.
Google Instant will roll out on mobile devices later this year.

Google Ranking Factor Checklist

2010-09-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

There are "over 200 SEO factors" that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). Few of them are listed below :-

1. Alleged POSITIVE ON-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors (38)
(Keeping in mind the converse, of course, that when violated, some of these factors
immediately jump into the NEGATIVE On-Page Ranking Factors domain.)

The term "Keyword" below refers to the "Keyword Phrase", which can be one word or more.
ON-Page SEO Factors Brief Note
---------------------------
For keyword selection, try Google Ad Words - Google Trends

1 Keyword in URL
First word is best, second is second best, etc.

2 Keyword in Domain name
Same as in page-name-with-hyphens

** Keywords - Header **

3 Keyword in Title tag
Keyword in Title tag - close to beginning
Title tag is of 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.

4 Keyword in Description meta tag
Shows theme - less than 200 chars.
Google no longer "relies" upon this tag, but will often use it.

5 Keyword in Keyword metatag
Shows theme - less than 10 words.
Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance.
No single word should appear more than twice.
If not, it may be considered spam. Google purportedly no longer uses this tag, but others do.

-
Keywords - Body

-
6 Keyword density in body text
5-20% - (all keywords/ total words)
Some report topic sensitivity - the keyword spamming threshold % varies with the topic.

7 Individual keyword density
1-6% - (each keyword/ total words)

8 Keyword in H1, H2 and H3
Use Hx font style tags appropriately

9 Keyword font size
"Strong is treated the same as bold, italic is treated the same as emphasis" . . . By Matt Cutts

10 Keyword proximity (for 2+ keywords)
Directly adjacent is best

11 Keyword phrase order
Does word order in the page match word order in the query?
Try to anticipate query, and match word order.

12 Keyword prominence (how early in page/tag)
Can be important at top of page, in bold, in large font

Keywords - Other

13 Keyword in alt text
Should describe graphic - Do NOT fill with spam
(Was part of Google Florida OOP - tripped a threshold - may still be in effect to some degree as a red flag, when summed with all other on-page optimization - total page optimization score - TPOS).

14 Keyword in links to site pages(anchor text)
Links out anchor text use keyword?

NAVIGATION - INTERNAL LINKS

15 To internal pages- keywords?
Link should contain keywords.
The filename "linked to" should contain the keywords.
Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only.

16 All Internal links valid?
Validate all links to all pages on site.
Use a free link checker. I like this one. http: //www . dead-links . com/

17 Efficient - tree-like structure
TRY FOR two clicks to any page - no page deeper than 4 clicks

18 Intra-site linking
Appropriate links between lower-level pages

19 To external pages- keywords?
Google patent - Link only to good sites. Do not link to link farms. CAREFUL - Links can and do go bad, resulting in site demotion. Unfortunately, you must devote the time necessary to police your outgoing links - they are your responsibility.

20 Outgoing link Anchor Text
Google patent - Should be on topic, descriptive

21 Link stability over time
Google patent - Avoid "Link Churn"

22 All External links valid?
Validate all links periodically.

23 Less than 100 links out total
Google says limit to 100,
but readily accepts 2-3 times that number. Linking to Authority
Some say this gives a boost -
Others say that is absurd. However, it certainly is the opposite of linking to trash, which WILL hurt you.

OTHER ON-Page Factors

24 Domain Name Extension
Top Level Domain - TLD
.gov sites seem to be the highest status
.edu sites seem to be given a high status
.org sites seem to be given a high status
.com sites excel in encompassing all the spam/ crud sites, resulting in the need for the highest scrutiny/ action by Google.
Perhaps one would do well with the new .info domain class. - Nope. Spammers jumped all over it - no safe haven there. Not so much, now - .info sites can rank highly.

25 File Size
Try not to exceed 100K page size (however, some subject matter, such as this page, requires larger file sizes).
Smaller files are preferred <40K (lots of them).

26 Hyphens in URL
Preferred method for indicating a space, where there can be no actual space
One or two= excellent for separating keywords (i.e., pet-smart, pets-mart)
Four or more= BAD, starts to look spammy
Ten = Spammer for sure, demotion probable?

27 Freshness of Pages
Google patent - Changes over time
Newer the better - if news, retail or auction!
Google likes fresh pages. So do I.

28 Freshness - Amount of Content Change
New pages - Ratio of old pages to new pages

29 Freshness of Links
Google patent - May be good or bad
Excellent for high-trust sites
May not be so good for newer, low-trust sites

30 Frequency of Updates
Frequent updates = frequent spidering = newer cache

31 Page Theming
Page exhibit theme? General consistency?

32 Keyword stemming
Stem, stems, stemmed, stemmer,
stemming, stemmist, stemification

33 Applied Semantics
Synonyms, CIRCA white paper

34 LSI
Latent Semantic Indexing - Speculation, no proof

35 URL length
Keep it minimized - use somewhat less than the 2,000 characters allowed by IE - less than 100 is good, less is even better

OTHER ON-SITE Factors

36 Site Size - Google likes big sites
Larger sites are presumed to be better funded, better organized, better constructed, and therefore better sites. Google likes LARGE sites, for various reasons, not all positive. This has resulted in the advent of machine-generated 10,000-page spam sites - size for the sake of size. Google has caught on and dumped millions of pages, or made them supplemental.

37 Site Age
Google patent - Old is best. Old is Golden.

38 Age of page vs. age of site
Age of page vs. age of other pages on site
Newer pages on an older site will get faster recognition.

Face Move With Cursor

2010-08-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

Latent Semantic Indexing for SEO

2010-08-25T11:55:00.000-07:00

Latent Semantic Indexing aka LSI is a form of indexing that the search engines use.It is a technique of analyzing, listing or categorizing certain keywords or phrases in the contents of various websites in such a way that they have contextually and conceptually the same or related intent and meaning despite the different words used in them.

The explanation above may sound a little long winded, in short it means using different variations of your keywords. So for SEO you would use search engine optimisation – Search engines – Onsite – offsite – ranking factors and so on.

As you can see the keywords above are all related to SEO. In the past if you wanted to rank for the keyword SEO then you would use that very keyword a number of times on your website. The search engines have now evolved and this no longer works.

So using synonyms of your keywords is the way ahead and the way in which the major search engines such as Google advise us to layout our text.

In the same way a LSI structure of contents is required then so is a LSI structure of anchor text. SO instead of creating a number of backlinks pointing to your website with the keyword SEO for example, you would rather use variations of your keywords as in the example above.

Optimising your text and webpages in this LSI form and also using the LSI structure for your anchor text will ensure that you do not get pulled up from spam and it will also help you to rank for many more keywords.

To drive certain keywords up in the rankings then I would advise to build more backlinks with that keyword as the anchor text however, do not forget to vary your anchor text along the way. I would also suggest using your domain url as a backlink alone as if your website was to get pulled up for human review then it will not be striking that all of your backlinks are anchor text backlinks which can be a sign of spam.

Frequently Asked Questions

2010-08-19T10:06:00.000-07:00

What keywords or phrases should i choose for my website ranking?

Pick up the best-performing keywords, just do not think about high volume keywords, think about the keyword which are going to give you more business e.g. if your selling Luxury Holidays to different destination of the worlds choose Luxury Holidays Destination Name whcih have low volume of traffic with high conversion rate. And if you try to target keywords like “holiday to destination name (Mauritius)”, you will have high volume but low conversion rate and hard to achieve high ranking as well

Do i have to check my ranking in search engines and how this can benefit me?

Always check your rankings in Search Engines because thats is the only place where you can see which SEO effort are working and then you can modified accordingly. If you know one of your website page is on second position in a Search Engine then you know your almost there you just have to see where you can improve this page to jump to number page number one in that particular search engine

Do i have to find out which website are ranking my websites?

yes,find out the website which are linking to you and why they are linking to you and which pages they are linking ( link: www.domain.com; link: domain.com) second one will give you more precise results

Can i Automate my linking process?

Well there are two thoughts on it, but every body is agree more link (quality) you have better they are for your website.

How SEO Link Love Value Differs?

2010-08-19T07:25:00.001-07:00

As we all know links from sites are votes to search engines eyes but many do think all link love has same value. I saw few discussions on this and thought of having a note to make a clear thought on link love value discussions.

Link love differs from page block place to place. A link placement in content is different from links in blogroll, footer links area or link listings - say directories.

Content link love has the benefit of having related text around and it looks natural to search engines eyes. There are many article sites and blog authors who write content referring quality content pages that contain examples or O.P section. These reffered links has much value than the links submitted to directories or having links in the blogroll. So write fresh content and start getting natural links from authors and bloggers and move your page popularity much ahead.

Top 10 PPC Search Engines

2010-07-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

Our list of what we consider to be the Top 10 Pay Per Click Search Engines based on volume and quality.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords provides just about everything you could want in pay per click search advertising. It's quick and easy to set up an account and you can have your ads up and running in about 5 minutes from sign-up.
Yahoo Search marketing
Yahoo! Search Marketing maintains a highly professional, well maintained site. It pioneered the pay-per-click search engine model in 1997,after seeing a need for a more focused search engine. After operating as GoTo.com the name was changed to Overture and in 2005 it was rebranded as Yahoo!Search Marketing.
MIVA
MIVA is a network of partner sites powering over 2 billion queries per month. When you open an account with MIVA your ad can appear across the MIVA network, which includes sites such as CNet.com, InfoSpace and WorldNews.MIVA's proprietary bid-for-position technology allows you to set the amount you wish to pay for each keyword.
7Search
7Search focuses on serving website owners of "low profit margin" categories of business that can not afford to pay over ten cents per visitor.7Search currently provides advertiser results for over 1.5 billion searches a month.
ABCSearch
ABCSearch has been around since 2001. According to ABCSearch it is the world's largest privately held meta search engine handling over 3 billion searches a month across its network of specialized engines and smaller search engines offering online advertisers an affordable way to diversify their PPC traffic efforts.
Microsoft adCenter
Microsoft adCenter is the new player in the big league when it comes to pay per click search marketing, but it's already making an impact.It offers a great range of features including the ability to target your ads to Live Search users who match your optimum target-market criteria.
Findology
Findology Interactive Media, Inc. was founded in May 2000 and is currently serving over 3 billion searches per month.Findology is currently offering PayPerClickSearchEngine.com visitors a $50 bonus in free clicks when they sign up using this link:
Marchex
Marchex's stated mission is to provide consumers with the most comprehensive and compelling local experiences on the Internet; to provide local businesses with the best products for acquiring customers; and through a shared commitment to each other and to its customers, to deliver consistent product innovation and shareholder value creation.
Searchfeed
Searchfeed.com provides online advertisers with a cost-effective, easily tracked method of generating sales leads.

An Efficient Structure for WordPress Permalinks

2010-07-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

WordPress offers you plenty of options for choosing a permalink structure for your blog. For instance, you can chose to have dates, post IDs, categories or even the name of the author in the pemalinks (short for permanent link).
The URL structure that you see on this blog uses the following custom format:
/%category%/%postname%/%post_id%/

So if I am writing an article on WordPress Tips under the Blogging category, the URL of that post will look something like this:
http://abc.org/Blogging/WordPress-Tips/1234/
Here are some reasons why I chose such a permalink format:
#1. The URL structure is SEO-friendly and also looks clean in snippets that are displayed in search engine results pages.

#2. The structure doesn’t contain dates. I generally try to write “timeless” blog posts that should stay relevant for a longer period of time and hence skipped the date completely from the URL – the date is anyway displayed in blog articles and sometimes even in search snippets as in the above screenshot.

#3. Google News includes quite a few multi-author blogs in their index and one of their technical requirements says that all article URLs must contain a unique number. If in future, this blog grows and gets included into Google News, I won’t have to alter the permalink structure because there’s a unique number already in the URL – it’s called Post ID.

#4. Words in the URL are separated by hyphens and not underscores as suggested by Matt Cutts in one of the WordPress camps.
The Problem with this URL Structure
Now before you use a similar permalinks structure for your own blog, let me share a problem – this structure can make you site a little slow. That’s because WordPress will have to run some extra queries each time to figure out whether the URL matches a WordPress page or an individual post.
For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties).
They have raised a ticket for the above issue but it won’t be fixed until WordPress 3.0 so you are better off not using the structure that I am using.
What’s the Best Permalink Structure
If you are looking for performance, the best permalink structure would just have the /%post_id% in the URL. That’s however not very SEO-friendly so you may consider going for a structure like the one below (there’s no trailing slash)./%post_id%/%postname%
I know you can change the permalink structure anytime (Tools -> Permalinks) and WordPress will do a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones but that might push your site out of Google’s index for some time so there’s a bit of risk involved.

SEO Tips | ON Page Optimization Techniques

Google announced new feature in sitemaps

Find my blog on Google Search Engine

Update to Top Search Queries Data

How to Auto-Forward Gmail Messages in Bulk

Better page titles in search results

Essential SEO Tips & Techniques

Google Announces “Megasitelinks,” Image Search Improvements & Better Byline Dates

navjot singhMegasitelinks (Localized, Too)

Image Search Improvements

Byline Dates

Other Google Changes

Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World

Spring Cleaning out of Session

Google Removes Author: Search From Google News

Google Adds Author Stats To Webmaster Tools

What Is “(Not Provided)” in Organic Search Traffic Keywords on Google Analytics?

Raising awareness of cross-domain URL selections

Common causes of cross-domain URL selection

Ten recent algorithm changes

Should I Change My URLs for SEO?

All Change Is Risky

(1) Dynamic URLs

(2) Unstructured URLs

(3) Long URLs

(4) Keyword Stuffing

(5) Keyword Cannibalization

Proceed With Caution

Yahoo traffic data into Bing Webmaster Tools reports

Yahoo! Rolls Out Redesign for Search Results Pages

Twitter Web Analytics

Canonical Tags- Get the credit you deserve!

Google expands search results to include deeper site links

A new beginning Bing Webmaster Tools

create a wikipedia page

Meta Refresh VS 301 Redirect

Let's Get Social Comparing Facebook Like vs. Google +1

Like vs. Google +1: What Are The Main Differences?

Strictly Business Eleven Tips For Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines

10 Top SEO Facebook Strategies

Contextual Advertising

Subscribed Links

Google Algorithm Change February 2011 Losers & Winners

Blocking user-agents

Do the Little Things in SEO Make a Big Difference?

Do the Little Things in SEO Make a Big Difference?

Tips to Optimize Images

Ten Controversial Search Engine Optimization Techniques

About SEO

Page speed tool family

E-mail marketing

Advantages

Disadvantages

Market your business on the internet

What is Viral Marketing?

PPC beat Long tail keywords

It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like SEO for Xmas Time

Google Ad Planner

How does Google Ad Planner work with Google AdWords?

Excellent Firefox Plugins/ Add-one for SEO

Improve Alexa Ranking of Your Website

Worried About why Google is not showing ads on Google Search results

City of PPC never sleeps

Common PPC Mistakes

Submit a Podcast

Great Ways to Kill Your SEO Progress

Fundamentals of Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO for Dummies – Demystifying Optimization

Command Structure Enhancing Traffic

Facebook New Security Feature Launched Yesterday

Webmaster Tools - Links to your site updated

Facebook Marketing

Best Practices for Search-Optimized Flash Development

Improving Your Website’s ROI with PPC Advertising

Expand your PPC Reach

How to improve Google’s Quality Score to decrease costs and increase ROI

SEO Is Far From Dead

Different Types of Links

Types of links and how to get them

Google's ranking formula

navjot singh
Megasitelinks (Localized, Too)