Wednesday, October 21, 2009

EXPERT SPEAK

Monday, June 15, 2009

Keywords Research as SEO Tool – Take Advantage of Relationships between Words

Keywords have been playing the key role in preparing a website for good search engine ranking since the advent of SEO practices. By employing extensive keyword research, you can encompass all those words, which carry the potential of a search-oriented keyword, in your website content. Careful exploration of how one word is related to many other words can make you selective for creamy words. Here are important aspects of the keyword research approach, followed by experts in search engine optimization.

Utilizing the Power of Synonyms
Whenever you use a keyword in your website content, make sure you utilize its synonyms as well. Different web surfers use different synonyms of a particular word and when all these words are included in your website content, you can expect to satisfy the search motive of each of these individuals.

Words That Are Triggered
Utilizing those words, which are triggered as the result of a particular keyword, can also form the important part of your content. For instance, the keyword ‘loan’ can be associated with other words and phrases like ‘finance’, ‘search’, ‘home’, ‘car’, ‘cost’ and so on. Thus, all the words and phrases related to the main keyword, when used by a web surfer in his search query, can bring your website on the top of search results.

Words That Narrow the Meaning
Even those words and phrases can be included in the content, which narrow downs the exact meaning of the main keyword. For example, for the keyword ‘search’, you can use other words like ‘investigate’ and ‘investigation’. When an internet surfer uses these words at the place of your main keyword, even then your website will be included in the search results.

Words That Generalize the Meaning
Which words can generalize the meaning of a keyword, let’s say ‘search’? ‘Looking for’, ‘quest’, ‘want’, ‘seeking’ and so on! These are the words, which broaden the search criterion for a regular surfer on internet, thereby bringing advantage to your website rank in the search engine results.

Using Grammatically Connected Words
Nouns, verbs and other grammatically connected words of the main keyword can also be embedded in the content of your website. For instance, ‘search’ can also demand the use of ‘searching’, ‘searcher’, ‘searched’ and so on.

Some Other Important Words
? Rhyming words also work: The words, which rhyme with your main keyword should also find place in your website content. For instance, ‘loan’ can be rhymed with ‘tone’, ‘moan’, ‘cone’, ‘phone’ and so on.
? Similar sounding words: Words that carry sounds similar to the keyword. For ‘loan’, the similar sounding words are ‘load’, ‘long’ and so on.
? Anagrams: These are the words, which are formed by rearranging the letters of the main keyword. For instance, ‘casher’ is the anagram for ‘search’.

Thus, keyword research is a vast field, which can take loads of time to be explored properly. However, to achieve impressive results for your website, you can take this pain with a smile.

Monday, June 08, 2009

Search Engine Optimization – Easy to Conduct on a Usable Website

What does a SEO expert advice you to make your website a favorite destination of users as well as search engines? Apart from employing different SEO strategies, you are often recommended to make your website usable for these two types of visitors. Experts believe that a website, which is usable for a human visitor offers similar usability for search engine spiders. So, what are the different approaches to increase the usability of your website to make it SEO friendly? Take a look at what follows as significant tips and advices.

What Do Search Engines Prefer
Do search engine prefer to see keywords stuffed on your website pages? Or, is it the high page rank, which grabs the attention of search spiders? None of them, as modern search algorithms encourages these search engine spiders to locate the websites which offer high usability to the user. Usability is terms of easy navigation, informative headlines and proper positioning of keywords makes a website eligible for search engines as well as users to lend their interest.

Taking Care of Four Areas
? Planning a website: The process of making a website usable starts while making a plan for it. Consider various aspects like who are the prospective audiences, what would be their expectations, how website design should facilitate them and so on.
? Analyzing your plan: Watch your website plan from a visitor’s point of view. Is it an appropriate plan to trigger the interest of your ultimate visitors? Don’t get satisfied with a plan in one go and keep on modifying it.
? Designing the website: While implementing your plan, make sure you visit and revisit the first two sections and come out with a design, which offers ease and convenience to your visitors while exploring your website pages.
? Testing and modifying: If necessary, expose your website to a bunch of common users and take their suggestions. Again, place your feet in the shoes of common visitors and try to find out the abnormalities which could be harmful for your website.

Useful Tips to Improve Your Website
? It is a good idea to provide general information at top navigation level and allow the detailed information to be revealed, as the visitors start drilling your website.
? Not only the users, but also the search engines prefer to know the content offered by each page of your website. For this, provide a general information paragraph at the top of each web page.
? Include general keywords in the top paragraph and place specific keywords in what follows as detailed content.
? Provide informative headings to each web page, as the usability of each page is hidden in the heading itself.
? Finally, learn about your audience and what would appeal them the most. Even search engines like to reward those websites, which take care of their audiences.

Before your move on the road of advanced SEO strategies, make sure that your website has required level of usability. This is the basic requirement of a website, in the absence of which all successive SEO techniques can fail.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Disclosure of an SEO Experiment

Matt Ridout had a bundle of surprise for the people related to the world of SEOs. When the generation is battling at the cutthroat competition to conceal the test results, this man had the guts to display the entire testing process and all its relevant observations publically. Though experimentation is a key to success in search engine marketing, this event published on SEOUnique Blog was a bolt from the blue for many. He targeted one of his three months old website, which he used for this SEO experiment. He modified the following things:
  • Optimized the current Meta data.
  • Included keywords, substitute keywords, and phrases on the page.
  • Optimized the images from the page content.
These were the measures taken on the issues, which were amongst the basic SEO issues. Now all Matt Ridout had to do was to observe how this practical would help him acknowledge the ups and downs in rankings. He collected the records of the SERP positions of the keywords before this experiment and after that; he recorded them once a week for consecutive six weeks. Out of those results, he mapped neat and smart graphs and on the spot shared with many interested in the realm of search engine marketers.

The experts in the area of search marketing might have an overview of what he would have discovered. So let us see what his six-week long experiment’s summarized results say:
  • The first and the second week of the experiment showed a gradual hike in the rankings for most keywords. There were very rare occasions of dropped rankings.
  • As the third week arrived, there was a drastic dip in the rankings as they fell for 85% of the total keywords.
  • The fourth week brought again the new results. This duration of the experiment had 70% of the keywords, which crossed their original rankings and there were very few drops.
  • The fifth and the sixth week of the experiment hardly witnessed any major movement in the rankings.
The graphs plotted were very sharp and visually comprehensive. The experts and commentators scrutinized these graphs, which helps to understand them better. When the graph lines were ascending, there was a dip in rankings whereas the rise in ranking showed descends in the graph. The readings during third week of this SEO experiment got troublesome. The plotting of the graph clearly seemed like the life cycle over the period of six weeks. This falls under the superior quality content of case study for the people interested in learning more about SEO experiment. Leaking information in this way provides knowledge and people can gather them from the industrial information outlets.

Experiments like this prove to be a great source for the search marketers industry to grow. If the people do not disclose their findings, the next generation of discoveries would never occur. The display of such case studies lead to conferences and discussions, which in turn is responsible for greater developments.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

The Trilogy of SEO Strategies for Making You Think

Succeeding in any online business requires your website to be search engine friendly and full of informative content. SEO will help your website in earning a high page ranking and for this to be an event that stands long term, it is extremely important that you strategize well.

Mixing Different Forces for Attacking With Unique Tactics
SERP domination can be achieved through usage of multiple sites belonging to the same niche. These sites should be made to feature different kinds of content, design, development and link sources. Various other ideas can be materialized such as using audio, video, blogs, media profiles, image galleries, content generated by user, wikis, tools and articles. The networks and link sources should also be made to vary. If it happens that all the links on the site are coming from a single blogger whose blog is gradually decaying, then these might not be good signs for you. This might also cause the penalization of wikis for providing easy spamming facilities and so on.

Build Network
The website should focus on developing content that governs authority over a broad range of topics so that it is well respected and showcased by leading content networks such as Squidoo. It can also focus on capturing a particular market niche such as Gooruze (marketing). Providing abundant visibility to your website in SERPs helps in earning you readers who shall faithfully use kw+your authority’s name for performing all of their searches. Istanbul Wikipedia has projected this as a method of building long term traffic to your website. This strategy is often used for trading on your website’s domain equity. Along with the strategy mentioned earlier, this strategy can prove to be useful for building horizontal sites for the purpose of increasing industry presence, link equity, relationships, topic diversification possibilities, etc.

Cover the Opponent without Making Them Succumb
This involves researching on the people competing with you and finding their vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
  • Reliance on Few Links’ Sources: This involves researching the sources of your competing website’s links. Find out if it is possible to eliminate their back links. This can be made possible through in-post linking and blogroll.
  • Paid Links: This involves buying a review, buying blogs that are bringing maximum value to your competitors and paying bloggers for not following the links that were sold to them by your competitors.
  • Improper Anchor Text: Focus on differentiating your website through the usage of greater variety by going for n grams, especially in cases of competitive work, and anchor text algorithms and matrices.
  • Content: Find out about their marketing and operational policy deficiencies and after this is done, work really hard for building world-class content for your website.
Stay away from becoming desperate just for the sake of outscoring your competitor as this might backfire at you in strange ways, such as your site getting hacked or Google-bowled, meaning banning of a website because of a lot of spams pointing to it. Hence, stay cool, stay intelligent and outwit your competitor.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Planning to Assign Link Building Activity to an Intern? Think Again

The thought might cross minds of many at the top level of organizations that what is the need to pay for link building services when the interns could be the counted as the source to tackle this job. This could have been feasible some years back but in today’s scenario, it might not be an appropriate option. Different SEO professionals would narrate different stories for link building efforts. Let us see the reasons why the amateurs should not handle this task.
  • An intern jumping out of college would not be much equipped with the apt details of link building. They would require proper supervision and training for weeks to months depending upon their grasping potential. A link builder should carry sufficient knowledge of SEO and what their work matters of search engine optimization. Link building handling requires a smart aptitude to achieve higher rankings. They have to design proper link building strategies to avoid higher costs.
  • Link building is not a small task. An internship would last for around 3-4 months and the job would pass over to the next candidate after this period. Now this would prove to be a cumbersome process. The new interns would follow-up the previous ones and there might be chances of communication failure in these cases. In a turn, this would harm the linking opportunity for the concerned site. Experts suggest that continuity is the key for better performance. The one who initiates the process should follow-up as many cooks might spoil the broth. One can take the assistance from Webmaster, but it is not a wise idea to bother them as they might refrain to sort out the issue.
  • Interns joined a firm with the intention to learn the maximum they can in the span of couple of months. They want to supplement their industrial experience and aim to please their future employer. They do not think beyond this level and hardly have any inclination to climb the next rung. In the domain of Web technology, things are not static; they need foresighted strategies and willingness to raise link-building programs to higher avenues. To be proficient in a client’s link building programs, the first step is to surpass basics, setup the initial link portfolio, and then with scientific and artistic edge find innovative alternatives to secure their links. For this, the team should have a long-term goal setting which might not be suitable for an intern.
  • SEO programs when catered by some interactive agency show more insight of the current trends and adaptability to capture them. Whereas interns might not furnish in this content and hence no such traces would arm over your link-building program. Moreover, the logs of efforts and their reports submitted regularly help SEO Analysts to track the performance of SEO program. In case of many interns coming in and going out in short durations, there are chances of losing the information. This tracking is an important constituent to measure growth of SEO program.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

The Importance of “Trust” while Outsourcing SEO

A Marketing channels need for SEO has increased leaps and bounds in the recent times of crisis, as far as Conversion Rate Optimization is concerned. In addition, with the passage of time, SEO industry is starting to mature as the number of people with the tag of ‘SEO Consultant’ is ever increasing. SEO consultants swarm the industry these days. This makes a firm’s decision of whether to outsource the search engine optimization or the carry out the optimization process with the firm itself, an extremely critical decision.

If you decide to outsource your SEO efforts, then one should surely keep in mind the following tip: “Outsourcing Tip: Hire talent you trust and let them do their job. Your micromanagement can hinder the process & results.” If you have been in this world of SEO’s, you would quickly realize that this is a simple yet extremely useful piece of information.

While consulting an expert regarding his experiences of Outsourcing SEO efforts, it was a clearly and strongly concluded that Trust is one of the primary factors based on which a decision to outsource can be made. The need for outsourcing is at its peak when occasionally, the workload increases exponentially. In such times of crisis, a firm usually has a few people to whom it can outsource their optimization issues. Among these, some have a good history of doing their work to such perfection, that to review their work is almost needless. Though reviewing and rechecking, is always a better practice to follow.

On the other hand, there are some, whose history of work is not so appreciable. Their work almost inevitably leads to lot of rework and review, which consumes a lot of time and effort, even after you decided to outsource. Effectively it is wastage of resources, time, and money.

Also in this world of SEO, it is very important to have a circle of trustworthy people around you. In this world, where competition is on the edge of a sword, each and every person would boast of himself as having best of the skills and maximum knowledge. All behave as if they are your best of friends. There might be a clear case, where in you did not have a network of people, which forces you to take a chance and ultimately you end up in a fix. These issues definitely throw some light on the importance of having relationships, on which you can depend upon. This will surely keep you at an advantage, if you have good rapport on a personal front, with the person to whom you decide to outsource.

So the lessons to learn from these instances is that do not go overboard as far as setting limits to the amount of work you can absorb. Most of the experts would agree that though money is important, it is certainly not worth a lot of stress and tensions. Outsource to people who have your trust, try to nourish the relationship and most importantly create your network of trustworthy people.